Register for our upcoming webinar

19th November, 2025 - Webinar replay

10 mistakes advisers and planners make with newsletters and how to fix them

Phil Bray  

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to November’s free Yardstick webinar. Today, the 10 biggest mistakes advisers and planners make with their newsletters and how to fix them. We wouldn’t want to leave you with just mistakes. We want to give you the mistakes and how to fix them as well. So welcome. Hope you’re going to be finding the hour useful. As usual, it’s going to be full of practical, tactical hints and tips. We’re going to start with the consequences of making newsletter mistakes. Let’s show you the problems, and then we’ll show you the solution. So for each of the 10 mistakes, we will indeed show you the problem and the fix. We’re also, at the end of today’s webinar, going to tell you about December’s webinar. That’s a topic we’ve never done before. And Abi’s going to twist your arm and ask you to spend two minutes completing our annual webinar survey so we can make these sessions even better next year. Before we go though, before we get to all that. Dan, do you want to do your usual training of how we do things around here?

Dan Campbell 

Yes, absolutely. Hello, everyone. So what do we need to know for today’s session? Well, first things first, we are recording the webinar today, so don’t worry too much about making notes. Focus instead on getting stuck in and of course, we’ve been carefully cultivating a nice, cosy safe space here on our webinars, haven’t we? Which means we encourage plenty of questions and comments. So ask that daft question. I promise you, it’s not daft. Well, it probably isn’t. That’s not a challenge. So I’m just going to give you a view on what we’re talking about, really. The regulars here know that these sessions work better with lots and lots of healthy debate. So you can do that by using the Q&A box or the chat function, and speaking of which, Zoom has helpfully changed the way it shows if we’ve selected the right setting for the chat box. So if anybody would be kind enough to stick a message in there now, to test it out, we’d be most grateful. Just say hello or good morning, or whatever, just so we know that it’s working. I’ll be monitoring all comments and questions. Brilliant. Thanks, Matt, thanks Richard, thanks, Joe. So I’ll be monitoring all questions. I’ll read them out at regular intervals, and depending on where we end up in 60 minutes time, we’ll sweep up as many as we can before we have to say goodbye. Now, I mentioned earlier that we are recording the webinar, which means you’ll receive a neatly packaged follow up email with the video link and all the important notes and resources we mentioned today. And of course, we have our client engagement manager, Abi, to thank for that, who will be working furiously behind the scenes, as always, to make that happen. So before we hand over to Phil, let’s start with a question, shall we? So, what are your biggest newsletter challenges? So now we know that the chat box is working. We’ve got no excuses. So if everybody could put a little comment in there and think of things such as, what systems you might use, perhaps you’d struggle with finding the time to craft newsletters, or perhaps you don’t know what to say. You don’t know what the content should be. So while we start, if you could just kind of bundle all of your challenges together, just so we can focus the session on those that’d be brilliant, and then without any further ado, and Phil over to you.

Phil Bray  

Thank you, Dan. And what have we got here? So thank you, Richard, “branding it to me and the covering email”. Thank you for that. We’ll try and deal with that at the end, unless we do it during the session. As Dan says, just pop your challenges in there. Pop you the things that you find difficult about newsletters, the things you find problematic. It might be coming up with the content ideas, finding the time to write, being able to edit and proof what you write, what systems to use, how to interpret the data. Just stick some of your challenges, your problems, in the chat would you? Matt, what have you got? “Knowing when to send or not to send ad-hoc newsletters about business updates and other matters?” Thank you very much Matt, maybe you should be sending one of those this week after your two nominations in the Professional Adviser Awards Matt, seamless that wasn’t it? From your question to a little bit of praise for you. So what are the mistakes, or what are the consequences of the mistakes that people make with newsletters? So the first two are pretty obvious, lower open rates and lower click through rates. Open rate, being the rate at which people open your newsletter, click through rates being the rate at which those people have opened it, then click a link to go and read the articles. So some of the mistakes we see today, and we’re going to talk about today, will reduce engagement. They’ll reduce the open rate and then reduce the click through rate. Some of them might even increase the unsubscribe rate, the mistakes we want to talk about today also undermine your position if you make them as a trusted expert. If we get lower engagement, the newsletter is less likely to perform its job, whether that’s the job for clients, prospects or professional connections. And that means you’re wasting some of your time and money without delivering the results. So those mistakes will waste time and money without delivering the results. They’ll do a worse job of nurturing prospects and professional connections. One of the key functions of a newsletter is to nurture those people who have made an inquiry but haven’t yet become clients, and also to keep you front of mind with professional connections. And finally, these mistakes might damage the perception of clients, prospects and professional connections, of you and your firm. So I guess what we’re saying is, if we’re going to do newsletters, let’s do them properly, and let’s not make these mistakes. So let’s dive in for each of these mistakes. We’ll talk about the mistake, we’ll talk about the problem, and we’ll talk about the solutions. Now there’s only really one place to start this, and that is mistake number one, sending newsletters on a quarterly basis, not a monthly basis. Now our view is always that newsletters should be sent monthly. Very occasionally, advisers really push back hard on that, sucking in breath through their teeth and saying “not sure about that, quarterly newsletters are bombarding my clients, like monthly newsletters are bombarding my clients. Clients will unsubscribe, clients won’t engage”. And nothing could be further from the truth. The data we see shows that monthly newsletters increase engagement. They get a higher open rate and a higher click to open rate than quarterly newsletters, and that’s because people expect to receive them. They get into the habit of receiving the newsletter. Whereas, if you go quarterly every three months, each edition is a bit of a surprise. They’re not expecting to get it. I’ll give you an example, Graham Wells at GrowWiser, Financial Coach, every Friday morning at 11 o’clock, Graham’s newsletter lands in my inbox. It’s like clockwork. Council House bells go off in Nottingham, if anybody knows Nottingham, 11 o’clock, The Yardstick Parish meeting starts, and Graham’s newsletter drops into my inbox. It happens clockwork every week, and that pattern of consistency builds up a pattern of engagement. So the data shows that monthly newsletters get more engagement than quarterly newsletters. Monthly newsletters also mean that you can communicate more timely on certain things. If something happens that you wanted to communicate with clients about and wanted to educate them and inform them about but it happens just after you’ve done a quarterly newsletter, you might have to wait until the next quarter to be able to communicate that to. And then you should be, in our view, sending your newsletter to prospective clients, people who have made inquiry but not yet engaged with you, and your newsletter is the foundation of the nurturing of those prospective clients. And if you send it quarterly, that means it’s four touch points a year, rather monthly, which would be 12. So for me, it’s pretty simple. Go monthly, not quarterly. So what’s the fix? So for me, the fix here is to think logically, not emotionally. There’s that immediate emotional response of “my clients don’t want to be bombarded by newsletters every month”. Well, let’s try it. Let’s send them the newsletter, and let’s see what the data says. And if the data says you’re getting a 70 to 80% open rate, then let’s trust the data, not your feelings. So think logically, not emotionally. The second is to overcome those myths and misconceptions. And again, that for me, is trying it and using data. And we’re going to talk about the importance of using data to make better decisions about your newsletters a little bit later on, and then one of the key barriers for sending newsletters on a quarterly basis is just people finding the time. So if you want to send them monthly, either allocate the time or allocate the budget to be able to outsource it or get somebody else to do it for you, because time is a barrier to getting newsletters written, built and sent on a monthly basis. There’s no getting away from that, and if you’re going to do it regularly and consistently, then allocate the amount of time or the budget you need to just get it done. So that’s number one, sending quarterly, not monthly. Number two, being inconsistent. So what does this mean? So this might mean somebody decides “I’m going to do a monthly newsletter”. Good, but then they try and do it themselves, and they get it sent in October, but miss November. December’s goes late in the first week of January. They get January’s done because they’ve turned over a new leaf for the new year. And actually February, work gets in the way, they don’t do it. So missing editions is a real problem. It really is a problem. But that isn’t the only example of inconsistency. So we’ve seen firms where they will send a newsletter out on different days of the week at different times of the day. So I was recently reviewing one newsletter for a firm, and over so far this year, they’ve been inconsistent, missing months, doing some months, not others, and they’ve been sending on different days of the week, and they’ve been sending at different times of the day. There’s zero pattern of consistency. Typically, what would have happened is they would have built it at a quiet time, six o’clock in the morning, and then sent it at that point immediately, rather than building it at a quiet time and sending it at a pre-agreed time where they know they can send it same time, same day every month. So how do we fix this one? Back to resources, we allocate the necessary time and resources. I think this is a mindset issue as well, if we remember that consistency of sending newsletters means you look reliable to clients and that gives them confidence. That’s a reason to do it. Confidence equals reliability. Sorry, consistency equals liability, equals confidence. When someone gets something at the same time, same day, every month, you look consistent, you look reliable, and that gives people confidence. Again, the fix is either get somebody else internally to do it, allocate the time yourself, or outsource it to a done for you service. Might mention that a bit later, but find somebody who’s got the time to do it, and you will then be able to deliver on a monthly basis and consistently. Dan, what were the responses to people’s problems, challenges?

Dan Campbell  

So Wally mentioned that “the discipline to send regularly was a big challenge there”, Joe mentioned that they’ve never sent one. They’ve got RO6 in Jan, and they’re exploring more the use of an agency to help them get started. And then finally, Fiona said “having a simple email merge design function that only allows text and links alongside boring photos”. So there seems to be a bit of a tech challenge there.

Phil Bray  

Yeah, so Joe, good luck with the exam. If you want to have a chat with Abi, should be very happy to have a chat with Abi about newsletters and Fiona again, yeah that’s a techie thing. I think most of our clients would not use Mail Merge. They’d use a bespoke mailing system, something like MailChimp, Dot Digital, something along those lines that are actually built for these sorts of things. Matt, just going back to yours knowing when to send ad-hoc newsletters about business updates. I think you’ve got to rely on your gut feel for those sorts of things. And I would be sending them after significant events. So The Budget next Wednesday, that’s a significant event I’d absolutely be communicating. Then earlier on in the year, we had some market volatility due to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. That’s another good reason to be sending and then absolutely spread the good news. If you’ve, let’s take you back, you’ve been shortlisted for a couple of awards yesterday, and that’s not the sort of thing I would hide away in a newsletter. I would send that as an ad-hoc one off. I think clients would be interested in it. So mistake number three, poor quality subject lines. Poor quality subject lines. And what’s the problem here? If you don’t get your subject line right, you are going to reduce your open rate. Flip it round more positively, if you get your subject line right, you will increase the open rate. What did David Ogilvy say? “Once you’ve written your subject line, you spent $80 out of 100” or something along those lines. Just to show the emphasis on the importance of subject lines, and in my experience, a lot of people will spend, I don’t know, two hours writing the article and two minutes writing the headline. Where it should be, not the other way around, should be much, much more time placed and much more emphasis placed on writing the subject line of the email so people open it, and then writing the headlines of the articles so people read them. And it’s often the case when we move on to the fix that people forget with subject lines. When I talk about subject lines, I’m talking about subject lines and headlines as well. Same thing. Subject lines to get somebody to open the newsletter, headline to get them to read the article. It’s often the case that the person writing it doesn’t remember the objective, the reason why they’re trying to write an engaging subject line or an engaging headline, and the answer is very straightforward, if the subject line on the headline is not engaging, people aren’t going to read the article. So the bit that you spent two minutes doing dictates whether people read the article that you spent two hours doing. So it needs to be rebalanced so you need to remember the objective. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to get people to open a newsletter. We’re trying to get people to read the articles, and therefore we got to spend time writing a good quality subject line and a good quality headline. It’s interesting that the national newspapers, the media, if you are writing a piece for The Times, The Telegraph wherever it’s generally the case that the person who wrote the article does not write the headline, somebody else writes the headline. That’s how important it is. These publications have people dedicated, sub-editors, dedicated to writing the headlines. Second thing I’d say is write the subject line or the headline after you’ve written the article. Too many people start writing at the headline level or the subject line level. Don’t. Write the email, write the article, then come back and do your headline. Much more effective, as I say, spend more time doing it. I personally would sit and write maybe five, 8 or 10 different headlines. Stack them on top of each other. Write your first one, write the second one, write the third one, slowly iterating as you go. Then once you’re happy with it, we are 18 minutes in, first time we mentioned AI on this webinar, go and use AI to try and improve your subject line, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, whatever you decide to use, give them your subject line and ask them to improve it, give it certain parameters, talk about the target audience, what you’re trying to achieve with the subject line, and ask AI to improve it. Ask AI to give you a couple of options, and then just bat it back and forth between you and AI, whether it’s ChatGPT or whatever, to try and improve it. We’ll also use a tool called Headline Studio from a business called CoSchedule I think it’s called and that ranks your headline or your subject line out of 100 and tells you where it could be improved. Maybe the length is too short or too long. Maybe you’re not using enough power words, enough emotive words. But use AI. We still need to follow the AI sandwich of human, AI, human, because sometimes what AI gives you, it won’t land well with you. You don’t think it’ll work. But I will tend to write between five and 10, two, which I think is best, give it to ChatGPT to get it to improve it, and then take it over to Headline Studio. So it becomes a three way dialog between two AI applications and me. But if you don’t get this right, people won’t open the newsletter, people won’t read the article because the headline isn’t engaging. So that’s mistake number three. Number four, basic mistakes. Now we have all done this with newsletters in the past, simple things like a broken link or a link that’s incorrect, typos, spelling mistakes, poor personalisation. You might have done it. You might have been one of those unlucky people who have done it. You certainly will have received it where it gets that rather than saying “dear Dan” or “dear Abi”, it will say “dear first name”. Or even worse, they send you something to Dan, but they put “dear Abi”. So poor personalisation, and that does two things, I think, that are linked. It undermines people’s confidence in you, and damages your reputation with them. People are very precious about their name, and rightly so, and broken links, typos now just don’t engender confidence back to that reliability equals confidence. So how do we fix it? So the first thing I do is rigorous copy checking. Rigorous copy checking. And here at Yardstick, for example, we’ve got two human copywriters. They will use AI, from time to time, to help them with our proofreading and copyright checking, but we have two human copywriters. That’s how important this stuff is. 

Dan Campbell  

Just to caveat that, Phil, you mean proofreaders, don’t you? We’ve got a team of copywriters, but we’ve got two human proofreaders.

Phil Bray 

I do apologise. Sorry. Shouldn’t use copy checking there.

Dan Campbell  

That was Phil checking if I was paying attention. There we go.

Phil Bray 

We have two human proof readers to check. What can you do if you’ve got somebody in your team who can do the proofread? Brilliant. If you don’t, then combination of a couple of tactics. One, use AI, so get AI to review it. Now you might use something like Grammarly. You might use ChatGPT, but use some AI. The other trick that I’ve used for years is to change the format of it. So I used to print it out. And if you print it out on paper, pen and edit it yourself, you’ve changed the format, and you’ll see typos, you’ll see areas. You’ll see opportunities to improve the quality of the text and the writing that you wouldn’t see on the screen because you’ve written it and your brain is kind of getting ahead of you when you’re reading it. The other thing that’s wonderful, and if you take nothing else away from today, take this Microsoft Word has got a “read aloud” function across the ribbon at the top. I think it’s under “review”. Click “read aloud”, and it will read your text back to you. And again, you spot things that you wouldn’t have  spotted just reading on a screen. You spot typos, you spot errors, you’ll spot ways to tighten up the writing. So use AI, get another human to do it, or use the read aloud function on Word. Then if you’re using MailChimp or Dot Digital or something along those lines. Send multiple test sends to yourself and check every single link. A healthy dose of paranoia is a good thing here. Multiple test sends, checking every single link that is set up correctly and it’s working. The alt text on images is correct, you haven’t carried over an old link from a previous newsletter, all that sort of stuff. Then regularly check your source data. If you’re using MailChimp or something similar, you will have uploaded a spreadsheet into Mailchimp with your source data, and that source data might have a column for people’s known by name, so Dan rather than Daniel, Abi rather than Abigail, and Phil rather than Philip. Check that’s correct. Check email addresses are correct. Check that you have removed anybody who has left you as a business or has passed away. So constantly check your source data, because again, that’s another weak point on where things could go wrong. And again, if you don’t have to do this, or you don’t know on a regular basis, you could outsource to a trusted partner to do this, whether that’s an agency like us, or a fractional marketing executive, something like that. Right, number five, we’ve talked about AI, but I think you can get over reliant on it. And what’s the problem of being over reliant on AI? Well, the first one is bland, AI driven copy, just AI slop that doesn’t add value, doesn’t reflect your brand, and in some cases, is unfortunately, clearly written by AI. We are not AI luddites at Yardstick. We use AI. It’s in the core of our business, and we use it where we can, and it makes sense to help. I just don’t think it produces high quality enough copy right now that beats what a human produces. It also, I think, sometimes lacks some original thought. It can never have your experiences with clients. It can never draw on those experiences with clients, in a kind of “they ask you answer style”. We also need to be careful of hallucinations with AI, mistakes and inaccuracies. I would say it’s getting better. I would say it’s getting a lot better, but you still have to check it. And again, the other point here is to talk about the AI sandwich of human, AI, human. I see occasionally people just pushing out what AI gives them, whether it’s on a newsletter, social post, social comment, without actually checking it. And you’re just looking and thinking “that’s written by AI”. It’s just bland. So what’s the solution here? Follow that sandwich. Human, AI, human, I was doing some stuff this morning. I was actually rewriting my LinkedIn profile. That’s how exciting I am on a Wednesday morning. And I gave it to a couple of AI tools and asked it to give me a bit of feedback. And it gave me some feedback. Some of it I took on board, some of it I disagreed with. That’s absolutely fine, but do use AI as a thought partner, somebody to bounce ideas off. Just don’t rely on it and accept the limitations of AI in terms of some of its copy, some of its ability. It’s one of the reasons why, when we changed, we needed to change the proof reader. Thank you. Dan. A few months ago at Yardstick, we didn’t go down the AI route. We went down the human route, because we’re accepting the limitations of AI. And then lastly, it’s about the mindset for me with AI, see it as a partner and assistant, not a writer. So step five, state five, don’t over rely too much on AI. Harness its power, but don’t rely on it. Dan, did I see a question coming? 

Dan Campbell 

Yeah. So we had one in from Amelia who asked, “would you recommend using someone’s salutation to address them in a newsletter or their formal first name?”

Phil Bray  

So we tend to recommend, Amelia, known by name. So hence me saying Dan, rather than Daniel. And my parents are a good example of this. Their known by names are John and Jane. My mother’s first name is actually Susan. She won’t like me revealing that in public on a webinar, but her first name is Susan. And if the financial adviser had emailed “dear John and Susan”, as per an application form, she would not be happy. She really would not be happy. She’d want John and Jane. So Amelia, I’d go with known by name. For bonus points, put their known by name in the subject line. “Dear John and Jane”, here’s your November newsletter that would increase open rates as well. So hopefully that answers the question million so halfway through, we’ve talked a little bit about how Yardstick or one of the options is a done for you solution. So Abi is going to just quickly talk about that done for you solution at Yardstick, so you can see what we do.

Abi Robinson  

I’m glad you said that about your mum, Phil, because I always thought that my grandparents were spies, because they’re George and Catherine, but they go by Bill and Margaret, and I just presume that they were spies. So I’m glad that it’s not just my older generation that’s doing it. Yes, more importantly, how we can help. So, as Phil’s been talking about, if you haven’t got the time, the skill, the inclination to do this in house, then we can absolutely be that trusted partner. And for the majority of firms, we work on two options. We can absolutely be flexible, we have some firms who do a mix and match, but it really comes down to personalisation, because with either of these options, you’ll have the confidence that the content is written for you by financial services experienced professionals. We will have that proof read internally by a different member of the team. It will be compliance. All that will be handled compliance approved on your behalf. And then we upload the articles to your website, and we send them out in a monthly email newsletter, which is branded by Dan’s lovely team, with your logo, your brand colors. There’ll be a bit of intro text that you can personalise every month, and it will look as though it’s coming from you, as opposed to us. And you’ll get that all important data, as Phil mentioned, that management report information so you can see who’s opened what, which articles have been of most interest, which can help drive your choices for the following month. No practical limit on how many people we send that to, so clients, professional connections, prospects, they can all be covered in the newsletter distribution list. And as a bonus, every month, you also get to opt in to whatever deep dive we’ve written in the form of a PDF guide. It’s opt in, because if you don’t offer mortgages, you’re probably not going to want to buy to let guide, if you only work with 18 year olds, then 10 financial planning lessons you can learn from ABBA, probably going to fall on deaf ears, but if you do opt in again, Dan’s team will brand it up for you, so it’s in your brand, colors, logo, etc. And as it says at the bottom there, we do do ad-hoc one off communications as well, the budget next week being a good example. But equally, we do for Trump’s tariffs. We did for the spring statement, and that’s all added extras that we can offer as part of that service. So you get a lot for it, and the difference really is in the content itself. With the syndicated option, you will choose six options from 24 that you are given every month by the team, and then that’s your involvement. You make your choices, we’ll handle the rest. And you can see that the cost on there is £239, per month plus VAT. The bespoke cost is £669 said on the screen, £645, but £669 is what we charge for bespoke, and that means that you’ll get a dedicated copywriter who will have a call with you, get to know your business, your target market, people that you work with will understand you and your firm inside out, and they’ll send through a handful of options every month. Once you’ve made your choice, either chosen from ours, a combination of your ideas and ours, then we will write three articles exclusively for you every month with either option there’s a £200 setup fee. That’s what helps Dan’s team make the template and do a few admin bits in the background. But if you’re interested to see any examples, if you want to chat about ROI that other firms have experienced from our newsletter service, then do drop me a line. More than happy to have a call about that. And we’d be happy to have a chat.

Phil Bray  

Thanks, Abi. I think the key for me here is it’s the done for you service. Some of the things that we’ve spoken about already, some of the mistakes are solved through capacity. And in my experience, a lot of financial advisers and planners are very, very busy, and therefore don’t have a huge amount of capacity to be building newsletters, sending them, writing the content, etc. This is a done for you option. Right number six. What have we got here? Mistake number six, sending people to third party content, not your website. So this is a really interesting one, and our view is that your newsletter should, as Abi has just explained, should include an introduction, then a number of articles, somewhere between three and six, and each of those articles should have a headline, bit of preview text explaining why someone might want to read that, and then a link to click to read the article, and that link points them through to your website. So there’s all sorts of reasons why that works best. We know some advisers who will, instead of doing that, pushing people to their website, will push the recipient of the newsletter through to other people’s websites. And for us, that causes a few problems. The first thing is, it doesn’t demonstrate your unique value. Your value is in the knowledge and information that you provide and share around personal finance and other matters, and we want them to hear that from you, not another expert. So we’re demonstrating somebody else’s expertise, not yours. It also creates a touch point with your other brand, with other brands. Sorry for newsletters, we want the touch points, to be with your brand only, and then in your minds or in the clients minds, you will become a curator of content, not an expert, not a financial expert. So for me, this is very simple. You should keep links to third party websites to a minimum, and instead, the links in a newsletter should go through to your website and your website only. And then you might put some links, research, find out more in a longer newsletter article, but not into the main body of your newsletter. So for me, this is all about positioning you guys as the expert with content, not other people, dead straightforward solution. your newsletter, links to your website. Really, really straightforward. Number seven, putting the wants and needs, your wants and needs ahead of those of your audience, putting your wants and needs ahead of those of your audience. And this is done by advisers, planners, business owners, marketing execs, who are in a bit of a rush or who are looking for a more easy life. Examples might include the type of articles. So we quite often, and we’ll talk about more about the type of article in a bit, but we quite often get challenged and push back from advisers who say, “right, I only want to talk about investment management or economics, or the economy” or something like that, and that’s what they think. But actually, the data shows clients are interested in other things. We have sometimes got pushed back around electronic newsletters versus hard copy. The adviser would prefer to read something hard copy. So that’s what they do with newsletters. Two issues with that, they can generally do it less frequently because it’s more expensive, and the second, you’ve got no management information at all. You don’t know what happens to that newsletter. You don’t know one once it’s landed on someone’s doormat, whether it’s gone straight from the doormat to the recycling bin, whether they read it from cover to cover and loved it, or the dog ate it, you just don’t know what happened to it with a hard copy newsletter. Then other examples of people putting their own wants and needs ahead of their audiences, missing editions due to workload. We talked about that earlier with one of the mistakes, but we know that some advisers, planners, business owners, are just too busy, and therefore they put this list of tasks ahead of getting their newsletter out, which means the newsletters land late or they miss it, missing editions. Sending newsletters via a client portal. So this sometimes gets me into a bit of trouble, but I strongly believe that we should only be sending communications to a client portal that actually needs to go through the client portal. So if you send your newsletter via your client portal, you will kill your open rate, and you’ll kill your click to open rate right? Because it’s a bit of a faff. There is friction there to log in. Even if you’ve got somebody who’s very good at remembering passwords or has got some sort of password manager, there’s still a bit more friction there than just opening an email. So in our experience, if you send it via a client portal, it creates real problems with your engagement. And then we see advisers putting their wants and needs ahead of their audience when it comes to their content preferences. And we’ll unpack that more in a bit. So solutions to this, meet people where they are. We know that the best way of driving up newsletter engagement is to send monthly, send by email and send a variety of topics as well. We know those things, three things work. So follow the evidence, not your gut feel or your emotions, and meet people where they are, which is in their inboxes. It’s been the case for 15/20 years, and I don’t see it changing. And then just remember your clients wants and needs always trump your own. It might be easier to miss this edition, but actually we’re letting people down if we don’t send. Mistake number eight, not repeating topics. So quite surprising we haven’t had one of the challenges being, “what should we write about in the newsletter?” Struggle to come up with topics. If anybody does have that as an issue or challenge, then do pop it in the chat. And one of the reasons people often talk about that is because they’re worried, concerned, and fearful about repeating topics. I had a conversation with an adviser earlier this week about what we should be writing about in their forthcoming newsletter, and they said, “Oh, we did that back in September”. Yeah, you did, true, but only a proportion of people open the newsletter. Only a proportion of those read the article. How many of them read from top to bottom? So some people haven’t read it. How many people read it but didn’t understand it or need a reminder, bit of a topping up of knowledge. So there is a fear around repeating topics, but you should absolutely do it because it doesn’t alienate people, as some people are concerned about, but it does harness the power of repetition, and if we don’t repeat topics, we don’t harness that power of repetition, we don’t give people the reminders, we don’t give people the opportunity to catch up on things that they might have missed. So it’s incredibly important that we repeat topics. I was on a webinar last night talking about LinkedIn, and they were talking about content pillars, things you talk about on a regular basis. Here at Yardstick, we talk about certain things on a regular basis. So again, this comes back to evidence and data. If you go and look at your articles that you’ve included in your newsletter this year, look at the most popular there will be some themes coming through. I would hazard a guess that those themes are anything around tax, paying more tax, pensions and IHT, property, anything to do with your business. Those are some of the key hot touch points that we’ve seen this year. So use the data, use the evidence. Do more of what works, and then for what doesn’t work, either do it differently or do less of it. The fix also, I think, comes from politicians. We can all think of politicians that have phrases that they have repeated time after time to time. Boris Johnson, “get Brexit done”. Tony Blair, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” for anybody who’s old enough here to remember that. And then we’ve got our friend across the Atlantic who has got various phrases that he will repeat on a regular basis. So politicians understand the benefit of repetition. Sometimes it’s repetition verbatim, sometimes it’s saying the same thing in different ways. Repetition is incredibly important. It helps hammer home your message. It helps drive that message home. And that’s because people have got short memories. Just need to remember that, and some of them will just missed it completely. So have topics that you continually go back to. Clearly they need to be relevant to your audience but have topics you regularly go back to. And then when it comes to topics number mistake number nine might sound a bit counterintuitive, but one of the mistakes we see firms make is a almost a sole exclusive focus on money and personal finance, yeah in your newsletter, your clients are going to expect to hear from you about money and things that affect their financial future. That’s only natural. That doesn’t mean that’s all we have to give them, and if it is all we give them, and we don’t give them some other article ideas and article choices, that will push our engagement down. If all you ever talk about is money, particularly if all you ever talk about is investment performance or the economy, it will dampen down your engagement rate, both your open rate and your click to open rate and then that, as Abi mentioned in a blog a few weeks ago, turns into a vicious circle of low engagement. “I didn’t say anything in October’s newsletter that I wanted. I’m a bit pushed for time. I won’t go to November’s, and therefore, I’m really going to miss December’s completely”. So we do have to try and maintain engagement levels and maintain people’s interest, and for me, that means giving them a range of different content, because some people will be interested in the financial stuff. Other people will think, “actually, I’ve outsourced that financial stuff to my adviser. Therefore I don’t need to read their newsletter”. So let’s include a range of content to give them another reason to read the newsletter. So what should be in there? Naturally, you are going to include articles about personal finance. No getting away from that. You are going to include articles about personal finance and things that affect them. I’d include articles about financial planning. Now those aren’t necessarily aimed at your clients. Your clients know the benefit of financial planning. You know what? Those prospects that are in your database and professional connections might not know that benefit quite so well. So your financial planning articles are aimed at the prospects and professional connections in your database. I would then encourage you to look at including some articles around lifestyle and wellbeing. Now we’re not trying to turn your article into Tatler, Vogue, Horse and Hound anything like that with those lifestyles. But they give people who are not interested in personal finance or the financial planning stuff, they give people another reason to read open and engage with your newsletter. Those articles can also be useful for embedding yourself in a niche or local area. So let’s say, for example, I think one adviser we work with Barwells down in Lewes, in Sussex and for Lee’s newsletter we’ll often suggest including articles about things that are going on in Lewes. So Christmas markets, walks to do in the autumn, restaurants that the team like, that sort of stuff, and that gives people another reason to engage with the newsletter. But also we can do really cool things on social media there, while we promote those articles, tagging in those restaurants and those destinations and trying to get a bit more of an audience coming to those articles that way, and then, yes, put the investment and economic summaries into your newsletter. And one of the things I would say is just check whether people are engaging with them or not. It’s always quite fun to see what people are putting in there and the engagement levels that they get and they will often be significantly lower than articles about you and the business. Anything to do with you and the business, things that are going on, people joining, people leaving, charitable community work, they go down really, really well. So I’d pop them in. And you can also do this sort of stuff with evergreen content. So regular, “meet the team”. So if your team is big enough, let’s do a series of articles around meet the team. And you could do things around Christmas, around Easter, the summer holidays, New Year’s resolutions, all that sort of stuff. It’s a bunch of things you could do there. So basically, what I’m saying is mix it up, put a variety of different articles in, meet people where they are, and then use the data. Look at what works, look at what doesn’t, do more of what works, do less of what doesn’t, or change it up and do it differently. Dan, I saw a few questions coming in. Are there any questions specifically about this?

Dan Campbell 

Yes. So Matt gives some context by saying “we had a lifestyle article every month, and it’s the third most popular category of article for clicks”. And then Harry asks the question, “do you tend to see that the data around opening rates is more supportive of financial planning content versus those investment slash economic content, for example?”

Phil Bray 

Not sure about open rates, but certainly click through rates. So the rate at which people read articles about personal finance, lifestyle and wellbeing and about the business, those get more clicks, get more engagement, than articles about investment and investment summaries, economic summaries, that sort of stuff. There will always be examples of newsletters where actually the investment, economic stuff, does better. So test it. But 80%, 90% of the time. The investment in economic stuff does worse than the other types of content. 

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant. And we’ll save Skye’s question and Amelia’s Question for the end.

Phil Bray  

Yeah sure. Right, last one number 10, poor database management. So we’re going from writing now to managing the database and how we get it sent out. So what are we talking about here? The problem, if we’re not adding clients and prospects to your newsletter database, new clients and prospects to your newsletter database, that means some of them will miss out, so your clients won’t get the full experience of being a client from you, and prospects will not be nurtured as well, because we know that the majority of people who go to an IFA practice and make an inquiry, never actually become clients. There’s all sorts of reasons for that. Some of them are in a box where you want to work with them, you can add value, they’re a perfect fit, but for whatever reason they don’t immediately become a client. So you have two choices with those people. You do nothing to nurture them, in which case, the time and money you’ve spent generating that lead is wasted, or you nurture them, you stay in touch with them, you add value, you educate them, you remind them of your brand on a regular basis. And that means when they are ready to engage, it’s more likely they’re going to come back to you than heading off somewhere else or starting their search again. So if you’re not adding clients and prospects to your newsletter database, your existing clients aren’t getting the full experience, and you’re not staying front of mind with them, which can damage referral generation opportunities, and your prospects aren’t being nurtured as well. Also on the database management front, we’ve got all that conversation that we’ve had, and Amelia, you brought up around the personalisation, people’s first names, people’s known by names, etc. So what have we got here in terms of the fixes? Add all prospects, as most of our clients do, to the newsletter database, so that prospect comes in November, they get either November or December’s newsletter. Use their known by name, as we said earlier, not their Sunday name. Make sure we take deceased clients out and make sure we do periodic checks on the data. You also might want to take out clients who have left you, less precious about that, but certainly we should be taking deceased clients out. So we need to get the database management right and if you do get the database management right, you should see each month the number of people receiving your newsletter rising slightly. So there you have it, 10 mistakes people make with their newsletter. If you get this right, if you get this right, you’ll get higher engagement, higher open rate, higher click to open rate. You’ll push your website traffic up, more people will be visiting your website, you’ll raise your profile with existing clients and prospective clients, they’ll get a light touch, valuable touch with your brand. So that helps to boost referral numbers from existing clients, and it increases the chances of a prospective client coming back to you rather than starting their search again when the time is right. If you do this right, you’ll be consistent. You’ll be like Graham landing same time, same day, every month. And that confidence positions you as somebody who is reliable, and that then helps to build your personal brand, your business’ brand as both somebody who’s reliable and also an expert. So there are huge, huge benefits to getting this right. I would say most firms, when they first come to us, maybe 20% are getting this right. 80% don’t. So hopefully there’s some practical hint tips etc, you can take away to improve your newsletters. Next month’s webinar is slightly different. We’re moving away from the practical and tactical

Abi Robinson 

We are indeed, yes. As Phil said at the start, never done a webinar like this before, but it struck us, or should I say, it struck Phil, at 2am a few nights ago, as great ideas often do that when firms come to us, a lot of the time, they’re in tactic mode. They want to straight away start talking about “how do we use social media? How do we improve our newsletters? How do we make our website more effective?” Which is great, but actually there’s two steps before that. Step before that is, let’s strategise. Let’s think about what we actually need to do to achieve your business goals. But even before that, you need the right mindset, because without the right mindset, you’re going to struggle to accept the things that you need to do to help you improve your marketing and achieve your business goals. And it struck us, “why have we never done a session like this before?” So next month, we’re going to be focusing on, as it says, “the mindset shifts that you can make ahead of 2026” to help you overcome doubt, help you get over imposter syndrome, help you ensure, feel the fear and do it anyway. So it’s going to be different. It’s the last one of the year, and we’d really love you to attend, see what you think, but we are sending the survey now just in case it’s a bit rubbish and you don’t like it, but you just need to scan that QR code and I will include it on the follow up. But yes, speaking of the webinar survey, for anybody who is a long time webinar attendee, then we will have asked you to give us a couple of minutes of your time last year, and we’re going to do the same again this year, because, we hope these webinars are useful. We hope you get lots of value from them, but we’d love to know if we are hitting the mark or not. So it’s a really short survey, it’s quick fire. It’ll only take you a couple of minutes. There’s just a few questions around the guests that we’ve had this year, and whether you enjoyed those sessions, whether you prefer us speaking solo, who you want to see on the list next year, and we’re just asking about your least favourite and most favourite of the webinars that we have given you this year. So scan the QR code again. I’ll put it in the follow up, but it would massively, massively help us out, if you can fill that in. And who knows, the guests that you want to see might feature.

Phil Bray 

Thank you. Abi, yeah, if anybody, if everybody, could complete that survey, that would be very kind. It will give us ideas for next year and help make these sessions even better. And the webinar in December is for anybody who’s feeling a bit nervous about their marketing, a bit unloved, a bit under appreciated, that imposter syndrome feeling. And that might mean you’re in a small business and you’re responsible for the marketing yourself, but you actually are an adviser. It might mean you’re a marketing executive, marketing manager, but you’ve got no one to talk to. So it’s going to be a proper safe space, and end the year with a marketing hug. Right Dan, what have we got questions wise?

Dan Campbell  

Okay, so we’ve got a great question from Skye. Who asks, “do you see any benefit in running two newsletters, one for clients and one for prospects?”

Phil Bray 

Yeah, I think there could be. I’m a big fan. The more you can tailor the content, the more you can make it relevant to your audience, the better. Now almost all of our firms will send the same newsletter to clients and prospects, because time and budget are an impediment for running two. But I can absolutely see how there might be benefits to splitting that down, I think you’ve probably got to think about how many clients, how many prospects. You’ve got to think about the return on investment, but yeah, I can absolutely see the benefit from that.

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant and on the subject of prospects, Louise asks, “should prospects be opting in for the newsletters rather than us just adding them?”

Phil Bray 

You can try and get consent. Most of our firms under GDPR rules, will rely on legitimate interest being the legal basis for which the data is processed, and processing the data is sending the newsletter.

Dan Campbell  

Perfect and then a question from Amelia so “we have discovered that of our fully serviced clients, we have a large number of people not receiving our newsletter. This may be due to unsubscribing, or they’ve said no to marketing preferences when signing up. Is there anything we can do to convince them of the value of getting our newsletter?”

Phil Bray 

So this, I think you’ve illustrated, is part of the problem of getting people’s consent, and because you’ve got to sell a newsletter and most people don’t want more stuff in their inbox. Yet, we know that if a newsletter goes out exclusively to a database made up of clients, it will get between a 70% and 80% open rate. So there is maybe a difference between the gut feel of what people want and what people are getting. So maybe some sort of familiar re-engagement campaign telling people what you’re doing next year, a relaunch of the newsletter. “Here’s a new newsletter for 2026”, maybe not calling it a newsletter. Maybe call it a client communication, maybe including it in your service proposition and then relying on contractual obligation as the legal basis to send it. There’s a number of different things, and mainly, we’ve probably got a meeting coming up actually, we can talk about it then, if you like. But there’s a number of different things that you could do. 

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. And I was chatting to a firm a couple of weeks ago, and they said a couple of clients had unsubscribed accidentally from the newsletter, and then in their annual review meetings each year, when the adviser spoke to them about it, they said, “oh, that sounds fantastic, yeah. How do I get that?” And they just accidentally unsubscribed. So you know what people are like with technology, assume good intent and tell them, because they might have just pressed the wrong button. So that ends our questions. So if anyone’s got any more for any more, do let us know. But other than that, we’re good.

Phil Bray  

Thank you, everybody. We shall see you next month for that marketing hug. If everybody could just go and complete that survey, Abi, myself and Dan would love you for it. So thank you everybody. Thank you Dan, thank you Abi, see everybody next month. Cheers. Bye bye.

Dan Campbell 

Take care, guys. Bye.