I’m of the opinion that, certainly for equity release advisers, ‘know how to reach your customer’ and ‘know how to stay in contact with your customer’ might be more useful ways to look at securing clients and, rather importantly, holding onto them.
Of all the professional headaches advisers will have, I suspect one of the most prolonged and intense will be how to secure clients. Lead generation is a significant part of any adviser’s role and we’re all aware of the ways in which this can be done and methods by which it can be successfully achieved. This will be different for each adviser – what works for one, for example, a simple sandwich board outside an office, will not deliver for another. Where one adviser swears by the purchasing of leads, another will not touch this method.
At our recent series of Masterclass sessions, we held a very interesting session by Peter Welch (formerly of this parish and now Intermediary Director at Touchstone Equifax) who looked at the ways advisers can use their existing client data, and external sources, in order to generate client leads. This was all about identifying those highly sought after customer segments who were much more likely to be interested in equity release whilst, at the same time, avoiding those for whom equity release was likely to be the very last thing on their Christmas wish list.
Via a variety of data mining and cleansing methods it can be possible for equity release advisers to identify those clients and to secure the information to begin marketing to them. At the most recent London Masterclass, one adviser asked if the data Peter’s company shared with advisers included email addresses – a pertinent question given the number of communications that are now sent and received by this method. While Peter answered in the affirmative – although this information comes at a greater cost as it is more difficult to acquire – there was a significant ‘but’ about marketing to potential equity release customers via email.
The caveat came with the belief – and I have recently heard this backed up by a marketing expert at an Equity Release Council meeting – that marketing equity release to older customers via email was likely to end up with poor results. So, why should this be? Well, like most people who have been on email for some time, while we all have various security systems and features installed, it is not always effective. And, particularly, with the older generation – the equity release target market – they are likely to be even more suspicious of businesses that appear to contact them out of the blue offering them a service which releases equity from their property.
As was pointed out at the meeting, for those advisers effectively ‘cold emailing’ these contacts, without any previous correspondence between the two, the response rates would be minimal to say the least. The only way this response figure may be raised slightly would be if the communicator was a large, well-known brand – and, let’s be frank, we’re pretty short of those in the equity release advisory space.
Therefore, how should advisers be contacting people who may have a significant need for equity release? The answer was somewhat ‘old school’ but it was with a focus on direct mail – for example, at the very least a letter, but ideally a marketing brochure or pack which detailed everything the customer needed to know about the service, and again where possible, with a focus on the customer segment they were likely to fit into. So, if their postcode had illustrated they were ‘retired wealthy’ – a group which is increasingly accessing equity release – then the marketing documents should be written with these individuals in mind.
The response rate for advisers using this method of communication was deemed to be far better, given that it provided a much more detailed and engaging précis of the service, the adviser’s credentials, and everything else they would use to establish their professionalism. It also doesn’t play into any fears of email phishing or the sending of viruses, giving them a reason not to hit ‘reply’, and puts the ball firmly into their court but with the addition of a suitably informative document to help them decide whether to make contact or not.
So, while it’s important to recognise and seek out those new customers, it is also important to tailor your message and your communications. The fact is that clients taking up equity release are far different to those who might be purchasing life insurance over the internet, and therefore a focused marketing approach which offers tangible documents via direct mail would appear to be the way forward.
