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This piece is adapted for financial advisors from the lessons found within Writing for Busy Readers. These lessons are key for any profession that seeks to educate, inform, and influence through written or spoken words, but will be most applicable for the financial advisor community. Check out the book here.
Summary
No matter what you are writing or communicating, it is imperative to be aware of the flood of information clients are receiving. An advisor's job is to cut through the noise. Pay attention to how you communicate so you can communicate most effectively.
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Less is more
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Make Reading Easy
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Design for Easy Navigation
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Use Enough Formatting (but No More)
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Tell Readers Why They Should Care
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Make Responding Easy
Less is More
The next time you are writing, think about saying less.
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Use fewer words overall
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Include fewer ideas
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Make fewer requests
Financial advisors by nature, want to be thorough. Clients’ questions and concerns can be complicated and nuanced. No two situations are ever exactly the same.
However, huge blocks of text can be a turnoff. How often are your messages written in multiple paragraphs? Or lengthy lists meant to capture everything covered in a meeting?
When clients see a message like this, they may want to read it. They may plan to read it. But all the same, they might file it away for another time and never get to it.
Limiting both the number of words and the imposing nature of the message can make your words more likely to be read, which is the whole point.
Make Reading Easy
Don’t make your audience work for it.
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Use short and common words
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Write straightforward sentences
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Write shorter sentences
Employing prodigiously formidable and obfuscating lexemes shall not bring about a voluminous audience of readership.
In other words... using hard-to-read words won’t attract readers.
The same is true for long and complex sentences. Make your ideas easy to digest. If you have long sentences that are hard to follow from start to finish, then readers will simply give up.
Financial advice can be tricky to communicate without jargon and formal language. The best advisors find a way to simplify. Don’t worry about sounding intelligent. Your clients are with you because they trust you, not because they expect you to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
Design for Easy Navigation
Place your message on a silver platter for the reader.
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Make key information immediately visible
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Separate distinct ideas
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Place related ideas together
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Order ideas by priority
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Include headings
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Consider using visuals
Readers are more likely to scan for information before they ever read it. Drawing their attention will make them more likely to read your whole message. If they don’t read the whole message, they will at least see the conclusion right at the top of the page.
An underutilized but essential part of proofreading is reordering and reorganizing ideas. After crafting your message, take another pass through the text to move sections or sentences. Place critical ideas first, and combine repeated ideas to limit length.
Use Enough Formatting (but No More)
Too much formatting can be just as repellent as too little.
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Match formatting to readers’ expectations
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Highlight, bold, or underline the most important ideas
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Limit your formatting and keep it consistent
There is no need to be cute with formatting. A little goes a long way and a lighter touch will focus readers’ attention on the most critical points.
Embedded Links
With the growth of platforms like Substack, advisory newsletters, blogs, and thought pieces are getting more sophisticated. With these improvements, there has been an increase in linked references, either to show sources or demonstrate the author’s vast information network.
Links are part of your formatting and should be used carefully so your writing doesn’t appear as a bad bruise: all black and blue. When using links, minimize the length of linked text for readability.
Reading a sentence that has a very long link will be much harder than choosing to only use a single word as the link.
Nested Lists
Lists are one of the most powerful pieces of formatting a writer can use. They tell clients what to do, how to do it, and in what order. I doubt there is a single reader who doesn’t include lists in client communication.
However, the more complicated a list gets, the more likely it should be broken up into multiple communications. If your list has more than one item with a subsection, rework that list.
Tell Readers Why They Should Care
Be ARTful with your communication: Actionable, Relevant, Timely
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Emphasize what readers value (“So what”)
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Emphasize which readers should care (“Why me?”)
Take extra care with the title of your post or the subject of your email. From the beginning, readers should know why this message is worth their time. Clichéd clickbait titles don’t belong here. Readers today are too numb to those tricks, and it dilutes your message.
This is equally important in the introduction of the body of your message. As we discussed in the section on navigation, place the conclusion of your message at the top to anchor the reader to the most important takeaway. Explain to the reader what the point is and why they should care.
No matter how much they trust or appreciate you as their advisor, every client is still allocating their minimal time. Particularly important for outbound client messages, focus on topics that are ARTful: Actionable, Relevant, and Timely.
Often, setting the stage for seamless communication takes place in the months or years before a specific piece of communication is made. Understanding what to send is just as important as who it is sent to. Thorough client notes and categorization will make it easier to send only relevant information.
Make Responding Easy
The easier it is for clients to reply, the more engaged they will be.
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Simplify the steps required to act
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Organize key information needed for action
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Minimize the amount of attention required
Spending time on preparation to minimize your audience’s required action will increase engagement. Client segmentation is key here, and maintaining engagement may require drafting multiple messages instead of drafting one with all the relevant information for everyone.
Readers unconsciously view the length of a message as an indication of how time-consuming it will be to complete. Writing concisely or utilizing well-placed links or attachments can improve open rates and response rates. Any upfront work is likely to save you and your clients time in the long run by minimizing follow-up messages or miscommunications.
Consider a reader who receives 30+ personal emails daily, which they will review after putting their children to bed at night. Review the example below and decide for yourself which is more likely to be read quickly. Pay close attention to the message subject, formatting, and length.
The conclusion is at the beginning, remember?