4 Communication Principles for Advisors Who Want to Keep Clients & Prospects Engaged

Sep 19

Here's a question I often ponder: If advisors provide such massive value to the people they serve, why is the average email and blog they publish largely ignored by clients and prospects alike?

Think about it: On your subscriber list of 300 people, how many do you hear from on a regular basis? What's your response rate on emails? What's your engagement rate on blog posts?

I get it, to some extent. My doctor’s newsletters get deleted immediately. I've never read an email from my bank.

Why should I? They're all the same: generic, bland, white-labeled, chat-gpt'd white noise. I can’t imagine anyone expects any engagement from that kind of communication.

And if you don't expect any engagement from that kind of communication, that begs the question: Why communicate at all?

As an advisor, if you're going to communicate with your clients, you owe it to yourself, your team, and your readers to put your best foot forward.

That's why I put together these four principles of communication—to help advisors get and maintain the attention of their core audience.

1. Always keep your audience in mind.

Audience matters. Not just when you’re choosing keywords or you’re writing. Not just when you're sending an email informing clients about your updated Form ADV.

Your target audience should inform what you write/talk about, how you communicate, how you segment your email lists, when you send emails, what your emails look like, which social channels you use, etc.

Your audience should drive everything you publish and touch—hence, it is the first principle of advisor communication.

One note: Try to go deeper than “my audience is retirees.” That’s true for 99% of advisors. Consider geography, interests, politics, etc.

2. Make it relevant.

If you nailed the first principle, this second principle should follow pretty easily. When you are truly focused on your audience, relevance comes naturally.

When it comes to communication, I am willing to bet that businesses send the wrong message to the wrong people more often than not. Rather than study their customers and understand their needs better, they send out random offers and messages and never seem to learn any better.

It's like they're throwing things at the wall, but they don't care whether it sticks or not.

Your clients like you, but that doesn't mean they're going to listen to you. First, you have to talk about something they care about.

If you're wondering how to keep it relevant to your clients, just ask them. Send out a client survey to discover what they would want to hear from you.

(Side note: We offer client-centered communications research as a service at Clay Pigeon. Click here to learn more.)

3. Use examples whenever possible.

Real, firsthand examples are best—use hypotheticals if necessary.

This is the only principle with a subheader, and there’s a reason for that.

You probably use examples during client meetings, but when it comes time to write, it’s easy to fall into the theory behind financial planning and leave out the application. While that is a great way to show your expertise, it’s also a great way to lose your readers.

Weave examples into everything you write—whether it happened to you or someone you know, or you helped a client navigate it. Of course, you need to change some details to protect privacy (and get the client’s permission if you’re talking about them), but the more real your examples are, the more engrossing they will be.

If you don’t have any real-life examples, then create a hypothetical scenario. The key here is to write it like a story with character names and everything.

Rather than saying, “Imagine you wanted to retire with $1,000,000,” say, “John was a 35-year-old man, married with four kids, and he wanted to save $1,000,000 by the time he retired.”

It may sound like a small change – and it is, really – but it makes a world of difference in keeping your readers engaged with a hypothetical example.

4. Headlines and subject lines should always spark curiosity

I used to serve as headline-writer for an advisor who published articles on Forbes. It was a great way to see firsthand what worked and what didn’t.

At the time, I was fairly new to marketing and severely underestimated the power of headlines. I knew they needed to be compelling, but I hated clickbait headlines and felt that good content should speak for itself—and this advisor had great content.

The articles were usually fairly technical and my headlines reflected that. A good article could bring in a couple thousand views and the best of the best hit 10,000 or so. I struggled to understand what made one article "hit" and one not.

Then I put up an article that hit 50,000 views the first day. Forbes moved it to their Featured page the next day and it jumped to more than 150,000 views within a week.

What changed? I came to realize that it had to be the headline. The content was still technical and data-driven—still solid, but it was another in a series of articles on retirement that we had been working through for a while.

Unbeknownst to me, I had written a headline that touched on something that resonated deeply with retirees.

From that lesson, I learned the basics of headline-writing. Results are definitely not guaranteed, but your content is better positioned for success if your headlines do these three things:

Appeal to your specific audience (refer to principle #2)
Make a promise of what readers will learn
Spark curiosity

If you’re like me, you might be thinking that headlines are important, but not so important that they need their own communication principle.

But think about it: If the headlines of your blogs (and subject lines of your emails) don’t spark curiosity, no one will click. And if no one clicks, then none of the other communication principles matter.

This is my attempt at creating general principles that everyone can apply to their own efforts. If you have a newsletter or blog, you probably have some principles of your own—whether you’ve written them down or not—that are more specific to the kind of communication you create. I would love to hear them!