I always like to start by just sharing a little bit about myself in case somebody’s new around here, even though I do these every other week. But if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, this is a new hack I discovered not that long ago. If you just hover over the QR code there, it will pull up my profile and we can connect. And if you wanna do the same, so when you’re connecting with a prospect or you go to a networking event, if you pull up your LinkedIn app and in the upper right hand corner of the search bar, there’ll be a little QR code.
And you can click on it, and it’ll give you your code, or you can go to the scan and scan someone else’s code. So it’s such a great way to exchange information, especially at networking events. So if we’re not connected, please connect with me there. I try pretty much every single day to share a marketing tip or hack that will help you grow organically this year.
So would love to connect with you there. Hopefully, some of you are already connected with me, and, you can tell everybody else that, yes, it’s worthwhile that I try to deliver some value, on LinkedIn for you.
And if you’re new here and you’re wondering what FMG is, we are the only all in one compliant marketing solution for financial advisers. And because today we’re specifically talking about communications, we are gonna show you some of the ways we make email marketing a breeze. But even if you’re not using FMG, all of the tips that I’m sharing will apply to any email service provider that you are using, so you’ll be able to use them. These are just some of the awards that we’ve won in the last few years.
I’m so proud of our team and all of the things that we’re doing to try to help advisers grow, and that includes things like today’s workshop.
So I mentioned that you’re gonna get some freebies just for being here, and one of those is this amazing communication checklist that we put together, our marketing team did, that is just gonna summarize in a quick PDF handout all of the things that we’re going over today. So that will be coming to you in an email with the replay.
Alright. So let’s just really set the baseline, though, today for how consistent communications are integral, not just for client retention, but also for lead gen. So let me know in the chat if you’ve seen this before, but YCharts did a a survey a year or so ago, and they found that nine out of ten clients consider their advisers’ communication frequency and style, not only deciding to retain their services, but to make referrals. Yet half, almost half, forty seven percent, wish their adviser would contact them more frequently.
So I’m curious to know from all of you, how often are you, communicating with clients not on a one to one, but sending an email, or you have an email newsletter, or you have, you know, something that’s more marketing material that you’re sending to clients and prospects. Is it once a week, once a month, once a quarter, once a year? We’re gonna talk about what maybe what’s most optimal because that’s one of the questions that came in ahead of time. But let’s just see what everyone’s saying.
We’ve got, Laurie saying at least weekly. Karen is saying quarterly newsletter, monthly topical emails. That’s really great too because anything that is timely, we have found, gets the highest open and click through rates. And we’re gonna talk more about that.
Nicole is counting social media posts. So three times a week social media posts, bimonthly emails, a few times a week, a few couple times per month. So it’s sort of all over the place. And that is one of the things that we are gonna talk about is what is the best cadence. So we will, we will get to that in just a minute. So interestingly enough, you guys seem to be ahead of the curve here. This was a KITC’s report, and what they found is that when you talk about drip marketing, so this is collecting emails and then dripping on those prospects over time, and that can include dripping on clients in the hopes that they’ll forward the email, make referrals, only twenty four percent of advisers said they were using drip marketing as part of their organic growth strategy.
So twenty four percent is pretty low, especially because we know it is such a, r great ROI strategy when you look at all of the different ones that there are. And as this wide chart study showed, client communication really is key to organic growth for lots of different reasons. But, again, this study is showing that nobody’s really raising their hand saying, I wish my adviser would contact me less frequently. Okay.
I lied. One point six percent. But out of, you know, all of the people out there, less than two percent are saying, I wish they wouldn’t contact me so much. And, of course, there’s ways to take people off list, unsubscribe them.
The vast majority are saying, I wish that they would contact me more. Right? And when we look at what kind of communication people want out of all the different kinds, surprisingly or maybe surprisingly not, email is still the number one form that people say that they want when it comes to how their adviser gets in touch with them.
So how do we actually build out a quality email list? Let me know in the chat. Is this something that either you’ve struggled with or, you know, you’re you’re always trying to figure out ways to build your email list? Is your email list growing? Is it shrinking?
This is something we get asked about a lot, so we are gonna start with this because I find that this is probably one of the biggest issues that people, struggle with. So okay. We’re saying Molly said just starting my business, definitely need to start an email list. James is saying definitely struggle building the email list.
So, yeah, let us know. And if there’s a tactic that’s worked really well from you that for you to build your list that we can all learn from, please share it.
Kelly said ours is growing. All clients, of course, on the list, and then we keep adding prospects.
And Kareem said trying to segment our list to better reach the right reader. I love that. And we’re gonna talk about all of these things today. So the sad fact is that ninety seven percent of webs website visitors do not convert.
That means they go to your website and they’re not actually booking a meeting with you. Right? Instead, they’re leaving. But we don’t want them to leave.
We wanna capture their information before they leave. So you want to have some sort of call to action to convert the people that are aware of you but not yet ready to book a meeting with you. So we here at FMG have a ton of different guides and, downloadables that you can add to your website on the home page, on specific resources pages to capture those leads. And one of the things you’ll notice is that all we’re gonna ask for is first name, last name, and email.
If you have a form that asks for phone number for, you know, sometimes people will ask, like, just a whole bunch of questions or ask somebody to fill out something to get a guide. It’s not going to convert as many people. So the less form fields that you require, the higher your conversion rate will go up. Now that’s not to say that you should never do it.
There are certain use cases, but just know that that’s the truth of the matter.
And so this is a great one we offer right in the FMG downloadable library that you can add to any page of your website. But if you have a page all about estate planning, right, and you are writing articles about it, it would be great to have something like this that you add and you can capture people their email right there on your website. So this is in essence what that Kitsis report was telling us. Only twenty four percent of advisers are actually doing drip email marketing. So what is it? Your drip email marketing, again, is just you’re collecting people’s emails, and then over time, you’re sending them valuable, educational, timely content.
And this is not a sales email. So it’s not, hey. You filled out this form. Do you wanna book a time on my calendar?
It’s, hey. You commented or you downloaded avoid these six common tax errors, and here are some things, some ways that we can help you. Here’s a piece of content that is you know, you might find interesting about this. So it’s all about leading with help, and education.
And this always is gonna be easier if you have a specific niche. Right? So if you really help tech executives, in Silicon Valley, you could make a downloadable that’s very specific to the RSUs they get, for instance. And you’re gonna get a lot higher of a conversion rate on your, website than just more of a generic one.
So keep that in mind as well.
Okay.
I’m just looking to see because I can’t see the questions and the screen at the same time, if there was any if anybody said anything else about questions about that. So tell me, do you currently have a lead gen guide or downloadable on your website?
Do you feel like it’s working? What is it? If you have one that’s working really well, tell us what it is. I would love to know.
So we got a lot of not yeses or not yets.
Eliza said yes with an exclamation point. So maybe hers is really good. We would love to know, what it is. So, again, the more specific you make it to your audience, the higher the conversion rate will be, but also know where to put it. So I don’t know about all of you. How annoyed do you get when you land on a website and their download or their guide keeps popping up and you just keep x ing out of it because you can’t read the darn website?
That is not a way to collect leads. That’s a way to frustrate people. Right? So instead, you wanna embed it into the page where as they scroll, it will continue to be there and catch their eye.
Pop ups can work in certain situations, but, generally, I like to just have it on the page that’s related to what it is we’re talking about.
Okay. Oh, Eliza said or me I’m sorry if I’m saying your name, if it’s Elisa or Eliza. But she said we are using the estate planning ebook, and everyone loves it. Great.
Which is the one that we, just said. Molly said I hate pop ups. Me too, Molly. They drive me crazy.
I was just dealing with that a little bit ago. So instead, again, embed it somewhere on your website and then you can, you know, as people are scrolling through, they’ll see it. And I like to put it on a page where, again, it makes sense. So if you have a whole page about estate an estate planning resource center, then it would make sense to put, you know, our understanding your estate, critical elements of an estate strategy.
If you have a page all about how you help with tax planning, it would make sense to put how to avoid these six common tax errors. And then once somebody does, fill it out, you do want to immediately have a trigger email that is sent to them. So in this case, in the FMG library, we have this thank you for downloading the common tax errors, and it will, personalize it with their name.
You can put other information in there that you want so that somebody the minute that they get it, you wanna strike why the iron is hot, right, and make sure that they’re hearing from you while their interest is at its peak.
So once you have that prospect’s email, how often should you be emailing? So, really, the typical ways we see it is either weekly, once a week, every other week, or once a month. The main thing is finding a cadence that you can realistically stick to and a time of day and day of the week. Right?
So maybe it’s every Thursday at noon, you send out your, weekly newsletter, or it’s every other week on Wednesdays at, you know, three PM. Whatever it is, you want to be consistent with it so that people will come to know and expect it. And, you know, consistency is really the the key here. Just again reminding you that these are not sales emails.
However, one of the things we see works really well is timely content definitely win. So you can see here in this example, this email saying recently the yield curve inverted inverted for the first time. Why do we pay attention to this? So in addition to the regular emails that you’re sending when breaking news happens or something that everybody’s talking about, sending out a separate email about that one thing is a good strategy.
Right? So it’s not your normal newsletter. It is a one off email about something happening that shows that you are the trusted source that people can think about when they’re thinking how to make sense of what’s happening in the news.
So I’ll talk a little bit more about timely content in a second, but let us know, is that something that you do or maybe you struggle with? We here at FMG in our do it for me program, actually, that’s one of the biggest value ads I’d say people say they get is that when breaking news happens, we’ll get a piece out usually twelve to twenty four hours that you can send to clients. Because I know for many of you, you’re dealing with the phone calls, you’re dealing with what’s happening, and so getting the timely piece out is difficult. But if you do, do you see a really good open and click through rate?
Because we have found that with timely content, the open rate is significantly higher. Right? If you’re saying Silicon Valley bank collapsed, what you need to know about your own banking or, you know, the the Fed is gonna increase rates this, what you should know about your what to do with your cash, you’re going to get a much higher open rate than just your weekly newsletter. Right?
Kelly is saying, yes. We did a one off responding to market volatility, the off week of our twice monthly newsletter. That’s a great reason to do it every other week. You get build in some gaps there for these one offs. Kelly Peterson said, yes. When we send timely content, our open and click through rates are much higher than general emails.
So there you go. Two testimonials right there in the chat on the power of how this works.
With clients, one of the things that I think so many people forget to do is they’ll welcome in a new client, and they forgot to they forget to take the client, the spouse, the partner, and add them not only to their CRM, but to have a welcome series of emails of what they can expect, what communication’s gonna look like. So in the FMG library, we have this new client welcome series that you can you can see it’s a series of six emails. You can edit it. You can add a video welcoming them.
You can really make it your own. But I highly suggest you use this. It’s already written for you. You can just make it your own, and so definitely take advantage of that one as well.
Here’s a little bit more about that timely content and how it performs much better.
We have found that the average, financial services open rate is about twenty four percent.
But through our do it for me marketing program, those timely emails average about a seventy percent open rate, which is just astronomically high, but we know that it works. So if you do monitor your these key performance indicators, things like your open rate, let us know in the chat. What are you currently averaging for your open rate? We’re gonna talk about averages in our industry in general for open rate, click through rate, all that good stuff. But I’d love to know on the call if anybody knows what theirs is, currently, and we’ll see kinda how we’re we’re all benchmarking.
Okay. And while we’re doing that, we’re gonna put up a quick poll.
If you do wanna learn more about our do it for me marketing program where we’ll write these timely emails for you so when breaking news happens, you don’t have to worry about going and, you know, creating something. We’ll do it for you. The other thing in this program is that Susan Dieter, our CMO, and I put together an editorial calendar that looks just like this every single month where we will actually give you exactly what emails to send, what blogs to go on your website, what social posts, but then everything is customizable and editable.
So you can kinda take and leave the pieces that you want, and you’re paired with a marketing concierge on our team who will do the implementation for you. So when it comes to the timely, that’s one of the biggest benefits I think people say that they love. Of course, we also have you know, we give you a video outline so you can make videos every month, a, so a script of the month, all other kinds of good stuff. But thank you for answering that poll. That will just help us reach out to the people who really want to learn more about that the most. Oops. I’m going to the wrong thing here.
Okay. The other thing, a mistake I see a lot of people doing is not building their email list, in a very systematic way. So when we think about how do we want to, you know, get more people to sign up for our emails, yes, your website obviously is a great way to do that. You need to drive website traffic there.
But social media is another fantastic way, especially on your own personal social pages. Right? So your personal LinkedIn page. You can really build your newsletter just by reminding people that you have one and giving them a preview of the type of content that they’ll get in it.
So have any of you maybe tell us in the chat, have you ever signed up for a newsletter because you saw a creator, an influencer, a writer say on social media, hey. This is the type of content I put out, and you can get it right in your inbox. And they give you a preview of what that content is, like, Callie Cox is here. And then they say, here’s the link to sign up.
Tell me in the chat. Have you ever added yourself to a newsletter, that way? Because I think that a lot of people forget about doing this. It’s not part of their regular marketing, routine.
Kareem just said, I am a sucker for lead generation marketing. I love it. So am I. We’re getting lots of yeses and absolutely, but this really works.
The main thing is don’t just say, hey. Every week, I have a newsletter. Sign up here. You have to tell them why.
What are they gonna get in the newsletter? Give them a preview of what they can expect. So on your website, you can even have something that says every other week, we send a newsletter where we recap the top stories that you should be paying attention to in the economy, the markets, and, here’s last week’s issue. And they can see a actual example of the email that you are sharing.
So that is a really, really good way to do it.
And just one other point, I recommend doing this at least two times a month. We are all we all I just the other day was telling our team at F and G, I haven’t posted about our F and G newsletter and all the great content we put in it in a while to my LinkedIn page, and I need to do that. We all forget, so you really wanna build it into your editorial calendar so that you remember to do it.
The other way that you can really build your email list is through events, and I love this hack by using LinkedIn events. So on LinkedIn, you can create a page. That’s what you see here from Accordant Wealth Partners. You can say, I’m gonna host a webinar.
You could add your Zoom registration link, and then you can actually invite your first, second, even third, or any any connections, through the LinkedIn platform without having their email. Right? Then once they register via Zoom, now you will have your their email, and you’ll be able to start that drip marketing. So this is a fantastic strategy.
I would love to know if anyone on the call has tried this before and has seen any success with it.
We’ve seen it work really, really well for us here at FMG. Right? We host an educational event, a workshop. We are able to see who’s interested, provide value, give really good information away, but then also get emails so we can continue to add people to our email list.
I don’t know many advisers who’ve tried this. Corden Wealth Partners, who you see here, doing it on the screen, they have had tremendous success with it with it, which is why they do it pretty much almost every month.
They are very targeted in the what kind of event they’re gonna have and then who they invite, but it is such a great way to get new blood into your email list.
Okay.
Karen is saying I have put our event on LinkedIn, but not sure if I can invite people directly with the free version. So you only get so many I’m not sure about with the free version if you can invite people, actually. I’ll have to double check on that. But I know you can send, second and third degree connections, even an invite with a URL. So you could say, you know, hi.
I see you work at Microsoft. I’m hosting this event for their employees, and here’s the link. And you can send out, I think, what is it, a hundred a week of those. So that would be one kind of workaround that you could try, Karen.
Okay. The second thing about email is segmenting your audience. So you’ve heard this before. I’m not gonna get too too in the weeds about this, but just know that this is an example of our f m d FMG dashboard.
There’s so many different ways that you can segment your audience. At a minimum, you want to have all your clients on one and all your prospects on another. But if you do have any lead capture forms on your website, right, like download our tax guide, I suggest putting all the people that came from that one specific, gated content into a group because you know they’re interested in taxes. Right?
So if there’s very specific tax information that you wanna send out but you don’t wanna send it out to every person on your email list, that’s a great way to target those people. You can do the same thing with, you know, specifically young families, people under sixty over sixty, however you want to break it up, which is then going to allow you to send personalized messages, which we’ll talk about now. So I’ve shared this before, and I love this. It’s the idea no one cares what you can do.
They care what you can do for them. Right? So we tune out the messages about why a company is so great or what they offer. We pay attention to how can they make our lives better.
So when you’re writing your email, when you’re crafting your communications, you want to use that as well. The more you can stop talking like an adviser and start talking like your clients and how they talk, the more successful all your communications will be, not just email, or texting. So you wanna think about what is the problem that the client or the customer or the prospect has, and what is the solution you provide to that problem that they are searching for. And I love this example from this plumbing company where they literally took a message someone sent them and turned it into the copy on the homepage of their website.
And this might surprise a lot of you. Let’s see in the chat. Has anybody heard, this before, the Flesch Kinkade readability test? We are terrible, everyone, in the wealth management space about this.
So if you go and read a magazine, you get the newspaper. The average reading level is like a sixth, seventh grade. If you look at what most financial advisory firms are sending to people as marketing newsletters, it is written like eleventh, twelfth grade, writing. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
People are smart and intelligent. But the problem is when it comes to marketing messaging, think about the slogans that you remember or the ads that you pay attention to. They are very, very simplified because that’s what we can we’re processing so much information in a day. We want to just get to the point.
We want it to be written in a way we can understand. So whenever you’re writing anything, this is one of my favorite hacks, is you wanna go look up your Flesch Kincaid readability, score. So I put the instructions here, but you basically copy and paste what you write. And in Word, there is a little widget, and it will tell you at what level your writing is.
And you’ll find usually that you can really dumb it down. Right? Get rid of some of the jargon. Because remember, the average consumer is not in our world.
They’re not talking about the COLA and the RS RSUs and, you know, AUM or whatever these different acronyms that we use and all of the different ways we look at what’s happening and, market indicators. They’re not paying attention to it, nor do we want them to. We wanna be the one simplifying it for them. So this is such a great way to do that in your communications.
And the more you personalize, the better success you will have, obviously.
The average person receives about a hundred emails a day. Does anybody know what their average is? I would love to know. And how many of those emails that you get do you just not even open and delete?
Right? Because they’re not they’re not personalized to you. So the more you can personalize it to the person getting it, the more success that you will have. I’m actually going to show you just an example here and then we’ll come back to this.
So let’s just give I should have put this up higher. Let’s just give an example. Let’s say you have clients or prospects with kids in college. A subject line in their inbox could be the top ten money mistakes college students make.
Right? And then the underlying text that shows up below it could say and how to help your child not make them. If you have prospects that are five years out from retirement, your subject line could be the top ten financial mistakes retirees wish they wouldn’t have made. If it’s people who are currently receiving Social Security, you could have this is how much your Social Security check will increase this year.
Notice in this one, I didn’t say the COLA has been announced, the cost of living adjustment. Right? I’m not using financial jargon.
You know, you could even say open this email to see how much your Social Security check will increase this year. Right? And then you give them the percentage.
So great marketing, great hook writing makes you want to open the email. Think of that subject line as the gate that’s gonna decide whether someone opened your email or not. If you had prospects who work at public tech companies, right, you can talk about specifically our issues or other factors that relate to them. So the more specific you get, the better success you will have with those emails, and this really, really applies for prospects. Your clients obviously know you. They know the value that you’re providing, hopefully. But specifically, they’re trying to use email as a marketing tool to get, you know, more prospects to book meetings, this is really something you wanna pay attention to.
So going back, just to how to know whether your emails are good or not, I put these these are the four things that I really think I pay attention to and I suggest other businesses do. So that’s your open rate, your click through rate, your bounce rate, and your list growth rate.
I think Elise is gonna put in the chat where in FMG you can track, your different stats. But, again, the average open rate in financial services is twenty four percent on average, and I think I saw in the chat a lot of people saying that theirs was a lot higher. So I love that. I saw a lot of forty percent, thirty percents. So you guys are well ahead of the curve. Well done.
And if you don’t yet know, that is something you can start tracking now and, you know, obviously, going going forward.
You can see how you compare. The click through rate is about two and a half percent.
The bounce rate, anything below two percent. And in case you’re not sure what these mean, if you’re new to this, the open rate is just how many people open your email. The click through rate is if you have any links in your email that you want someone to take action. You want them to go you’re sharing information about a blog post you wrote and you want them to go click the blog.
That would be how many people click to read it. The bounce rate is the number of emails that aren’t even sent. So that would be, you know, an indicator. If your bounce rate is above two percent, you need to scrub your list, clean it up, get rid of the dead emails or the emails that have not opted in.
And then the list growth rate, we wanna aim for one to three percent per month for a healthy list.
So, again, we are talking a little bit about subject lines.
The more you can keep it short and sweet, six to ten words, the better.
The more you can be specific again in sending content for a specific niche, that’s why having those groups is so important, the better. And so if you’re not sure if your subject lines are good or you wish they could get better, you can use AI tools like subject line dot com where you can actually just go in, enter your subject line, and it’ll rate it for you, evaluate it, tell you how good it is, and give you suggestions on how you can improve. So we love this tool.
And then, obviously, you want to, you know, automate what you can. So that is one of the ways we love to help advisers. We talked a little bit about consistency and how important and crucial it is to be consistent with your communications.
One of the things, again, going back to that earlier survey, you’re probably just not emailing enough. So a recent Morningstar study asked how frequently clients prefer to be emails or to be emailed, And they found that most people are saying they would rather they would either want weekly or monthly emails. So at least sixty seven percent want a monthly educational email from their adviser, and that is just not happening at the vast majority of firms. So if you’re doing it, you’re ahead of the curve. If you’re not, this is not just something that, you know, is good for prospecting, but your clients want it as well.
And if you’re like, I don’t know really what I should be saying. What should I talk about? This is a slam dunk email newsletter idea. So you’re all reading a ton of articles throughout the week.
Some of them you probably agree with. Some of them might be clickbait. Some of them you think clients shouldn’t pay attention to that, but you know that they’re they are reading The Wall Street Journal and seeing these these headlines. You can round up those headlines, and then you can see these all these are blue links you can click on, and then you can give your take on it or why someone should read it or why not, why they should pay attention to it.
So let’s say you mostly work with, business owners and a bunch of the business owners, like, more than fifty percent are in manufacturing.
You could have an article in there and that says, you know, for all of the, you know, my manufacturing business owners, this article is for you and then go into detail with it. So it’s a great way to reach all your clients, but then even get more specific within a sub niche.
If you are thinking about, okay. On top of all this, I still need to get in touch with people for holidays or for their birthdays.
We have you covered in F and G. We have these great birthday cards that you can send out, that can be automated. So, right, you’re integrating with your CRM.
And every single month, your I should say every week, every day, all of anybody who’s got a birthday is going to get one of these birthday cards. And you can choose certain things to customize it, but it just takes one, you know, more thing off of your plate. And there’s both printed and email versions. And then we also have holiday ones as well, to address all of the major holidays on the calendar, and you can pick and choose which of those holidays you want to automate. These are probably two of our other most popular automations we have. So you can sign up so that every single month, whoever you wanna put on a list gets your monthly market insights newsletter, and that includes what’s going on in the markets, a video summarizing everything, a quote.
There’s all different great stuff in there. If you wanna see a copy of it, certainly, reach out to our team, and we would love to show you. That’s a really popular one. And then for everybody that is either about to retire or already retired, the retirement insights newsletter is another super popular one that you can automate monthly. So, again, these automations, you set them up, you add people to the list, and then it just goes out. You don’t have to get it approved every single month.
We have a compliance approval process on the back end. So it just takes an extra thing off your plate so you know those consistent communications are happening, but you don’t have to actually manually take care of it.
Okay. I’m just gonna go back into the chat and see, what other people are saying.
Candace is saying we do a happy anniversary for whenever a client the anniversary of they became a client. I love that. Is that just an email that you send, Candace?
Or, what else do you do? I love that you get send them a little anniversary email. What what a good idea.
Kelly was asking where the widget is in Word for the flesh kinkade.
I’ll find a Google knowledge base article here and send that to you, or maybe at least you could find one on the back end.
How do you get clients to respond to your surveys that they are happy with your firm like a referability survey?
That is a great question. Has anyone here done that where you email all your clients?
It’s basically like a NPS score, and you ask them how happy they are. And then, I’ve seen a lot of people who are trying to collect more reviews and testimonials.
They will do that, kinda get a gauge. Like, are most people five stars? And then they’ll send out from that, you know, an email asking everyone to leave a review because they’ve already kind of tested the waters.
I don’t know if, like, there’s a magic way to get them to respond to an email like that. I would say if you can make it look like a one when you’re asking them to do something like leave you a review, you know, obviously, you wanna ask everybody, but if you can make it look like it’s just to them, very specific, like, maybe text only email, you’ll get a better response rate. But then for a survey, you wanna make it so that they feel, you know, it really will be anonymous and they don’t have to worry about offending if you really wanna get the most honest pulse.
Oh, Frank is saying we receive very little feedback to any survey we use. So I’m I don’t have a great answer for that. I don’t know if every anybody on the call has a client survey tool or strategy that they’re using that they can recommend to Frank. Okay. And Elise just put the Flesch Kinkade readability stat in there.
Thank you for that.
Okay. So I’m gonna go on to this next, thing about texting. I would love to know, does anyone here currently utilize texting as part of their strategic communications with clients? So getting them to, you know, giving them a reminder that their meeting is starting with you, appointment reminder, or, that they have to fill out a DocuSign.
If they are, I would love if you are, I’d love to know. We currently, let me just go back to the slides here. We recently, I should say, FMG acquired MyRepChat, which is a, texting tool that is compliant.
And we are we have so many fun and exciting things planned for that tool to really make it, a part of your marketing tech stack. And what we have found and lots of studies have found is that when you leverage both email and texting together, you can boost your engagement rates by, like, ten percent because whereas email open rates, you know, we were seeing the industry average is twenty four percent. Some of you are really thrilled. Right?
Forty to sixty percent. Text messaging is a ninety eight percent open rate. People do not leave text messages unread. Well, maybe there’s some of you out there who currently have, like, a hundred and nineteen texts unread.
I would love to know if there’s anybody that’s in some group texts they can’t get off of. But for the most part, they get read. So it’s really, really, a great way to communicate with clients. And on average, they’re read within three minutes.
Right? So we are texting all the time. We’re paying attention to our text. And one of the ways that you can really utilize texting is through meeting reminders.
So you get a prospect.
They’re on your email list. You’re dripping on them over time. The day comes they’re supposed to meet with you to really reduce no shows by up to ninety percent. You wanna pair those emails that you’ve now that you’ve been doing with a text reminder.
And you can just create a template, where they can reply yes to confirm or reply reschedule, to do that. And we have through the my rep chat knowledge base, if you’re using that tool specifically, let us know in the chat. We have a great PDF we can send you that shows you how to set up all these templates to really reduce all of that manual, reminders to people. And you can you know, the other thing is blending texting with your usual outreach outreach method.
So you can, just like you can in email, create different groups, in your texting tool. So you can be really hyper specific and personalized with who’s getting which text when. So one to one and one to many can all happen. And specifically in my rep chat, we make it really easy to do that.
One of the other things we found that I think is just amazing, I’d love to know if anyone else here has experienced this, When we would we found that when an adviser is sending someone paperwork, the DocuSign, what have you, that needs to be completed, and they ask them to fill it out, it can be days before the person does it. But when they send them a text reminding them, the paperwork is returned on average in as little as five minutes. So massive, massive difference. And I know I’m so guilty of this, not just through texting. You know, I’ll owe somebody a response to an email and they’ll send me a LinkedIn message and then I respond.
It’s almost like your inbox feels like work and then you get a message on your phone. It’s like they caught you or something. I don’t know if I can’t be the only one to feel this way. Let me know if you’ve experienced this as well. But I really do think, you know, it’s an amazing way to again, not just for those client reminders, but for getting people to take different actions. Pairing text is really, really, a great way to do it.
So yeah. Okay. So some people are saying oh, do text messages go through hearsay? So MyRepChat is a separate tool, that we have as part of our FMG family.
It is not with hearsay. That’s a separate tool, but it is all would be hooked up with your compliance, and it archives everything. So it is a separate tool. Judith is saying, I use RepChat.
Would love to expand these features. Yes. And we have we know the power of texting. So as part of our road map for the my rep chat tool, we have a lot of features, that we’re working on that we’ll be excited to unveil so that you can really pair texting with your other forms of communication.
Okay. Oh, and we put in a, article there, eight ways texting can boost your efficiency as an adviser. So definitely, check that out as well.
Okay. So I I’m gonna go through and look at the questions that came in, that we didn’t get to yet. But if you are interested in learning more about MyRepChat, FMG, how we can update help you improve the marketing you’re already doing.
Or if you’re a customer and you wanna know more about certain features, the downloadables, the lead captures, you can book your twenty minute consultation here with our team, and we’ll go over what you’re currently doing, understand what you have in terms of your growth goals and what you’re looking to get, and then we’ll give you tailored recommendations on what we, suggest so you can book that there.
And I also just wanted to give a shout out if you haven’t already.
This, workshop is the last in our twenty twenty five marketing guide series. If you have not downloaded the marketing guide, you are missing out and you absolutely need to do that. You can see here, we go into websites, social media, AI, client communications, events, and it is chock full of everything you need for all different aspects of your marketing. And we will put the link in the chat on how you can go ahead and download that, but that is an amazing resource. You can hand it over to other people on your team, Print it out. Keep it on your desk.
Absolutely. It is this was the last in that series. So there was a whole session we did on events, a whole session we did on AI, a whole session we did on social media. If you missed any of them and you want us to send you the link to one, feel free to let us know, and we’d be happy, to do that as well.
But let me see if there’s any questions. Oh, Mark said, great job, Sam. You’re amazing. That is so sweet.
Thank you. Oh, thank you, Tom. You guys are making my day. I don’t have a cohost today.
So sometimes I feel like I’m just talking at a blank screen and it’s a little bit more difficult, but I appreciate the great feedback. And that is why I love doing them because so many of you do message me saying, I at least learned one thing I could implement today, and that is what we really want to do for you here at FMG. It’s what we’re all about. Whether you use FMG, you use one of our competitors, you’re going out and doing marketing on your own, we just wanna help advisors market better.
So thank you for that awesome feedback.
Oh, George said, I think I’m finally sold on FMG. George, we would love to work with you. Please, please reach out.
Okay. Angela is asking, are the text distribution list limited to twenty five people?
That is a great question. I wish I knew the answer. Elise or Aubrey, do you know on the back end, is that currently the case? And if it is, I’m assuming we would have it in the road map to change that in the future, but we’ll see what they what they say.
Angela Martin asked, do you recommend using a company LinkedIn profile or a personal?
We want you to have both, but know that your company, page will never perform as well as your, personal page because people connect with people. So, you know, it’s a lot harder to leave comments and interact with a company page. Use your company page to think about how are we recruiting future advisers? What kind of content are we putting out there to show where a firm they wanna work with? If someone googles our firm and they land on our LinkedIn page, what are they gonna see? We want them to know what we’re experts in and what we focus on, and then use the personal page to really build those connections. But you would also set up if you’re gonna do a LinkedIn event, to drive, you know, new leads for your email list, you would wanna do that from you’d wanna do it from the company page.
Okay. Karen asked, can you share the link to the AI webinar all about answer engine optimization? Absolutely.
That is one we just did. If you’re not sure what answer engine optimization is, when you go to Google right now and you ask a question, it just gives you a bunch of answers at the top. How do you get your business to be one of the ones being recommended? Or if someone goes to Perplexity or Gemini or ChatGPT and says, who are the best financial advisers in Philadelphia working with physicians? How do you come up? So that webinar was all about the ways to change the way your website is structured, what’s written on your website to show up. So we just put the link in there, I’m sorry, in the chat if anybody wants to check that out.
Okay. Do you work with tax accounting and CAS firms? We definitely have a ton of CPAs and tax firms, and I am so sorry, for my ignorance. But what is a CAS firm?
I do not know.
And then I can answer the question.
So but, yes, definitely, we work with c tons of CPAs, accountants. If you’re looking for examples of the marketing that those firms are doing through FMG, we can certainly send you some, examples, and we’d love to do that. You guys have great questions today. Thank you.
Okay. Let’s see what other questions have come in.
Okay.
Somebody was asking about just compliance. Oh, the marketing guide. We put the link to the marketing guide in there. I think it might have got buried.
Let me just re put it in there for you. Definitely download it. Check it out. You will love that.
Oh, that was not what I meant to put it. Because somebody put it in there. I actually and we put the poll question in. Okay.
Okay. Let me go back and see. Oh, somebody was just asking about compliance. So they’re asking if, you know, with the texting and all the other email communication, if it’s compliant.
So we have an entire back end system built for compliance. So depending on how your compliance is handled, it will either be routed to somebody for approval, and then once it’s approved, it’ll go out. Or a lot of the different things that we do at FMG, the big value add is that we automate that process. So we’re getting it approved at the firm level, and then the automations can happen without you needing to get every piece of content compliance approved.
So it’s definitely one of the biggest value adds. It’s one of the things advisors who work with us love is that, compliance is so much easier when you’re using a system like this. So definitely, check us out, and we’ll be happy to tell you more about that. Okay.
Oh, CAS meant client accounting advisory services. Yes. I’m sorry. I did not know what that meant.
We can send you Karim, if you wanna connect with us, we can send you some examples and, give you a taste of how we can help you with your marketing. Alright. We try to keep these at forty five minutes. I’m two minutes over. Thank you. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. Again, I love it when you give me some feedback whether good or bad, if this was helpful.
If there’s something we didn’t cover that you’d love to see in another workshop, please let us know.
We obviously could do an entire workshop just on writing email subject lines or what content performs best. We’re trying to do a high level overview. But if you really want us to dig further deep into a specific topic, let us know, and we’ll add it to the list for an upcoming session. Thank you everyone so much. I hope it’s beautiful spring day wherever you are, and we will talk to you soon.
