Wealth managers can reduce communication costs while preserving client engagement
In an environment of increased competition, evolving client expectations, and downward pressure on fees, digital transformation in wealth management is essential to your firm’s success. To serve more clients with lower operational costs, you need to encourage digital adoption. One of the key ways to encourage digital adoption is to enhance client communications.
But enhancing client communications often means sending more communications and estimating the cost of this increase can be challenging.
CCM vendors typically charge per communication, which means the more successful you are at communicating with investors, the more you spend. This can create a situation where you become a victim of your own success, as your digital adoption initiatives deliver way above expectations, meaning your digital volumes skyrocket and your budget is blown.
Doxim’s client communication experts can help you encourage paperless adoption and consult on creative communication design that both promotes engagement and delivers a great user experience. BOOK A DEMO
The dilemma of the double dippers
There is another risk relating to increasing digital adoption. What if investors agree to receive digital communication, but do not agree to go fully paperless? These ‘double dippers’ want the convenience of digital communication but are not yet willing to let go of the familiarity of receiving an envelope in the mail. In traditional vendor pricing, this would mean a doubling up of messaging costs. Your organization achieves no cost saving on postage but must add the cost of each digital communication.
Communicating with these customers costs more than those that are on print, only because you are paying for both print and digital communications.
A Keypoint Intelligence report reveals the following when it comes to financial services customers:
Financial services customers receiving print only – 37%
Financial services customers receiving digital only – 32%
Financial services customers receiving print and digital – 32%
This doubling up of costs, while positive for your omnichannel communication strategy, could be catastrophic for your budget.
In two years, the percentage of digital only customers is expected to increase to 36%, at the expense of the print only percentage, which declines to 31%. But the number of double dippers is expected to remain the same. This means, to reduce communication costs in wealth management, these firms must either adjust communication budgets to accommodate double dippers or find innovative ways to encourage them to go fully paperless.
How to reduce communication costs in wealth management while preserving client engagement
Unpredictable customer communication costs can wreak havoc with a wealth management firm’s annual budget. At the same time, digital communications are a critical way to increase client engagement and serve more clients at a lower cost, so scaling back communication plans can cause long-term problems. By communicating less effectively or less often, you risk losing customers and prospects to non-traditional, low-cost wealth management options with more engaging customer experience strategies.
The solution to this thorny issue is to find ways to simplify your communication-related budgets, so you know what to expect on your monthly communication invoice. The truth is your digital transformation project will not be approved if the return on investment is not attractive or can’t be calculated at all. ROI calculations become far more accurate when the fee for the year (ex-postage) is fixed.
What you need is cost certainty – one predictable fee structure that covers all communications across print and digital. As you migrate customers to digital, the monthly fee (excluding postage costs) remains stable. This approach simplifies budgeting and removes the need for complex invoices based on volumes that need to be audited. It also allows you the flexibility to experiment with different types of communications, like targeted offers to encourage your “double dippers” to turn off the paper.
How Doxim can help reduce communication costs in wealth management
As a single, trusted partner offering a holistic CCM solution at one fixed cost, with predictable monthly fees, Doxim can help you take the uncertainty out of your communications budget and reduce operational costs for your client communications.
See, for example, how working with Doxim helped Aviso Wealth achieve 10- 15% cost savings and SLAs that get statements out 3-4 business days earlier than its previous vendor managed.
