Client and business letters
Financial adviser client notes
An adviser’s thank-you note is constrained in a way most are not: it cannot reference performance, it cannot imply a recommendation, and it should not mention a product. What is left is the relationship, which is the thing clients actually stay for.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
On a client anniversary
[FIRST NAME], [NUMBER] years this month. Thank you for staying, and for asking the difficult questions in reviews rather than nodding along. It makes for a better job on our side.
After a client made a hard decision
Describe the conduct, never the outcome.
[FIRST NAME], [YEAR] asked more of you than most years do and you held your nerve when a lot of people did not. Thank you for trusting the plan and for the conversations along the way.
To a client who has retired
[FIRST NAME] and [PARTNER NAME], congratulations. Twenty-odd years of planning for a date that always seemed theoretical, and here it is. Thank you for letting us be part of getting there.
Where you have taken on a client from a departing adviser
[FIRST NAME], thank you for staying through the handover. Changing adviser is not nothing and you had every reason to look elsewhere. I will not take it for granted.
Getting it right
- What to mention. The length of the relationship, a decision they made that was hard, or simply that they were straightforward to work with. Everything here is about conduct rather than outcome.
- What to leave out. Returns, performance, markets and anything that could be read as advice or as a recommendation to act. Nothing on this page is financial advice and nothing you write on a card should be either.
- How long. 25 to 60 words.
- How personal. Warm and professional. Advisers often default to formality on paper and it reads as distance to a client who speaks to them candidly in meetings.
- When not to send one. In the same envelope as a statement, a fee disclosure or a product change. Anything regulatory in the envelope makes the note part of the disclosure rather than a note.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PARTNER NAME], [NUMBER], [YEAR].
Joint clients are the standing trap in advice. A note to one half of a couple who are both clients is read as a statement about whose money it is, and it causes more offence in this profession than in any other. Merge both names or neither.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
A practice with four hundred clients has four hundred anniversaries spread across the year, and the whole value of the note is that it arrives on the date rather than in a December batch with everything else.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap and hand-addresses the envelopes.
Want anniversaries going out on the day, all year? How a standing run works
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