How Brokers can use Marketing Automation to Improve Profit
A lot of brokers have a clear division. Marketing gets the leads, Sales converts them. But in order to get the most from those leads, Marketing needs to be involved beyond the lead. They need to start to market along the entire client lifecycle in a programmatic way, in order to increase conversion, trading and ultimately income. In this piece we will discuss how we use data and automation in order to do this.
Consider this; when a lead comes in from a brokers’ website, they are interested in using your product and there is no better time for a sales person to contact them. However, not all leads are created equal and at some point a prioritization is going to have to be done (if only who to call first in the day). Marketing Automation will allow a sales person to make that decision according to quality factors automatically determined. These factors include the origin (country/city) of the lead based on IP address, but also whether they have used the demo platform, what trades they have put on, what pages they have looked at on your site and many more factors. In cases where a lot of leads are generated it can also help to assign the better leads to more senior staff and the lower quality ones to junior staff or a call centre.
A lead that has been a lead for more than a week can usually no longer be a hot lead for sales people and at that point our job from a marketing automation point of view is to get them active again on the demo trading platform, actively engage with material and ideally applying for a live account. We can do this by a series of automated emails that are sent depending on the behavior of the lead. If they look at application forms on the site, we send them ‘apply today and get a bonus’ type emails or in the case of a more upscale broker we just point people in the direction of the application form or ask them if they want to have a sales person call them to go through the process. Of course even if sales people are still actively talking to the lead, a set of automated emails will be complimentary.
We can also practise service differentiation and make it easier for sales people to do retention by using trade and treasury data. It allows us to put in place an early warning system that shows us a list each day (or in real time) of clients in danger of becoming inactive, and assigns a task for sales people to follow up. Interestingly for marketing people, we can trace back all marketing spend to specific clients and income and can say in week x we earned Y amount of income on clients that came from marketing source 1. With this trade data, we can also see what products people are trading and increase multi asset trading by crafting specific messages for FX traders to try CFD’s etc.
Lastly, we can do automated onboarding and application for a live account by integrating the website forms, the CRM system and the onboarding workflow so that, for instance, when a client applies the KYC team gets assigned a task for follow up. This improves efficiency but also improves the application to client conversion because of the improved workflow and reduced time it takes to get applications approved. Of course for brokers where clients do not have to be manually approved, this process can be automated even further.
To do the discussed marketing automated and more, we need to have access to a number of data sources. Find an overview in below table:
As you can see, we need access to a lot of data, and integration work always needs to be done. In addition, we need a good number of systems: an adserver, a CRM system, a web analytics system, marketing attribution system, a demand generation system, a bolt on for surveys and various others. It can get rather complicated and we recommend you get a company with experience setting this up for brokers (like ours) to help you with this.
No matter how complicated, in the end the result will be a much higher conversion rate from lead to client, a higher loyalty from your clients, more cross-asset trading and overall an increase in income.