Hortz: What is the importance of building your own first-party understanding of your clients and prospects rather than purchasing third-party information from others?
Kenalty: It is vital to build your own data profile on each contact. Connect all your sources of information together, then analyze and mine it to deliver the most impactful content journey for each contact that keeps them engaged, adds value and increases demand for your services.
Rogerson: A recent CDP article supports the importance of building first-party data versus purchasing late-funnel lists or other third-party customer data. The key point is that third-party data on prospects and clients is increasingly going away due to privacy choices and blocking access to cookies. Having your own profile data on each contact now becomes highly valuable for advisory firms and advisors, helping them understand their clients’ needs. The focus should be on building relationships early with prospective clients and to continue nurturing current client relationships by serving as an educator and resource through providing the appropriate mix of original and curated content to make every communication valuable.
Hortz: How do you gauge that your efforts are becoming more strategic?
Rogerson: What is often forgotten is that success in these efforts should not be measured alone in open rates and engagements, but how these actions can be translated and brought back to the advisor in a way that helps to inform their next conversation or outreach with the client with a recommendation that meets their interests and financial situation.
Kenalty: Building on Scott’s answer, the industry is evolving from being satisfied with simple digital activity metrics like “clicks” and “sends” to wanting to understand ROI and business impact. As advisors and firms become more knowledgeable with the power of education and engagement programs, they are increasingly looking for data connecting how communication and content investments impact at the contact level.
This is where email has distinct advantages as it enables the deep CRM integration which connects every contact’s communication interactions directly to their account profile. This allows firms and advisors to understand interest and revenue opportunities, build strategic communication programs against those opportunities, then measure the specific business impact with each client or prospect.
A simple example would be identifying that a client has an interest in college education planning, but no account yet. The advisor gets this alert, turns on a prebuilt education planning nurturing automation program, then monitors and closes the business. The communication interactions are connected to new revenue in CRM, illustrating ROI.
Hortz: How do you ensure this result?
Kenalty: Make it easy and efficient for advisors to deliver relevant, impactful content experience at scale. Do not make advisors do heavy lifting searching for the right approved content. Leverage data-driven content recommendations, sourcing and delivery automations to understand, organize and suggest impactful content for each contact.
Rogerson: There are a number of key elements and mindsets on how you operate that you need to address for success:
First, ensure you are providing a mix of content. The only way to understand the nuances of your clients and prospects is to give them a breadth of content to act upon. If you are only sharing articles on retirement planning, then you can only receive binary feedback. If your communication includes lifestyle, home ownership, savings and retirement planning, then you are able to see what the recipient naturally engages with to help guide your understanding of what is currently on their mind.
Second, ensure the data is easily accessible and usable by the advisor. Do not hide this data within the communications group but make these insights immediately available to the individual advisor to support their next outreach or communication. Also add communication tools and client interest profiles and revenue “hot lists” right into your Advisor CRM dashboard (Salesforce, Wealthbox, Redtail, etc.).