When our founder, John P. Calamos, Sr., established Calamos Investments in 1977 the idea of holding a computer in your hand would have seemed like something out of Star Trek. Calamos has always been quick to adapt to the changing world around us, and embracing new, digital approaches to communication has been a key to our success and has become a major differentiator for our firm.

It's no surprise to those of us in the industry, but financial services has been historically slow to change. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the truth is that we must adapt to the needs of our customers and our customers are increasingly seeking personalized, relevant information accessible from their preferred device and channel.

It starts with understanding your audience. The average advisor receives dozens of emails a day from financial advisor firms. When you've got that much content pouring into your inbox, everything starts to look the same. There's nothing cutting through the clutter.

We are in an industry that gathers a tremendous amount of information about our customers. We've found that when you leverage that information to provide personalized content, our customers are happier and more satisfied.

For example, we launched an online portal for financial advisors. We regularly update the portal with new information on topics that are top of mind to advisors and their clients.

We've been able to use Predictive Intelligence to generate personalized recommendations in real-time based on the firm an advisor works for, the content viewed by other similar users, or even an advisor's unique browsing behavior.

If someone clicks on a recommended content item on our website they visit twice the number of pages and stay on the site twice as long as someone who doesn't click on the personalized content. Predictive intelligence provides us with the opportunity to better engage with our clients and the impact has been significant to our digital relationship with financial advisors.

Once you understand the needs of your audience, it's important that you take deliberate steps to engage them from the start. We've developed an onboarding journey that consists of four-emails.

This welcome series begins when a new advisor signs up for the portal. The emails recommend personalized content based on the advisor's browsing history as well as content based on what's most popular on the site.

In another email campaign we created utilizing personalization we focused on a key success metric on our site - a visit to one of our fund pages. So, we took a page from commerce sites and created an abandoned-browse email campaign that triggers an email to advisors who have clicked on a specific fund page. Three days after viewing a page, the user receives an email with recommended resources related to that fund.

The real lesson we've learned is that you need to capitalize on every touchpoint and make the most of each interaction. That approach has produced double-digit increases in our email campaigns for both opens and click throughs.

When you're competing in the cluttered digital world, making your customers feel important and valued is the only way to get their attention. That's only possible when you are speaking directly to them, giving them the 1-to-1 attention they deserve.

Want to learn more? Check out this webinar: How Calamos Investments Reshapes Advisor Relationships in the Digital World.

About the Author

As Vice President of Digital Marketing, Chris Howard is responsible for the digital strategy for Calamos Investments. Prior to rejoining the firm, Chris held senior digital marketing roles at Navistar, Discover and CareerBuilder.