6 ways to engage with legacy clients

By AdviceBridge

Financial planning firms have, over the years, been forced to absorb ever-increasing costs. These costs have risen across the board, from regulatory fees to Professional Indemnity insurance and levies.

There is only so much a business can do to absorb these costs. This leaves firms with three choices: increase their fees; become more efficient; or find alternative income streams.

The last option is the hardest, but it is possible to maximise your firm’s income by re-engaging legacy clients. Read on to learn about six ways you can transform a past relationship into a profitable one.

1. Identify your legacy clients

Many firms have clients who are not on an ongoing service proposition – these are your legacy clients. Examples of the legacy clients you should try and engage with include:

• ‘Orphan’ clients who didn’t adopt an ongoing proposition post-RDR
• Clients who were transferred to you as part of a merger or acquisition
• Clients of an adviser who has left your business
• Clients to whom you’ve only ever given mortgage advice
• Clients who may have disengaged following the death of a partner.

2. Update your records

You can’t re-engage with legacy clients if you don’t hold the right contact details.

It’s important to make sure you hold the right data for legacy clients, including up-to-date names, postal addresses and, top priority, email addresses.

Making sure basic contact details are correct is the starting point for any legacy client re-engagement.

It’s also a legal imperative that your email addresses are up to date because you don’t want to risk sending information to the wrong email account – this could put you in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018.

3. Make sure you are GDPR compliant

This brings us to one of the main challenges of contacting legacy clients. It’s unlikely that legacy clients will have given consent to receive marketing communications. This doesn’t mean you can’t contact them, but you will need to rely on what is known as “legitimate interest”. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) outlines this as using “people’s data in ways they would reasonably expect and which have a minimal privacy impact, or where there is a compelling justification for the processing”. Before embarking on any re-engagement, make sure you confirm your intentions with your compliance department. The ICO has a guide on data protection for organisations.

4. Re-engage with female clients

Fidelity International’s Unlocking the Power of Advice report found that 50% of advisers had lost a female client after their male partner passed away.

The report pointed out that in older generations it was more common for the man in a heterosexual partnership to look after the finances. Fidelity urged advisers to try and keep up a conversation with both women and men in a partnership.

Jackie Boylan, head of FundsNetwork for Fidelity International said: “Financial advisers need to be engaging with both partners in a couple when discussing the household wealth to ensure both feel informed and valued.”

5. Build your service proposition

Getting to know your legacy clients means it’s more likely they will make the transition to clients on an ongoing service proposition.

Make use of Client Relationship Management software to note down your client’s family commitments, where they work, where they holiday and all the financial commitments they have. You may also want to note their hobbies or interests.

• The more information you have about legacy clients the better you can tailor your service proposition to help you engage and retain them.
• As well as helping build a service proposition, the data you collect means you are on top of any key client events and can use those to contact them, such as on birthdays, retirement, or anniversaries.

6. Empower legacy clients to take action

A content marketing strategy not only helps connect you with legacy clients, but it can also prompt those considering financial planning to take action.

It is a good idea to use content that helps you engage with legacy clients of all age groups, but it may be useful to categorise your clients into three different groups:

• High-level: A small number of clients who are likely to re-engage and who will value personalised marketing campaigns and individual attention. These might be clients near retirement or looking to invest.
• Likely to remain: A larger list of clients, some of whom might be considering increasing their pension contributions. They are more likely to respond to standard campaigns, tweaked for the individual client where possible.
• Far and wide: This group may not necessarily be immediately engaged, but could be empowered by general content or social media campaigns.

Always use the information you’ve learned about your clients to address their problems, challenges and aspirations.

When considering content aimed at legacy clients, ask yourself:

• What keeps them awake at night?
• What are their main financial concerns?
• What life event are they facing?
• What might have nudged them into re-engaging with a financial adviser?

How AdviceBridge can help

AdviceBridge has developed a platform that helps financial planners deliver a personalised service to clients for whom a full financial planning service isn’t viable, including members of group pension schemes, efficiently and cost-effectively.

The white-label app gathers personal and financial information from the client digitising many of the manual, time-consuming processes, which allows the planner to focus on the relationship and not admin, research or reports. It also calculates the income the client will have in retirement while showing the best way to invest across different tax wrappers.

The app enables financial planners to communicate and engage with clients from all walks of life, no matter where they are, specifically those who traditionally prove unprofitable due to the accumulating phase of their financial planning journey.

Get in touch

To find out how AdviceBridge can help you improve scheme member communication and

engagement, please get in touch. Email hello@advicebridge.com or call us on 020 3925 3850, or visit our website to book a quick demo with our friendly team.