Attach, attach, attach… Wait, did you already attach that updated fund document or not? Sending updated fund documents like fact sheets and key information documents to your clients is a painfully tedious yet necessary evil.
Even if you send out one mass email with one link to your website or multiple links to multiple funds, you’re creating a frustrating experience for clients, making them work harder to find what they’re actually interested in.
These critical fund documents can impact investment strategies, but does sending them have to suck? Nope.
With the need to cut costs and optimize resources, you might be facing pressure to improve technology, processes, and timelines. We’ll walk you through how automation can save the day with personalization and how you can easily use it to minimize the operational inefficiency of fund document distribution.
The perks of automated fund document distribution
Yes, automated and personalized fund document distribution is possible! And if you have any doubts, here’s why it’s worth it.
Save a lot of time
So little time, so much to do. The old way of attaching fund documents to an email one by one is labor intensive. Even condensing all the documents into one .zip file takes time to first hunt down all the requested fund documents. And that’s just for one client. Multiply this by a lot more clients, and that’s hours of your day!
Automation means no. more. attachments. (Insert angel voices singing.)
It also offers a potential competitive advantage of gaining speed to market. The faster it gets to your clients (and future clients), the faster it could start attracting leads and even assets.
Make no mistakes
Ever forget to attach an important fund document? Or send the wrong one completely? With automation, there’s no more room for human error, so those mistakes would be a thing of the past. Why? Because…
Give clients what they want
No more guessing which fund documents clients care to see updates for. Or giving clients all the updated documents, making clients frustrated at having to do the extra work of sifting through them.
According to our Bridging the Divide report, only 28% of professional investors said at least half of the emails they receive from asset managers struck the right communication balance.
Automation helps you hit the right chord.
Clients are in the driver’s seat now, so you can give them what they want, when they want. By setting their preferred fund documents at their preferred frequency, you can rest easy knowing your clients are happier, automatically getting just what they asked for (and saving them the hassle of searching for documents themselves)!
Lessen your footprint
No more attachments means no more huge file sizes that may be too big to send, too slow to load, or flagged as spam. Yikes!
Many companies limit email attachment size so as not to overwork and crash their mail servers, which would prevent everyone at your company—not just you—from sending any emails out.
If you’re able to send one out with a lot of attachments, then it may be challenging on your client’s end as well, either being blocked completely by their corporate filters or painstakingly slow to load depending on their network’s bandwidth at the time of receipt.
Automation foregoes all of that because, again, no more attachments!
Get client insights
Best of all? Automation gives you powerful insights you’ve never had before.
With attachments, you don’t know if clients even open the documents you carefully put together. You just hit send and hope all that effort pays off. You really have no clue unless a client replies or gives you a call.
But by automating the process with web links instead of PDFs, you can see email clicks and web activity. Did they actually look at the fund documents? Which ones? How much time did they spend? Did they click on any links? Where else on your website did they go? Did they make changes to their investment strategies as a result?
…Now you’ll have a better understanding of the whole picture and use these insights to improve your marketing efforts and the client experience.
How to automate sending fund documents to clients
Okay, so automated fund document distribution sounds amazing. How do you get started? It’s much easier than you think!
1. Create a document library
First, you need a document library. You might even already have one, and if so, you’re one half-step ahead. What you need to look for in particular is whether or not your library automatically detects when fund documents are updated.
If it doesn’t, don’t worry. You don’t need to start over (we know how painful that process can be, too). Find a tool, like StoneShot, that can integrate with your existing document provider and auto-detects document updates for you.
2. Create a preference center
Next up: You need a preference center to let clients choose the funds they want to follow and how often they want to get updates. You can even have a separate signup for document alerts within your fund center.
While there are several preference center best practices to keep in mind, there are two things you’ll want to include when it comes to fund document distribution:
- Fund preferences
- Frequency preferences
Fund preferences allow clients to select which fund documents they want updates on while frequency preferences give clients the freedom to choose how often they want updates rolled into one email: usually daily, weekly, or monthly.
3. Set up an email workflow
Now to tie together your preference center and document library.
Make sure fund document updates are integrated with your marketing automation platform, so you can use the updates as part of your email trigger. Combine that with fund and frequency preferences to create an automated recurring email.
For example:
If Client A prefers weekly updates, then once a week, automatically send an email with links to their preferred funds if they have been updated since the previous week.
Skip the attachments or one-size-fits-all approach—and automate personalization
Easy, right? Especially when you compare this to endlessly attaching fund documents to emails for multiple clients or sending the same, unpersonalized email to all.
Kick operational inefficiency to the curb. No more wasting time. No more mistaken fund documents. Or huge file sizes. Instead, tailor your clients’ fund document updates, and get the insights you need to create even more personalized client experiences.
Ready to dive in? Check out StoneShot’s automated fund document distribution and marketing automation platform made just for investment managers and marketers like you. Need some help getting started? We’ve also got you covered with campaign management and strategy and consulting. You’ll get superior customer service with real people who care — not a faceless organization that treats you like a number — so let’s chat.
