How to Know if Your Marketing is Working

Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. Beverly Flaxington

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Dear Bev,

We recently did some analysis to see the impact our client communication is having. Specifically we send out a monthly newsletter on a variety of interesting topics such as the best ways to save for college or best places to retire, a quarterly update on the market and individual emails once every month to clients with a piece of interesting information. We found the open rate was high on all of our communications but the click-through rates were abysmal. While close to 40% of people opened the monthly, 25% opened the quarterly and 80% opened the one-to-one email, in all cases only about 2% of people clicked through to the information we provided. Is this normal?

It’s a lot of effort and clients are not apparently interested in what we have to say. Are we old-school in what we’re doing? One of our younger advisors said we should be sending out alerts via text to clients with “sound bites” of what we are seeing and considering. I would be annoyed if a trusted advisor of mine starting sending me random text messages.

We recognize the importance of communication and we’ve tried to be very thoughtful and diligent (and consistent) with what we are doing, but these numbers don’t give me a good feeling about whether clients recognize or appreciate it. Should we dispense with email and figure out another way to communicate?

Harry O.