4 Tips to Improve Client Communications at Your Firm

How you communicate with your clients can be an important factor in determining whether they remain your clients, or look elsewhere for financial advice. Good financial advisor client communication is a reflection of how often you interact, and the quality of those interactions. Improving your communication strategy is critical for building strong advisor-client relationships that encourage trust and loyalty.

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Understanding Client Expectations for Communication

What do clients want when it comes to how they communicate with their advisors? If you’re not asking this question, you could be missing the big picture when it comes to improving client relationships.

Here are some key insights into how advisory clients view communications, according to a 2024 YCharts survey ¹ :

• Clients who communicate less frequently with their advisors report much lower levels of confidence in their advisors’ abilities.
• Among high-value clients, 85% said they believed that regular and/or personalized communications could significantly enhance their confidence in their advisor.
• Nearly 80% of clients prefer to be contacted by their advisors at least every three months. However, 47% of clients with $500,000 or more in assets said they wanted to have contact with their advisors monthly. That’s important if you’re hoping to attract more high net worth clients.
• Thirty-eight percent of clients said they preferred in-person meetings with their advisors, while 36% said they’d be comfortable with virtual meetings.
• The majority of clients surveyed, 54%, said they relied on their advisor to provide information about the market.
• Around one-third of clients, or 36%, say that the conversations they have with their advisors don’t always resonate with them and their needs.
• Seventy-eight percent of clients said that regular communication would motivate them to stick with their current advisors. Meanwhile, 81% said they’d be more likely to refer friends and family to an advisor who’s a good communicator.

The survey results indicate that communication is exceptionally important for the majority of advisory clients. Now, how do advisors live up to those expectations?

According to the 2024 Financial Advisor Marketing Trends Report from Broadridge, ² 74% of advisors fail to meet client expectations regarding how often they’d like to be contacted. That suggests that there’s significant room to improve financial advisor client communication policies. 

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Tips for Better Financial Advisor Client Communication

Improving client communications isn’t rocket science. It just takes some thought to create the type of experience your clients desire. These tips can help you improve communications and build stronger relationships with your clients (while potentially gaining new ones through referrals).

1. Get on a Schedule

Consistency is the lynchpin of a solid communication strategy. You don’t want your clients to feel you’ve forgotten about them. Regular contact — whether it’s a phone call, email or text — sends the signal that they’re on your radar and you’re available if they’d like to chat.

How often you communicate may be determined by your clients’ expectations. If your client base is largely composed of high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth individuals, for instance, they may expect monthly or even weekly contact. Other clients, meanwhile, may be comfortable with a quarterly call.

The simplest and most effective way to find out what your clients want is to ask them. You can create a financial advisor client communication survey and have them respond anonymously to share insight about what they’d like you to change or improve.

Once you decide on a schedule, create the systems you need to follow it. This is something you should be able to do through your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. For instance, you could:

• Establish a communication frequency for each client
• Choose which channels you’ll communicate through
• Create automated email communication sequences
• Set reminders for client calls

Using your CRM to track communication schedules can also help you remain compliant with recordkeeping requirements.

2. Diversify Communication Touchpoints

The amount of time you spend meeting with clients may naturally decline over time. According to the 2024 Kitces Report, ³ teams dedicate 16% of their time per client to meetings after the first year, while 26% of their time is allocated to client communications outside of meetings. Advisors who had more communication touchpoints with clients saw higher revenue from those clients. 

The average revenue per client for advisors with 14 median annual touchpoints was $5,000; for advisors with 20 or more median annual touchpoints, revenue per client jumped to $12,500. In terms of how they communicate, advisors are using:

• In-person meetings
• Video calls
• Client-specific emails
• Standardized newsletters or emails
• Phone calls
• Webinars
• Educational events or seminars
• Client appreciation events

Review the number of touchpoints you have with each of your clients annually, and the methods you use to reach out. If there’s a communication channel on this list you’re not using or are underutilizing, consider how you could bring it into the fold. Look into how you might use automation to increase your frequency communication, without adding to your daily workload. 

3. Prioritize Personalization

Clients want to feel like more than just a number. And personalizing communications can underscore their value and importance. Here are examples of ways you can personalize client communications:

• Set your email marketing software to address clients by their first names when sending messages, rather than using a generic greeting. This is a small, but powerful change that clients may appreciate.
• Keep your tone friendly and your wording simple. Avoid jargon or complex terms. Or, if they can’t be avoided, take the time to fully explain what those terms mean to clients. Clients shouldn’t leave the interaction with more questions than they started with.
• Look for connections that can make you feel more relatable to your clients. For instance, do your children attend the same school? Do you have an interest in the same sports teams? Have they recently taken a trip to a place you’d love to go? Having something in common with your client can help you build trust and close some of the distance in the relationship.
• Share things your clients might find useful or interesting. If you’re communicating via social media or a blog, your content should speak to your clients’ pain points. Likewise, if you’re sending out an email newsletter to your client list, consider what you can include that would be valuable to them in some way.

You can also personalize communication by communicating through the channels your clients prefer. Some clients may prefer email, while others prefer phone calls for check-ins. If you’re scheduling meetings, consider whether your client would like to meet in person or book a virtual meeting instead.

4. Practice Active Listening and Develop Your Emotional Intelligence

When clients communicate with you, they want to know that you hear them and that you’re able to empathize with them to a degree. Cultivating active listening skills and emotional intelligence — which is the ability to manage your emotions and respond to the emotions of others — can help you to do both.

What does active listening look like? It simply means being present with your clients when they’re speaking.

If you’re meeting in person, active listening is:

• Making eye contact and using body language to indicate that you’re hearing what they’re saying.
• Giving them time to fully complete their thoughts before jumping in with questions.
• Asking questions that prompt an open-ended answer, instead of a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’
• Restating what the client has said back to them to ensure that you understand what they’re trying to express.

Practicing active listening can help you increase your emotional intelligence. As you become more aware of your clients’ emotions, you can better shape your responses to meet their needs in the moment.

Also, consider how you can capture client meetings without taking the focus away from what the person sitting across from you has to say. AI note-takers, for example, can record your conversation and provide a summary of meeting notes. Some of these tools can also draft a follow-up email to send to clients afterward to help you stay in touch. 

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Bottom Line

Successful advisors understand the importance of good communication with clients. As you fine-tune your communication policy, take time to ensure that your staff is onboard, as well. When everyone in your firm works together to uphold the same standards for communication, the end result can be happier, more satisfied clients.

Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business

• Automation is a time-saver when it comes to marketing and client communications. Email drip campaigns, for example, can be a fantastic way to nurture relationships with prospects or existing clients without being tied to your laptop all day. If you’re looking for other ways to automate, you might consider partnering with an advisor marketing platform. SmartAsset AMP (Advisor Marketing Platform) is a holistic marketing service financial advisors can use for client lead generation and automated marketing. Sign up for a free demo to explore how SmartAsset AMP can help you expand your practice’s marketing operation. Get started today.
• When communicating with clients, it’s important to observe marketing compliance rules. Your CRM may be equipped to do this for you, but if not, you’ll need to establish a system for maintaining records of client communications to avoid compliance issues.

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