Outsourcing Your Client Newsletter
Outsourcing Your Client Newsletter
I will be the first to admit that I do not feel that I am an excellent writer. Specifically, I struggle taking complex financial topics, such as rapidly rising interest rates or the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on currency valuations and global supply chain, and simplifying them to easily digested pieces of content that encourage clients to remain long-term thinkers and investors.
That’s why in early 2022, I decided to outsource Drost Financial’s monthly Client Newsletter to Morgan Ranstrom’s Value of Advice substack and Ashby Daniels’ MoneyVisuals Client Newsletters.
Below is a step-by-step explanation of our entire process.
Step 1: Find your writers!
I’ve been following Morgan and Ashby for years - well before I launched my firm. I resonated with their approaches to financial planning and their writing style. I kept thinking, “these guys have a knack for writing what I am thinking but can express their thoughts way more eloquently than I can.”
Also, they both specifically write for this purpose. Morgan’s Value of Advice substack and Ashby’s MoneyVisuals are written specifically for advisors to share privately with their clients and prospects.
I had reservations about sending their work to my clients. Thinking perhaps “I’m stealing” (even though I’m not) or that I’m “misleading my clients because I didn’t write what I’m sending them.” But the more I thought about it; I concluded that the source of the content was not important, but rather the message and the outcome are what matter.
The Client Newsletter's purpose is twofold:
To provide the client with content that encourages long-term thinking
To bring the firm and me to the top of their mind and serve as an invitation for a client to contact us for assistance.
If Morgan or Ashby can assist (and do better than me) with both these objectives, then why is that a bad thing? If your skills (or lack thereof) and interests are similar, I suggest you find your writers and save yourself hours of effort each month.
Scavenge Substack, Twitter, and blogs and find the people that share your values and vision and hitch your wagon to them. But remember that both Morgan and Ashby write specifically for this purpose - for advisors to share privately with their clients. I’m sure other writers offer a similar service, but you cannot plagiarize a public-facing blog and send it to your clients.
Step 2: Establish your cadence
Once you locate your writers, you must define your cadence for sending your newsletter to clients. I selected it monthly. This decision was not scientific but simply felt right to me. Your cadence will most likely be impacted by the writer(s) you select, as your publishing schedule cannot be more frequent than the frequency in which your writer(s) publish content. Morgan publishes monthly, and Ashby publishes weekly so their cadence is much quicker than mine ensuring I’ll have content to send each month.
Step 3: Leveraging support staff for compliance approval & sending the Client Newsletter to clients
Our process for sending our client newsletter is built directly into our CRM, Quivr, as a workflow. On the 5th of each month, I receive an “Identify Client Newsletter Content task.” My action item is to review the last few posts by Ashby and Morgan and locate the article I want to send to clients. This takes me maybe 10 minutes.
Once identified, I paste the URL for the article in the workflow in Quivr, and my admin gets a notification to start her process. This is the only thing I do - I am now done with the entire process, and Veronica will take it from here.
Veronica has three main action items:
First, save all sourced data.
Morgan and Ashby both like to cite sources and our compliance consultant requires us to save all sources to PDFs for our records.
Veronica estimates this step takes three to five minutes to complete.
Next, she sends the article via Word Doc to our compliance consultant for approval.
Sometimes they have a few minor changes that need to be made. If so, Veronica has the authority to make any updates that do not materially affect the article's narrative. If it’s simply “please change this word” or “add this disclosure,” she will make these updates without consulting me. Not once were we told to make material changes, and not once did I have to re-enter the process to provide guidance.
Veronica estimates that she spends three minutes receiving compliance approval.
Finally, she sends the Client Newsletter to clients and prospects on the 15th of the month.
She does this in our CRM, Quivr, which allows us to send bulk emails to clients filtered on any criteria we wish. Each household in the system is tagged “Client Newsletter” if we want them to receive the monthly newsletter. If it isn’t, then they do not. Veronica simply locates the saved filtered list in Quivr and sends the newsletter to that list.
Veronica estimates this step takes five minutes to complete.
This is then repeated each month.
Until next week,
Steve
