Digital Marketing is the starting point for raising hedge fund capital but marketers get it so wrong.

Many years ago I found a Client Relationship Management CRM software package. For me this was an amazing advance on using a hand written sheet of names and phone numbers pre email to contact clients!! As time went by, many names and companies were added to my CRM. I learnt early in my career that client communication revolved around newsletters and updates. Being a Hedge Fund Marketer, the distribution of monthly performance newsletters is the most important marketing tool for a Hedge Fund, or any Fund Manager. The newsletter goes to "known" potential investors and data vender groups for portfolio analysis. Investors, including Fund of Funds and Institutions, subscribe to the data providers using the data to construct portfolios or monitor investments in those funds.

Over the years I've raised a reasonable amount of money for various managers. In fact, I've raised a lot of money over the years. Mind you, I have bombed out a few times. Sometimes, the money has arrived from totally unexpected sources, and there a some interesting stories around the ultimate client. Nothing dubious! Over those years, the base process starts with the monthly newsletter distribution. These days, at Mantis Funds, we offer a "Digital Marketing" module as one of our services. On behalf of some of our clients, we ghost their monthly performance email. Let me explain, for a Fund Manager, we take over their client database, design an email template, load their monthly newsletter as a weblink and send to investors, potential investors and data vendors. I add in a group of potential investors that I think may be interested in the particular strategy. Superfunds, Family Offices, Wealth Managers, Consultants and Wealthy Individuals. I use a mail publishing software which connects to my CRM. Within the software I build a template for each manager, you know, logo, contact details and tables for industry standard metrics. I get the manager to write an "interesting report" on what happened over the month. Now this is where a lot of managers get it wrong. They give a descriptor of what happened to the markets. This is generally useless as most investors know what happened over the month. What an investor wants, is a descriptor of trades that went right and trades that went wrong, and what you did about it. The second mistake is adding an attachment. A lot of email list distribution end up in Spam Folders. If you use a link rather than an attachment, you have a greater chance of getting it through a Spam Filter. Additionally, if you apply a Certification to your DNS server, you are afforded a certain amount of grace in email list distribution. The next issue is personalisation of your blast email. The email needs to come from an individual. Normally I recommend the face of the Management Company, Founder or CEO. We set up a separate email to the regular day to day email address. It's still the Manager's Domain. We use that email on our system as well as our client system. Both of us can check return emails, i.e. questions, enquiries, bounces, Out of Office etc. When you send the email, you need to use Hi, and the recipient's first name. When you receive a blast email, you know it's from a list but if personalised, it feels well, personal. Using the Email Distribution software, I can see who opens the email, and who clicks the email link for the newsletter. This, for me, is the crucial intelligence. If I see that potential investor has read the email on say, 3-4 months in a row, it would suggest that they are interested in the manager. They become part of your call list. Then the sales process starts. That's all good, but if the manager doesn't have good performance, you don't make a sale. I've heard all the stories under the sun as to why someone isn't interested in investing, but at the end of the day, if the manager doesn't post the numbers, they don't get the asset flow.

In addition, it's a good idea to post the newsletter on LinkedIn and if you work the platform, it pays dividends. I'm not sure if a Hedge Fund newsletter is ready for Tik Tok. But.... you never know.

Going back many years, I worked at a prominent Futures Broker. I started a Commodity Newsletter which we would mail out monthly. Yes printed, folded, put in an envelope and mailed out via Auspost or whatever it was called. All my traders hated contributing articles and staying back to fold and stuff envelopes. They wanted to hit the pub. Everyone whinged about it. For me, it was a great marketing exercise. I assumed that only 10-20% of the mail was opened and read. The point of the exercise was that each month, the recipient got an envelope with the company logo on the front. It was a monthly reminder that their Futures Broker was still around and was more than accommodating to execute their business. Most of the letters went straight to bin but when the recipient thought of trading, BANG, they remembered the logo on the front.

To me, email marketing is the same as the old newsletter mail out. It's a constant reminder that we are around and maybe making money.

What I written here is not rocket science, anyone can and do what I have recommended. We offer it as a service so that a fund manager can concentrate on trading. We love this process because it's the start of the sales journey.

Again, I want to stress that Hedge Fund or Fund Management marketing starts with the newsletter and email distribution. The old days of phoning a client and doing a sales pitch is very limited. Think about how many calls you make which end up going to voicemail. Digital distribution is the core of a marketing strategy, but you have to get it right.