I heard a couple of speakers recently who run successful financial planning businesses in Australia.  They spoke about a range of topics, but both mentioned how they have a schedule in place to ensure they can ‘touch’ their clients in a number of different ways throughout the year.

They both differed on the details, but here’s the main points they raised:

• Both aimed for at least 12 touches a year.
• The touches had to be meaningful.  Producing blog articles are too generic and don’t count.
• They had a schedule so all clients in a particular segment received a similar level of attention – they didn’t just focus on their ‘favourite’ clients.
• Some of the touches involved phone calls.  These could be a ‘how are you going’ call which was just a chat with no hidden agenda.  Other phone calls were more targeted – ‘I’m ringing to talk about ….’.  These calls were relevant and tailored to the needs of the client.  The phone calls were sometimes made by the planner, other times different staff members made the calls.  This helps to stop the client only wanting to deal with one person.
• Other touches included newsletters, invitations to seminars and workshops and targetted mailouts aimed at the specific segment or demographic. 
• One firm sends out copies of relevant newspaper articles – either finance-related articles that are suitable for the client or articles about something they’re interested in.
• They both sent out birthday cards.  Planners I’ve spoken with have mixed views on this, but these speakers said their clients loved receiving them. 

I came away from hearing these speakers and I felt challenged about how I could do this in my financial planning business.  I care about my clients and want to make sure we have plenty of contact with them, but I don’t want it to appear insincere.  We’re working on building a contact schedule that takes some of the ideas above plus some of our own to ensure we touch our clients in a meaningful way.  We don’t want to seem too overbearing, but we don’t want our clients to feel neglected.

How many touches do you think are necessary?  Are there examples of you’ve seen where a business has kept in touch in a regular manner without it appearing to be over-the-top?