MassMutual’s Retirement Services division is using e-mail newsletters to drive awareness of the company’s products, both with brokers and investors.
“Our distribution model consists of MassMutual career agents, financial advisors and third party administrators,” says Ian Sheridan, CMO of MassMutual Retirement Services. “It’s our mission every day to make sure they’re aware of our value proposition, because awareness translates into consideration.”
“People typically spend more time on things like tweaking their MySpace profiles than planning for their retirement,” says Jeffrey Mesnik, vice president of business development with Waltham, MA-based IMN, which helped the company develop its e-communications strategy. “We’re trying to change that behavior. People don’t always do what is best for them. How do you convince people to eat an apple when a candy bar is sitting there?”
Springfield, MA-based MassMutual Financial Group was founded in 1851 and has over $500 billion in assets under management. The Retirement Services division started over 60 years ago, and manages over $40 billion in assets for over 1 million participants. Over 2,000 financial advisors sell the company’s retirement products.
MassMutual began working with IMN about five years ago, with a goal of driving education primarily to the intermediaries, brokers and consultants who sell retirement programs, says Mesnik.
Sheridan says there’s an overall universe of 250,000 to 300,000 registered financial services representatives in the United States. If you look at the 401K space, he says, you’ll see there are 15,000 to 20,000 who work with retirement plans, and maybe 7,000 to 10,000 of those reps work with retirement plans full-time.
“Our goal was to reach out to the investment buyer community and build relationships with those advisors who are truly focused on retirement plans,” says Sheridan.
Today, MassMutual has an active subscriber file of 7,000 financial advisors who regularly read the quarterly newsletter, says Kris Gates, director of distribution marketing.
The newsletter goes to intermediaries who sell products, such as brokers and third party plan administrators. Content—usually centered around fiduciary and regulatory issues—is chosen based on the behaviors of financial advisors to past newsletters. Gates notes that MassMutual considers what types of companies open what types of content, to see if there appears to be a particular type of company concerned about a certain topic. Then, programs such as online seminars can be designed to meet those needs.
“The newsletters do create awareness,” says Sheridan, noting that at any given time over 30% of the reps interact with MassMutual via the newsletters. “We will see attendance of a seminar on a topic increase after high readership of an article on that topic in the newsletter. And this can help us [identify] concepts that to add value for the advisors.”
The content of the newsletter typically includes things like ongoing regulatory changes to retirement programs rules, and how those changes might affect investors’ lives. To gauge the success of the newsletter programs, Mass Mutual is looking at opens and clickthroughs, as well as how much time is spent with the newsletter.
Working with IMN, MassMutual is able to personalize the newsletters with content of interest to specific audience segments. “This helps create one on one action with the people who sell the products,” says Gates.
In addition to driving seminar attendance, the newsletters are also used to promote appearances at trade shows and generate booth traffic. But the core of the program is building relationships and ultimately, sales.
“We have career agents throughout the U.S. and this gives them an opportunity to build relationships on a daily basis,” says Sheridan. “It can help them determine the needs and desires of [prospects] and help them move people from awareness to actual consideration to active proposals for 401K plans.”
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