How Firms Can Use Personalization to Effectively Connect with Millennial Investors
Today, Millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000, also known as Gen Y) account for the largest segment of active employees in the United States workforce. With more than 79.8 million members of this cohort now earning paychecks, it is estimated that, in 2020, their buying power will increase from $1 trillion per year to $1.4 trillion annually. In addition to their rapidly increasing buying power, Millennials are predicted to inherit $30 trillion of wealth from the Baby Boomer generation as a result of the Great Wealth Transfer.
Undoubtedly, Millennials will need sponsors who are readily equipped to help them manage their money and investments. Therefore, this exchange of wealth creates an undeniable opportunity for firms who are prepared for the Millennial investor to not only attract them but to also earn their trust and loyalty. To successfully attract and retain this emerging group of investors, however, firms must understand that the performance of returns alone will be inadequate in securing this cohort’s loyalty over the long haul. Whether it be their investment products, the way they communicate, or how they receive data and other insights, research indicates that emerging investors value a personalized experience to accompany favorable portfolio performance.
Read ahead to learn how firms can leverage CRE technology to satisfy Millennial investors’ demands for personalization.
Utilizing a CRM to Identify Investors’ Individual Asset Preferences
Stemming from their digital upbringing, Millennials expect a more dynamic and flexible view of their transactions and performance than their predecessors. This generation of investors desires their investment information to be delivered at a customized cadence or on demand, and with the tap of a finger. In fact, 56% of respondents in a survey conducted by corporate services firm Broadridge Financial Solutions indicated that direct digital access to their investment portfolios will be important to them over the next five years. To satisfy these demands, investment managers need access to robust data as well as the tools to render the data in multiple formats. With this combination of data and tools, managers can interact with Millennial clients in new and more personalized ways.
One of the benefits of leveraging a CRM is that the firm’s proprietary historical data is accessible from one convenient location. An investor management platform enables firms to view historical performance records, making it easier to quickly identify investors’ asset type preferences, regional preferences, and investment criteria. Having a thorough understanding of current investors’ portfolios and the type of deals that they seek creates more opportunities to connect with and engage them when a new project matching their investment preferences begins.
Creating Segmented Emails to Generate Personalized Messages
Today, personalization is key to gaining Millennials investors’ loyalty and keeping them engaged, meaning that the “one-size-fits-all” approach that may have worked a couple of years ago is no longer the best communication strategy for connecting with investors. In commercial real estate, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business, new offerings, and portfolio updates to your network with customized messaging. With 70% of millennials stating their frustrations with brands sending them irrelevant marketing emails and their preferences for personalized emails over batch and blast communications, the challenge lies in ensuring that the right message is sent to the right individual at the right time. In fact, consistently sending a subscriber irrelevant messages could cause them to stop interacting with your emails altogether – reducing their chances of opening and reading the emails that are actually relevant to them.
Using a CRM to create targeted email distribution lists can help you organize your contacts, manage your database, and ensure that messages are delivered to the right recipients. For example, email marketing with user segments can be incorporated to target subsets of contacts with common needs, wants, demands, behaviors, or characteristics. While distribution lists carry a significant portion of the workload for scaling communications, continuously analyzing and evaluating your contact list to create user segments is a technique CRE firms should strategically implement in order to take their relationships with Millennial investors to the next level.
Earning the loyalty and trust of a generation with a completely different set of preferences and expectations will require firms to adopt capabilities that were unthinkable a decade ago. Because the next generation of investors has plans to manage their investments in a completely different manner than older generations and with a stronger emphasis on personalization, firms are being forced to restructure the way that they have traditionally managed investors, providing a fully digitized process. Fortunately, achieving the level of personalization and customization demanded by millennials is possible. It simply requires a new mindset, a flexible approach, and a technology infrastructure that’s up to the challenge.
For more resources on effectively connecting with Millennial investors, download this free eBook: Why Technology is Critical for Winning Over the Next Generation of Investors.
