Marketing to High Net Worth Individuals

High Net Worth Individuals are great customers for so many companies. But, how do you find them? What is the best way to do that and what are the pitfalls? If you can find them, how should you communicate to them? Basic questions aren't they, but for many businesses, these questions about HNWIs are the ones that you should get right before spending your budget on a campaign.

Graham got to know Simona Spilak when she appeared as a guest on The Next 100 Days podcast.

Simona was an awesome guest and later started her LinkedIn Live show. She returned the favour and asked Graham to discuss his business Finely Fettled, a marketing agency specialising in marketing to high net worth individuals.

If you prefer, you can watch the recording below. 

Are You Marketing to High Net Worth Individuals?

If you have the responsibility of attracting business or investment from High Net Worth Individuals, then you are in the right place.  Each week, I receive calls from people just like you. 

Here's how the conversation usually starts...

Prospect: Can you help me find High Net Worth Investors?
Graham: Yes
Prospect: Tell me more about your database?
Graham: I market The UK High Net Worth Database. It contains names and addresses of hundreds of thousands of High Net Worth Individuals.
Let's discuss exactly how we can help you.
Prospect: Great....

The call often lasts for 45 to 60 minutes and during that time, Graham provides the logic for his recommendations and outlines broadly what the cost is, which is confirmed later in writing.

The Interview - Graham Arrowsmith's Background

Graham's career started at British American Tobacco, where he learnt the art of sales. From there he joined LEGO, where he sold to the trade. Later, he created one of their first direct marketing campaigns. It was to teachers to encourage them to turn up at an exhibition. He pulled off the legs of Legoland figures and stuck them to a postcard, popped it into a jiffy and mailed them. The headline was "find your feet at stand XYZ at the ABC Exhibition". 30% of the list showed up at the stand!

Graham joined Royal Mail, where he immersed himself in postage and direct mail. Managing some of the biggest mail order companies taught him loads about direct mail. They sent millions of letters. Later on, he was the first to use the Redirections Database of movers for a bank mailing. It was a great success.

Whist at Royal Mail, Graham earned a distinction in Marketing studying for his Masters in Business Administration at Bradford University, winning top student award. 

Then, he worked for Equifax in their marketing services business. This was pure data. He helped them create some data cleansing products they are still selling years later - disConnect and reConnect. He left and did something similar for one of their data competitors.

After that, Graham joined a printer to help develop an online direct mail producing product called Hello Market. The team there have really taken it to new levels but the experience taught Graham a lot about print and personalised direct mail.

The combination of marketing strategy, sales, data services, data cleansing, direct mail production, postage makes Graham pretty unique when it comes to targeting and the use of direct response media.

The FIRST thing to do when Marketing to the Affluent

The FIRST thing to do when Marketing to the Affluent is to look at your existing client data. When was the last time you cleansed the data? It doesn't take long for data to go out of date. People move, people die.

A clean set of data can tell a story for you. Of the data you hold, which are your best clients? Can you tell who spent the most, who spends most regularly and who has spent most recently? This is another way of determining the RFM of your data. That's recency, frequency and monetary value. Depending on your strategy, we can model the best of the best clients and create a model that can be trained against The UK High Net Worth Database.  We do this to create the best available data you can access that looks like your best clients.

In short, don't upset potential households by writing to a person who is dead. The bereaved will take a very dim view of your brand. And, if you write to someone that has moved, it also looks like you are out of touch and irrelevant. The best thing to do is get a free audit of your data from Finely Fettled, and invest a relatively small amount in validating the data you have. This goes for names and addresses, telephone and mobile numbers and email addresses.

Get Your FREE Data Audit Report

Marketing your offer to the wrong person is avoidable. Get your hands on a data audit and that will tell you just how many goneaways  and deceased individuals there are on your list.

What Qualifies you as High Net Worth?

If you have £250,000 of assets above and beyond the home you live in, then you are High Net Worth. Just. That's the minimum, then it's like a scale all the way up to the hundreds of billions of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk!

To be compliant with Financial Conduct Authority regulations, many organisations seeking investments from HNWIs want to ensure that Finely Fettled markets ONLY to HNW individuals. The logic is people beneath that level of wealth cannot reliably take decisions on their own investments. The types of investments open to these people are generally regulated investments, where there are more safeguards in place. It is a sensible policy, but marketers need to work sensibly to achieve compliance. So, Finely Fettled advises that leads from a selection of HNW Individuals is routed through a gateway landing page, where the individual expressly states they are High Net Worth. 

How to get Your Message to High Net Worth Individuals?

There are 3 main channels when using data from The UL High Net Worth Database. They are emails, telephone numbers and  names and addresses. Technically, you can reach more HNWIs by selecting wealthy households from the UK Affluent Address Database. This database contains the wealthiest homes in the United Kingdom.hThere is a fourth channel that Finely Fettled uses to get messages to the affluent. Magazine Inserts are a great way to single out wealthy people by the reading habits. I'm working with an organisation in rural sports. There are some excellent magazines, with high numbers of affluent readers, that subscribe to those magazines. An insert can be an envelope with a curiosity message on the outside, that both entices and potentially rejects people unsuited to the message within.

All the data in The UK High Net Worth Database is fully permissioned. They have given their consent to their email address can be used. Email marketing to affluent people who you do not know has higher risk than doing so by telephone. Direct Mail is lower and inserts is lower still. We are able to describe the individuals by where they live, their age, the property value that they Iive in and often by a range of lifestyle attributes. The data is not permissioned for WhatsApp or SMS.

Tip: Use QR Codes to Move People Online from Offline

We are all used to seeing QR Codes. The NHS App for Covid-19 is all about displaying a QR Code. People understand them and how easy it is to be transported from one medium to another. Adding a QR Code to a postcard, letter or insert, that takes the recipient to a landing page is a clever way to gain validation for someone's status as a High Net Worth Individual.

BEST RESULTS: Come from Your Best Possible Offer

You can get a horse to water, but you can't get it to drink. It feels like that sometimes. We've got the best possible list of names of wealthy people, only for them to be short-changed by the offer. Think deeply about how much you will spend to acquire a new high net worth customer. Their long-term value to you almost certainly means that you can and should afford the best acquisition offer you can make. If your FD's eyes are watering, you'll know you are on the right track!

SHOCK N AWE BOXES

One of the best ways to open doors with wealthy people is to send a shock 'n awe box. What are they, I hear you ask. Some call them influencer boxes, and you can see why.

Well, it's a box, of any size, with maybe a brochure, a personal letter, a gift, a DVD, a leaflet, a special report, enough to make an impact. The recipient was not expecting it, but you spent time selecting them and sending a special box to them. Their business is important to you. To some degree, receiving such a box creates an obligation.

There is literally loads more we could discuss in this blog post, but I'll leave some room for another post soon. In the meantime, if this has whet your appetite for a quick call, then drop your details in this form and I'll get in touch with you presently.