Elevating the Client Experience

Don’t we all love the barista that remembers our name and order, or the hotel that knows you like a firm pillow and late check-out?

These little touches create a human connection. We worship the brands that get it right, and quickly forget those that don’t.

Investment brands are no different of course. The industry is built on relationships and in the past that was (mostly) about meeting professional investors in-person.

But the pandemic forced fund providers to rethink how they manage relationships. In March 2020, in-person events practically stopped overnight. We saw a massive shift to digital. Investment marketers scrambled to adjust while having to figure out how to access corporate VPNs from the kitchen table. Often with kids and/or pets in tow.

While work has fundamentally changed, what’s unchanged is the intense level of competition (8,500+ firms and 126,500+ funds globally).

Providing a great digital client experience is critical and yet we feel few investment firms are doing it well. Let’s look at how you can stand-out with your clients.

We’ll start with email, not because email marketing is a huge deal for us, but because it forms the connection between your CRM and website. More on that later.

So what does a great email experience look like? We know that sending emails from your relationship managers can increase open rates by over 15%. But how about the content of the email? Adding the name, email, phone and photo of the relationship manager makes it easy for professional investors to engage.

With the email content itself, you won’t win any points by sending everyone everything. Better to only share content that’s of interest to the client.

The StoneShot platform allows you to automate this and much more.

Your website doesn’t have to offer the same experience to all visitors. We’re not suggesting having “Welcome back, Dave!” on your home page, but you can personalize your site in more subtle and effective ways.

Once you’ve authenticated a client once, they shouldn’t ever have to fill in a form again – unless there’s more info you need. Beyond that point, forms could either pre-fill or be hidden entirely for a smooth experience.

We achieve this with some simple website integration. If your client has agreed to accept cookies, we drop a cookie when they first click from a StoneShot email to your site. That’s then used to personalize the experience by using data you have on your clients.

We’ve mentioned pre-filled forms already and it applies to event registration too. But you can go further by integrating events into your website. Your clients can then see what’s coming up, register or cancel, and access post-event collateral. We can deliver all this seamlessly using our API.

Our integrations streamline registration with online event providers too. That removes another barrier for your clients.

And post-event, you can use StoneShot to automate CPD/CE certificate production and distribution. That means clients get certificates of attendance right after the event. It saves hours of your time too!

You can save clients hunting for fund documents by allowing them to choose the funds of interest and taking the updates to them. As with content, we can provide a widget that allows your clients to follow the funds of interest, right alongside the funds themselves.

Clients can subscribe for updates on their chosen funds, or your client services team can do the allocation. They can also choose how often they’d like to get email updates, either as soon as their documents are updated or on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule.

A little automation and integration creates a smooth client experience.