Meet and More: AMP’s latest release

By admin | Published: January 26, 2010

With the new release we pushed out today, AMP now has the ability to allow prospects to opt-in for a complimentary consultation. This strengthens our new mantra of:

Engage. Qualify. Meet.

The goals process engages prospects (76% of known users who enter through an email campaign complete the interactive goals process), then qualifies them so that advisors can effortlessly identify those that they can help, and now allows them to opt-in for a complimentary consultation to “review your financial goals and investment strategy.” We’ve incorporated this into the Dashboard popup for both the unknown (Google search or HTML button) and known (email marketing campaign) user flows. Here is what it looks like:

New Complimentary Consultation popup

Besides this, we also updated the Basic plan Contacts’ data page by adding a column showing whether the prospect requested a consultation. More significant, though, was the update to the Performance/Firm Contacts’ data page, which also has the new consultation column, as well as:

- A new row on the popup with information on a complimentary consultation, including the best time to call

- The ability to launch your email client/CRM system from the popup, in case you want to send the an email that way (thanks Ben for suggesting this)

- A [ ? ] tooltip that you can scroll over to get a description of what the status means

- The ability to view and edit the email templates

- The option to either (a) save any changes and automatically send the automated email that corresponds to the status level, or (b) save any changes without sending an automated email

To watch a short video on the recent changes to the Performance/Firm Contacts’ data page, please visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OdkdhP9U8s

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New! AMP Best Practices Group

By admin | Published: January 20, 2010

There are a lot of advisors doing interesting things with AMP to find new clients and automate their marketing.

Some are using it to amplify referrals by sending emails to clients and including elements of charitable giving in the campaign as a reason for clients to refer them. Some are getting amazing conversion rates with the email campaigns to contacts and old prospects. Some are looking to use it as a natural follow up to a small/medium-sized company presentations. Some are writing articles in the local newspaper promoting the service. Some are partnering with local CPA firms and using AMP as a way to engage and qualify the firm’s clients for wealth management services.

To capture all these great ideas, there is now an easy-to-use Google Group.

lightbulb

The Google Group is for current AMP advisors and has some useful files, such as screen captures of the AMP software that can be shown to a group of prospects (perhaps at the end of a Rotary club lunchtime presentation, before you pass around the sign up sheet for people interested in getting an invitation), as well as PowerPoint presentations on topics including investing for retirement and IRA conversions in 2010, all of which can be easily modified.

So if you’ve signed up for AMP, send your Google account email address or a Gmail address to support@boulevardr.com. If you want to learn more and haven’t signed up for AMP, then click here for more information on AMP.

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Engage. Qualify. Meet.

By Matt | Published: January 14, 2010

In essence, Boulevard R’s value proposition for financial advisors can be summed up in three words:

(1) Engage
(2) Qualify
(3) Meet

We know that we do the first two particularly well.

The average conversion rate for email marketing (entails clicking on link in the email, clicking on “Get Started” on a landing page, clicking through to the five pages of the interactive goals process and reaching the Results page) is 7.7%. By industry standards, a good conversion rate on an email marketing campaign is 0.5-1%. The application is also “sticky.” The completion rate for the goals process (a roughly 5 minute interaction) once a prospect clicks on the “Get Started” activation button on the landing page is 76%. For Unknown prospects who are not registered through an email campaign, the average sign up rate of those who start the goals process is around 17%.

From a qualification standpoint, even basic advisors are now able to view all the prospect profile information to assess whether the prospect is truly qualified. This new increased access to data is part of a new release we pushed out two days ago. If you want a quick overview of how the new Basic plan Contacts’ data page works, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7AVaaj_hpY

Key Changes in the New Release
In order to improve on each of the three themes of this post, we just released some new features. The one that most impacts the current Performance plan advisors is the new Contacts Data page. For an explanation of the workflow and how to use it, we created this short overview video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIUFuYFhCus

One of the key changes is that we’ve updated the Status levels, so that they’re more intuitive. Here is a screen capture of the new Performance plan popup:

Contacts' data page status popup

Here’s what’s different.

A prospect is assigned the status of “Incomplete,” when they start the goals process, but do not finish it (i.e. reach the Results page). When this happens, Boulevard R sends them an email with a link that takes them back into the goals process, so that they can complete it and get their Starter Roadmap and online Dashboard. This improvement was all about increasing engagement.

Instead of “No Assessment,” we now have “Roadmap not sent” and “Roadmap sent.” Since it takes about a day to generate and review the Starter Roadmap, we now pass the information along to advisors regarding whether the Starter Roadmap PDF has been emailed to the prospect.

The main change for both “Not Qualified” and “Qualified” prospects is the mention of complimentary consultation. This is a new feature that is not fully implemented yet. What it does is ask the prospect, once they reach the Dashboard, if they’d like a complimentary consultation to review their goals and investment strategy. If they indicate “Yes,” then two follow up questions are asked: “What number should we call you at?” and “What is a good time of day to call?”

Because we have not implemented this feature yet, currently all prospects are “No consultation requested.” However, once this question is implemented on the Dashboard, we’ll be including this information (i.e. Consultation requested: “Yes/No” and details if indicated “Yes”) on the status popup and on the Contacts’ data page.

In addition to the consultation question on the Dashboard, if a prospect is qualified, but didn’t request a consultation (currently, this is all qualified prospects), advisors can include a link in the “Qualified: No Consultation Requested” email to a form where the prospect can set up a consultation: Click here to see an example.

Keep in mind that for now Performance plan advisors should ignore the “Not Qualified: Consultation Requested” and “Qualified: Consultation Requested” status levels. There are no corresponding emails for these yet.

The “Qualified: No Consultation Requested” status corresponds to the the “Qualified” email on the Email > Automated emails page. The “Not Qualified: No Consultation Requested” status corresponds to the the “Not Qualified” email on the Email > Automated emails page. This will be updated shortly.

Finally, we added a new status for “Qualified: Already a client” since some advisors where including current clients in their email campaigns or sending clients an email asking them to forward on the offer for a complimentary Starter Roadmap, which is resulting in some of the clients signing up for a Starter Roadmap themselves. Incidentally, engaging current clients with Boulevard R’s software has turned out to be a pretty good idea for some advisors. Here’s what one advisor had to say:

“AMP offers an amazing way to engage both prospects and clients. I can market to the next generation of prospects, while learning more about my current clients as they interact with the software. Three months later, I’m still trying to catch up with all the new client information and planning that my first email campaign generated!”

- Ben Baldwin III, CFP®, ChFC, Responsive Financial Group

Boulevard R’s software is the only financial advisor marketing platform that posts such impressive conversion numbers, while also effortlessly qualifying prospects. We’re now focused on the third pillar, which is further helping advisors convert engaged prospects into first meetings.

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Find new clients in 2010

By Matt | Published: January 5, 2010

Start off 2010 by engaging and qualifying up to 200 of your contacts with a free email marketing campaign from Boulevard R.

With this new feature, advisors have been getting off-the-charts results, with an average of 7.7% of email recipients registering and getting Starter Roadmaps (0.5-1.0% is considered good). Here is an example of the Starter Roadmap:

It’s easy and free- just send us your list and we’ll do the rest.

To see how the campaign works, watch this short 2 minute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njXHKEJltmA

What’s unique about this email marketing service is that it pre-registers your contacts so that they automatically get a Starter Roadmap and Dashboard when they click on an activation link in the email. This new approach has been delivering exceptional conversion rates, while identifying prospects with millions of dollars in assets.

The beginning of the year is a great time to engage prospects, since their recent resolutions are still top-of-mind.

So if you’re interested in starting the new year with sensational results on a free email marketing campaign, then take a minute to reserve your place by answering the 2 questions on this form:

https://theboulevardr.wufoo.com/forms/email-marketing-campaign/

Happy 2010!

Posted in Advisor Marketing, Financial Services, Social Ventures, email marketing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The case for sending reminders

By Matt | Published: November 6, 2009

As we started sending out email marketing campaigns for advisors this week, I took some time to go back and explore the metrics behind the campaign that led to this new email feature.

When we created the initial email marketing campaign for an advisor in the Washington DC area, we were really blown away by the conversion rate (6% on a series of 3 emails- 2 of which were actionable with registration links). We thought we might be onto something, so we recruited some advisors to help us test and optimize this feature.

We ran the initial email campaign in the middle of summer (starting on July 14th) and while the initial response from her list was positive, it wasn’t until I created a timeline that we saw the significant role that the reminder email plays. Check out the below timeline on her campaign:

Iniital email campaign timeline

What’s really interesting is the huge response rate after the reminder email was sent (these were simple text emails, not fancy HTML emails which we’re currently testing). The initial response rate was modest with an email sent at 3pm EDT on a Friday (not great timing). A number of people were out of the office on that day (we got back a bunch of vacation auto-responders), so there was a nice bump on Monday.

What is particularly interesting is that of the people who clicked on the link in the Link email, 9 out of 11 went all the way from the landing page through the five pages in the goals process to the results page. That’s 82% conversion rate from the email click and keep in mind that it takes about 5 minutes to get your result after you click on your goals and set the sliders.

Part of the reason these prospects could have been highly motivated is because of the Intro email we sent for the advisor, preceding the Link email by one hour. These people were actually waiting for the Link email. In fact, due to a technical issue, we had sent out the Intro email to about 20% of recipients 3 days before and hadn’t been able to send the activation right after so the advisor started getting emails from their prospects asking about the promised link email. Now that’s prospect engagement.

When we sent the reminder email in the middle of the following week, there was a surge in clicks and Starter Roadmaps generated (what happened in the middle of the chart). In fact, over 60% of the Starter Roadmaps (indicated by the green boxes) that were generated happened after the Reminder email was sent. We also had a higher percentage of bounces/incomplete engagements on the two days when the activity spiked, but in those two days there were more conversions than there were clicks in the previous 8 days.

In the recent email campaigns we haven’t seen this reminder trend play out as dramatically, so I think that the list and the timing of the emails has quite a bit to do with it. On the flip side, since we’ve been able to run different email formats (HTML and text) along with different messages, we’ve seen advisors getting up to a 5% conversion rate on just the initial Link email.

Posted in Advisor Marketing, Financial Services, Retirement plans, Uncategorized, email marketing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Have an email list? We’ll qualify it for you!

By Matt | Published: October 21, 2009

Boulevard R is in the process of testing out a new feature for AMP: Email marketing. We’ve had initial success with this- a trial with an advisor in the Washington DC area got a 6% conversion rate (0.5-1% is considered good).

Here’s our offer:
If you have an old list of prospects or an eNewsletter list or a list of contacts from a presentation/seminar, just sign up for the free Basic profile and we’ll create an email campaign for up to 200 of your prospects. This way you can find out which of your prospects are most engaged and interested in your service and you’ll have provided them all with a Starter Roadmap.
> Sign up for free to qualify your email list

If you want to see prospects’ profile data, you can easily upgrade to the Performance plan for $99/month (no contract, no long term commitment). If you don’t want to upgrade, you’ll at least have provided each prospect with a valuable Starter Roadmap and an online Dashboard, which is fully automated so you don’t have to lift a finger. It’s a great way to build your local brand and stand out from your competition.

A little more on this new feature
So seizing on the initial 6% conversion rate, we added some features that allow advisors to take their email lists and run them through the Boulevard R engine by sending out activation links that take prospects to an optimized landing page. On the landing page (below), they can learn more about the value of the service you offer.
New email marketing landing page

To optimized the whole email marketing process, we brought on the former director of eCommerce acquisition from a large financial services company. The metrics that we get from these initial campaigns will help us further optimize this new feature- delivering more value for the prospects and more leads for the advisors.

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FPA NexGen Goes to Anaheim

By Matt | Published: October 13, 2009

Last weekend I took a quick trip down to Anaheim for FPA’s NexGen Community of Interest annual conference. Previous conferences had been stand alone, but this year the NexGen conference was lumped in with the FPA national conference (which started the following day at the Anaheim Convention Center). Here are some of my highlights:

Middle Market Session
Boulevard R participated in a panel discussion moderated by Michael Kitces on different models for serving the Middle Market. There were two advisors on the panel as well: JJ Sessions and Patrick Dougherty. It was interesting to hear how it’s still a big challenge to serve the Middle Market outside of an hourly model (which is very hard to do successfully).

The session had great audience participation, particularly from Mary Bell and Bonnie Hughes. We talked about how software alone won’t solve consumers’ problems and that having a person behind any technology is critical. It also is important to remember that people typically want to be told what to do (a lesson from behavioral economics which is reinforced by the experience of technology companies such as Financial Engines) and while cash flow sites like Mint.com are helpful, they’re a far cry from financial planning.

Another aspect that was touched on was the constant need for advisors to be out in the community marketing their services. Without steady engagement and a flow of new prospects, advisors can’t have anywhere near a profitable business serving the Middle Market (or any other type of practice for that matter). After the session was over I spent some time bringing one of our busier AMP advisors up to speed on the new email marketing service. The value proposition I laid out for her is really simple and she got it right away:

1. Current marketing efforts (brown bag small/medium company presentations, etc.)
2. Follow up with an email campaign offering the Starter Roadmap
3. Prospects who are interested click on the activation link the email (prospect qualifies themselves)
4. Advisor can view their information (advisor qualifies prospect)
5. Advisor finds new clients
6. Repeat

What the World Really Thinks of Your Profession
Ron Lieber, who one former colleague from Fi-Life described as the big kahuna of personal finance writers (Ron now writes for the NY Times) led an interesting session where he basically just flashed quotes from people he interviewed about the perceived value of financial planners. After a few minutes it became clear that planners have a major marketing/positioning problem.

The public doesn’t get “planning” and thinks that planners are more or less the same as investment advisors at wirehouses (not to be trusted). The quotes ranged from “they’ll steal you blind” to “the dartboard always wins (stockpicking is random at best)” to “I don’t need to pay someone to lose money for me.” The thrust of the comments highlighted the perception that for the general public, financial planners are synonymous with asset managers.

It made me think about something I heard at the NexGen Circle Gathering the night before where someone said that the financial planning community’s interests are diametrically opposed to those of financial services companies. If the financial planning community is going to get noticed, they need to position hard against financial services (right now they’re just getting lumped in with them). This is made more challenging for FPA, since a major source of revenue is based on sponsorships from these same financial services companies. Also, if FPA narrowly defines their membership (like NAPFA has), then they undercut their ability to grow and have an impact. Alienation vs. Irrelevance.

Under the Trees
I attended the lunchtime discussion on marketing and business development which included close to 2/3rds of all NexGeners (there were two other discussion groups, but this topic had by far the largest draw). Before we got started, I got to chat with Ron Lieber who had edited a story that Fi-Life had published on Boulevard R back in the early days. Ron is a really nice guy and very thoughtful about including other people in a conversation.

Some of the interesting take-aways from the discussion were:

* Niche yourself by working with a select group (anesthesiologists) and then become an expert on their issues and create a study group with other professionals who serve your niche.

* Build a non-client advisory team with individuals who have outside expertise and will help you think through business issues twice a year. This could grow into a great source of referrals after a couple of years and benefits your advisors as well, since they can network amongst themselves.

* Create a plan and work the plan. Marketing traction doesn’t happen overnight and many advisors give up if the initial results aren’t stellar. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’m glad that I had the chance to attend this years NexGen conference. It’s the one chance I have during the year to connect with many of the planners who have been big contributors and supporters of Boulevard R’s efforts to bring independent educational content out into the world.

Posted in Advisor Marketing, FPA NexGen, Financial Advice | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Setting AMP Free

By Matt | Published: July 28, 2009

Sometime soon we’re going to lead a new release of the Advisor-Branded Marketing Platform (AMP) out of the barn and set it free. That’s right, AMP will be available for free.

No commitments. Free forever.

Part of our motivation for offering AMP for free is to make it more widely available, while delivering more value with a new feature set that is so compelling that some advisors will want to upgrade from free to a premium version (now a more affordable $99/month instead of $295/month) in order to automate their prospect qualification process. Our bet is that advisors will easily be able to achieve ROI with AMP by avoiding just one prospect meeting each month (while still delivering real value to the prospects they can’t take on with the branded Starter Roadmap).

What we’ve focused on in this new release is email marketing. We found that email is a powerful way to make use of the AMP functionality (qualifying prospects, helping people with financial education and building a local brand). So in this new release, we’ve made professional grade email marketing a core offering.

We recently did a test with an advisor’s 400+ prospect list and found that it led to approximately a 10% completion rate. That is, out of the all the prospects we emailed on her behalf, she generated over 40 Starter Roadmaps. For advisors, it’s an easy, efficient way to find out who is interested in your services and if they’re qualified to come on board as a client.

Part of the free service will be the ability to send a one time email campaign to a group of prospects. The premium service will allow much more extensive email marketing capabilities, as well as full access to the prospect data. Both versions will include detailed campaign reports.

The new AMP is looking forward to helping financial advisors have much more effective email marketing campaigns.

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5% is 100%

By Matt | Published: July 8, 2009

As many retirement advisors are keenly aware of, regulatory change seems to be coming to the 401(k) world.  Part of the reason that we’re paying attention to this space at Boulevard R, is because we’ll be rolling out a new product specificially for the retirement plan market in the coming weeks.

The new product is the Retirement Plan Compliance and Education Platform (Rce) and is designed to automate 404(c) compliance and deliver on-demand participant education to save advisors time and reduce their costs, while doing a better job of protecting plan sponsors from fiducairy liability and preparing participants for a secure retirement.

Retirement Plan Compliance And Education Platform




Last week I came accross an InvestmentNews article on the proposed 401(k) Fair Disclosure and Pension Security Act that stated, “independent advisers who would qualify under the rules account for just 5% of the total population of more than 200,000 retail advisers and registered representatives in the United States, according to estimates from The Tower Group Inc.”

If the 5% of advisors represent all the advisors who would meet the regulations and the remaining 95% of advisors will be forced to adopt new business practices the retirement plan market could get very interesting.

Now, it’s hard to tell if the conflicts of interest provision in the act will remain, particularly since it was already challenged by two democratic representatives in committee.  However, the committee chair, Rep. George Miller has close ties to the current administration and both see 401(k) plan reform as a major priority.

Stay tuned.  We’re planning on covering this in more detail as the legislation moves forward.

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What’s New- Profiles & Business Model

By Matt | Published: June 24, 2009

I think it’s fair to say that when we rolled out AMP, we over-promised what it could deliver right out of the gates.  In the three months since we launched the first profiles, we’ve learned several things from listening to consumers and advisors, as well as tracking the metrics.

Here are the key issues we identified:

  1. If an advisor already has a prospect’s contact information (a Known prospect), they should be able to pre-register them and then email a unique link that automatically logs the prospect in as soon as they click on it (of course the email would explain all that)
  2. Unknown prospects should be able to sign up without having to input so much information, while also getting more value right away by being able to access the Dashboard without having to first sign up
  3. It should be easier for prospects to contact advisors through the profile page
  4. The profile should tell a better story about “this cool new service created by really smart people (economists and financial planners) and used by institutions you can trust (Virginia Tech and Texas Tech)”
  5. Advisors should be able to list specific services they offer in order to further niche their practices and attract prospects

So in response, we decided to launch a new profile (you can check out a live version here and watch the video for advisors that describes the features of their new profile below).

As a results we just launched these major improvements to AMP:

  1. A new profile designed to tell a better marketing story to Unknown prospects, with a video, dynamic contact forms and a place for Unknown prospects to sign up next to an example of the Starter Roadmap.
  2. A time-saving new feature that pre-registers prospective clients through the Advisor Management Interface and emails them a unique link with a token that captures all their information as they enter it, so that advisors don’t have to spend as much time meeting with prospects, while also gathering very helpful data without having to do any of the work.
  3. A new system flow that takes prospects deeper into the educational platform and delivers more value by showing the Dashboard content, while also making it easier to sign up with just a name and email

So far, we’ve gotten very positive feedback from the advisors.  Though this is purely anecdotal, one advisor who is using AMP very effectively as an efficiency tool to screen prospective clients, received 3 unknown, qualified prospects in one week.

Additionally, we’re going to be rolling out a new business model in the next few weeks that will make AMP much more affordable and available.  Most importantly, it will be a big step forward in helping us deliver educational content to help people reach their financial goals.  Which is precisely what we set out to do in the first place.

Posted in AMP, Advisor Marketing, Financial Services | Leave a comment