How Many Contacts Do Ideal Clients Want From Their Financial Advisor?

Advisors sometimes ask me how often we reach out to clients each year. I just read a research study that said ideal clients prefer 10 contacts per year. That might sound like a lot, but really, I think it's actually less than what the The Supernova Advisor book recommends. Here are a few numbers behind that study and why it's important to think about 10 contacts per year. Of the people in the study, only 38 percent of advisors have 10 or more contacts every year with their ideal clients. But the advisors who make more than 10 contacts per year earn 68 percent more than the advisors who make less than 10 contacts per year. In this post, I'll share our system for reaching out to clients throughout the year, but first, here's a quick assessment that could be helpful for you.

Questions to Consider

Think through what you're currently doing and just very quickly consider your top clients. Do you have a segmented list of your clients? If you don’t, that should be step number one.

Then, think through how many meetings you are currently having with those top clients every year.

And what about non-investment communication? How often are you touching base with them just for social reasons or relational reasons, for non-investment-related communications?

Next, consider how many personalized emails are you sending to them? This could include a monthly email with maybe the team update or birthdays or your kids' birthdays or happenings. People want to hear and see the non-financial things via that monthly email, so if you are sending those, how many of those go out each year?

The next thing is intimate events. Do you have regular client events? Personally, at Streamline, we do that very infrequently. We don't do it every year. We don't have a plan to do it.

The last thing is a client feedback survey. Do you do that once per year? Just a simple three-to-five-question survey, just to keep an eye on things, kind of like a Net Promoter Score, to make sure that you're not failing in any important areas of your business.

Considering these different ways of reaching out to clients, how many contacts are you making per year?

Here’s What We Do at Streamline

At Streamline, we have three client meetings per year. The first quarter is an investment-focused meeting with our top clients. In the middle of the year is a tax-planning meeting where we review their tax return from the previous year. And then towards the last four months is the are-we-on-track meeting, which is the income plan review using eMoney.

So, three meetings a year with our top clients, and then they also get 12 client videos; we send out one each month. Sometimes we send market-related things, but a lot of times not. A popular one we did recently was an article about the shock of war and how it impacts the market. It was really well written and we shared it in the video email and eased our clients’ minds a little bit. And then after that, we wanted to be proactive so we invited them to give to a nonprofit we are familiar with that is helping orphans in Ukraine. We did a matching donation - whatever the clients sent in, we matched it, up to a certain dollar amount. That got a great reaction from our clients; they wanted to be a part of something together.

Finally, because we limit the number of clients that we have and we know each one of them personally, we’ll sometimes send articles or things that come up about their hobbies or that reminds us of them throughout the year.

So, all in all, including the videos and the three meetings, we have at least 15 contact points and we aim for 15 to 20 annually for our top clients. We don’t do that for every single client.