As a wealth manager, you want to focus on what’s most important: helping your clients plan their financial future. Marketing can feel like a distraction from that core function.
It’s made all the more difficult by manual approaches to data collection, follow up, and nurturing leads into clients. If you’re not automating your marketing operations, you’re essentially leaving money on the table. And as a wealth management firm, that’s the last thing you want to do.
Fortunately, there’s a solution. Marketing automation can help you track user behavior and get the data you need for segmentation and personalization. It can also help you develop and launch upsell and cross-sell programs for your current clients. Let’s explore, shall we?
Use Marketing Automation to Track Wealth Management Client Behavior
One of the best benefits of using marketing automation as a wealth manager or financial advisor is the data. When you’re tracking your efforts correctly, you’ll have data on how people use your website, landing pages, emails, video content, SMS blasts, and social media posts. This added visibility will help you build more knowledge about your clients and what makes them happy.
These insights can help you improve your customer journey and deliver a better client experience. Then, take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors. This process will help you “nurture” the lead as they move through the sales funnel. The best part? This process is fairly easy once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution.
Use Marketing Automation to Retain Wealth Management Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management
Marketing automation provides the foundation for personalized marketing campaigns that drive growth for your wealth management practice. Your marketing automation platform can help you segment your audiences and make specific offers at just the right time. You can educate and engage new clients with automated nurture sequences. Or win over on-the-fence prospects with client case studies and infographics showing their wealth’s growth potential if they sign up.
That means you don’t have to spend precious hours sending emails to your prospects manually (or spend money hiring someone else to do it). You don’t have that kind of time! With marketing automation, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is segmented, you can deliver more targeted messaging uniquely suited to them. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities or services depending on who you’re speaking to.
Wealth Management Marketing Automation Helps Reach the Next Generation of Investors
According to Forbes, roughly $30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations in “the great wealth transfer.” Appealing to millennials and Gen Z means speaking to them in their language: digital communications.
According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending.” However, the GFLEC report also says that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to help younger investors better understand their opportunities.
Building a Digital First Customer Journey in Wealth Management
Here’s an example of what a digital-first customer journey might look like.
- A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options.
- After searching “financial literacy for Gen Z,” she clicks on your website.
- She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content.
- Over the next 30 days, she receives your advertisements as she browses online.
- She clicks on an ad. She’s redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
- She submits her details, reads the content, and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills.
- Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns.
- Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score, indicating she’s moved on in the buyer’s process.
- At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career.
- Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient.
Marketing Automation Helps Wealth Managers Cut to the Chase
By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content. The efficiency you gain helps you get time to refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. Don’t fumble around with a bare-bones email service providers (or worse, sheets in Excel). The sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to beat out rival firms.