Marketing technology mavens Snappy Kraken joined the firms trying to give advisors a leg up amidst the coronavirus outbreak.
The firm announced that it is waiving some fees and lowering the overall cost of its digital marketing programs and offering enhancements and tools to help financial advisors with crisis management and communications in an open letter circulated on Thursday.
Advisors’ success is diverging depending on their preparations and their ability to respond to the outbreak, said Snappy Kraken CEO Robert Sofia.
“On one hand, advisors have systemized business with layers of client support and are offering regular education to their clients, their clients are all very familiar with their plans and the reasons why they don’t have to panic during a downturn – these are the proactive communicators, and for them, they’re not facing a tremendous amount of tress,” said Sofia. “On the other hand, there are other advisors, solo proprietors and small teams running a practice, who are the primary givers of all advice and the handlers of all service issues, the takers of all phone calls. Because these advisors have maybe not been quite as proactive about their communications, this is a bit like World War Three.”
Sofia said that “it’s not business as usual” for Snappy Kraken’s existing members – revenues are going down and advisors of all stripes are facing a lot of stress.
Effective immediately, all setup fees are waived for advisors joining Snappy Kraken’s program, whether they’re new subscribers or existing subscribers. Moving forward, all bew subscribers will receive the program’s deepest discount available, and existing members struggling with outbreak-related hardships will be able to qualify for reduced rates upon request.
Snappy Kraken has also pledged not to increase prices until further notice.
“Any advisor who charges based on AUM, which is the largest part of the market we serve, is going to take a hit on their income,” said Sofia. “Knowing that, we decided to offer everyone our lowest prices – a lot of the marketing stuff that advisors participate in are personal activities involving a lot of contact, like seminars, face-to-face meetings and lunches – all of that stuff is out the window. We wanted to help them figure out how to market online and give them a bigger bang for their buck. Online marketing takes more exposure and more effort to go rfom prospect to client.”
In the mean time, members of the firm’s marketing technology platform will enjoy some COVID-19-oriented changes, including new weekly crisis management communications for their clients and prospects offering perspectives on the outbreak – Snappy Kraken says the changes will help advisors “demonstrate expertise and build trust.”
The company is also rolling out its new video tool early to help advisors communicate with clients during the crisis. The tool is intended to create bi-weekly videos and includes prepared scripts, ready-made branded landing pages to host the videos, and promotional emails to drive traffic to the videos. The tool, intended as a premium add-on to the platform, will be offered to members at no additional cost.