Meaningful Milestones: Track Key Client Dates and Show Them You Care
- Olivia Allen
- Apr 6
- 3 min read
You have a solid RIA business model. You’re insightful. Your clients are always top of mind. These traits and their unifying goal – building and maintaining strong personal client relationships – are likely what drive you each day and may have contributed to you finding this blog. Knowing the goal and being able to execute it can be challenging, especially when you have a growing and complex client base. If you are starting to feel overwhelmed, we're here to help!
There is a strategy to ensure your clients know you care about them personally and professionally, one that humanizes you even in a digital realm without sending you down distracting rabbit holes. It’s all about tracking key client milestones and creating meaningful moments with your clients.
If you assumed, and perhaps even feared, that this would pivot to a conversation about the importance of CRMs, you guessed correctly – sort of. CRMs can be robust. That doesn’t mean they need to be scary. By aligning the use cases of your CRM directly to your client service goal, your database will end up your bestie and not your cross to bear. For example, you can use a fintech platform like Bento Engine or build custom reports in your CRM to identify clients turning key ages. These milestones often trigger important life events and financial planning considerations.
Once you have identified these milestones, you can take the following steps:
Create email templates: Develop personalized email templates for each milestone, addressing the unique financial planning needs and opportunities associated with that age.
Schedule emails: Use your CRM to schedule emails to clients on or around their milestone birthdays.
Systematize: Build a workflow to automate the process of identifying milestones, creating and scheduling emails, and tracking client engagement.
If you feel like this blog is a milestone moment for your practice,
let’s discuss how we can elevate your client milestone tracking.
Age isn’t just a number, and it isn’t the only type of milestone to track. It may be easier for you to monitor client events including:
Marriage: Nuptials can trigger discussions about estate planning, beneficiary designations, and joint financial goals.
Birth of a child: Nothing says celebrating baby like having college savings, life insurance, and estate planning conversations.
Job change: This is a pivotal “money-in-motion” event to track to start client talks on retirement planning, investment strategies, and insurance needs.
Buying a property: Get ahead of purchasing stress by inviting clients to talk through mortgage financing, insurance, and estate planning.
Retirement: Whether nearing or in retirement, monitoring client progress toward retirement can help you start conversations around Social Security, Medicare, and long-term care planning.
Think of your clients turning 60 this year. Too many? OK, let’s think of one then. Here’s how having an age-based milestone tracking system could benefit your client interaction:
You would receive a notification prompting an email send wishing them a happy birthday and offering to schedule a brief call to discuss their evolving financial needs. During the call, you discuss their retirement goals, review their current asset allocation, and explore potential strategies for maximizing their Social Security benefits. This forward-thinking outreach not only demonstrates your value as a trusted advisor but also strengthens your client relationship. Now, think of that for all your clients nearing the big 6-0.
Getting started on milestone tracking can feel like a tall order from a client service standpoint. Bringing in a Fractional CSA can help effectively scale this milestone strategy, especially a partner with diverse vendor relationships and vast CRM experience. If you were spacing out on the topics of email scheduling and templates, a Fractional CSA can take ownership of those while developing and implementing a milestone tracking system and providing insights to inform client outreach.
If you'd like to incorporate client milestone communications into your practice, let's chat.
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