Handwritten mail for advisers, brokers and funds

The list that matters is different in each of the four

Broking, advice, accounting and insurance get grouped together on pages like this one and handed the same letter. They do not share a calendar, and the calendar decides when a letter is worth posting.

Mortgage brokers

More dated events than anyone else here. A fixed rate expiring in March was knowable the previous March, and so was the fact that the lender would write about it - so a note four to six weeks before the roll-off, naming the month rather than quoting a rate, arrives while the decision is still open. The settlement anniversary is the same idea without a deadline, and a letter asking what has changed since is not a refinance pitch.

Then the back book: two hundred loans written four years ago, thirty of those clients spoken to since, and the best list in the business sitting idle - how a run to past clients works. And referral partners - the accountants, conveyancers and buyer’s agents who send most brokers most of their work and get thanked by text message, when a written note after each settlement, naming the client they sent, is rarely done and barely costs anything.

Financial advisers

The annual review is the obligation and the opportunity at once, and a note asking to book it gets answers a fourth email did not. Two other lists are barely written to: the adult children of ageing clients, who decide where the money goes next and usually have no contact with the firm - written to with the client’s knowledge, not on details found elsewhere - and a purchased book, where a letter of introduction signed by the adviser now on the file is the entire job.

Accountants

The end of the financial year is the one date every client already has in their head, which is why writing in May beats writing in July. The harder list is the client who appears once a year, hands over a year of paperwork and disappears: entirely transactional, and therefore entirely portable. A letter in a quiet month stops it walking. Third is the compliance-only client, where naming the specific thing you noticed in their last return does work a brochure cannot.

Insurance brokers

Renewal is the whole calendar, and the notice arrives whether you write or not, so the only question is whether anything from you arrives near it. Two other lists earn their postage: sums insured set years ago and never revisited, and claims that have just closed. A closed claim is the one moment a client has used what they pay for, and a note then lands differently from a satisfaction survey.

What the published benchmark is worth here

The series does publish a financial services figure, and on its own it is not much of an argument.

These are United States figures, self-reported by the marketers who ran the campaigns, and there is no equivalent Australian series. Treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a forecast of your result - the honest use is to compare channels and list types against each other, not to predict a number for your campaign.

The rows underneath it are the useful part: a client file is a house list, a bought list of homeowners in a postcode is not, and writing to strangers is different arithmetic.