Struggling with prospect emails? Fidelity Labs' Catchlight says generative AI can help

It sounds simple. But writing prospect emails that actually connect with their targets is easier said than done.

The line between correspondence that feels either too mass produced or too casual is a tricky one to navigate. And there is a good chance that if your firm is going after a particular prospect, their inbox is already full of pitches from other planners.

Catchlight

It's a common challenge that Wilbur Swan wants to help wealth managers overcome. The co-founder and CEO of Catchlight, an AI-powered prospecting data engine that launched from Fidelity Labs' wealthtech incubator, says the goal is to help advisors better understand who their prospects are, and which ones are most likely to be seeking paid financial advice. 

So the Catchlight team got to work on optimizing the email prospecting process to lay the foundation for their latest launch. 

"In classic startup form, we developed handwritten templated emails. Dozens of them for advisors. And then lo and behold, all of the generative AI news started to hit the wires. And Fidelity has a lot of early experience playing with these solutions and testing them out, which fit perfectly because now that we had a sense for what types of emails and templates advisors were looking for," Swan told Financial Planning.

"We began testing those generative AI solutions to see if they could generate something as good, or hopefully better. The initial rounds were super generic, like you would expect … but over time, it just got better and better."

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Earlier this month, Catchlight rolled out the feature that lets advisors create unique AI-generated emails using information drawn from prospect profiles in order to create unique emails that are personalized to the prospect. The advisor then has the option to take it a step further by making edits or to generate a new email based on their objectives. 

The technology that supports the automatically generated emails is built uniquely for the financial advisor community, and solely for the purpose of prospecting, utilizing its proprietary transformation layer and natural language processing model to craft one-on-one outreach campaigns launched by financial advisors. 

The new technology represents an evolution of Catchlight's support for personalized prospecting that it launched nearly a year ago.

Catchlight Co-founder and Head of Product Yelena Melamed said advisors using Catchlight have an appetite for more individualized prospecting content, but few have the time or the team to create it at scale. 

"Our AI-generated emails let advisors do something that might have seemed impossible only a few years ago," she said. "Automating personalized outreach that is similar to a thoughtful, handwritten note."

Swan said Catchlight developed the tool in response to direct and heavy demand from its users — advisors looking for an easier way to connect with Catchlight's prospect insights to establish concrete, actionable next steps. 

The tool also takes into account advisors who simply don't have the time or ability to write these kinds of emails themselves.

"Oftentimes what we heard from advisors is they didn't have a lot of experience doing it. So they felt like they could use some suggestions. Or they had writer's block. Or they say, 'I've only got 15 minutes to write something. Can you automate it so at least I've got something to start with,'" Swan said. "And what we hear from advisors all the time is growth is a top priority … so we fit well into that. A lot of time, they see that if there are simple ways for them to speak more regularly with their prospects, and with a larger number of prospects, then good things result from all that."

Swan added that it's an exciting time to be creating these kinds of solutions for this group of users. The industry's high interest in solutions that leverage artificial intelligence means feedback from advisors who plan to put it into practice is abundant and readily available.

And the very nature of generative AI means once that feedback is in hand, taking it and weaving it into an AI-powered tool to push out an improved piece of software can happen at a rapid pace.

So no more enduring long gaps between patches for your favorite piece of software to get that game changing update. 

"We were always releasing quickly, but it's just gotten faster and faster based on what's available in the space from some of these generative AI solutions to the point where we're releasing upgrades daily," Swan said. "Fortunately, there's enough flexibility that the flywheel of feedback and spin super fast."