As an advisor, you hope that your clients trust you and will stay on with you for life. You may be doing well in managing their finances. You may never hear any complaints about your fees. But unseen forces can be at work and any one of them can prompt your client to think he or she needs to go somewhere else. Lures of lower fees, better returns or a younger family member urging them to give up your management can undermine the trust you thought you had. How do you maintain the relationship? What can you do besides your essential job of skilled management to keep clients?
Consider that everyone appreciates being thought of and attended to one way or another. If you look at marketing efforts from another industry, real estate, you note that brokers and agents send lots of mailings and notices to prospects over time, just in hope of keeping themselves, top of mind. They may not even know you but they send mailings to your address or email anyway. If they do know you, you may even read what you receive. It makes sense to find reasons to contact clients regularly even if there is no need to update them on the performance of their portfolios. One way is to send them something as a courtesy, to let them know you want to be helpful.
You may know that financial abuse of elders is a massive problem in our country. In fact, research shows that it costs elders over $36B a year. Most aging clients have heard of abuse or scams, but may think warnings would not apply to them. But of course no one is immune. At AgingInvestor.com, where we focus on advisor education and training about age-related issues, we urge every advisor to keep retirement-age clients informed of scams and fraud. There are two important reasons for this. First, you may actually prevent a client from getting ripped off by educating them. And second, sending regularly scheduled communications about these issues and more can strengthen your relationship with the client.
If you don’t have time to write or look up what to send clients, we make it easy for you. Go to AgingInvestor.com and get started. Send your clients the AARP tip sheet on avoiding scams you’ll find HERE. They can learn about common scams and what to watch for. We even created a brief suggested cover letter or email you can send with it. You can use this one or create a letter that works for you. We have a series of free things we assembled so you can use them to maintain the best, warmest communication with your aging clients. It will deepen your client relationship and they’ll appreciate you even more!
