Bridging the Engagement Gap in Online Trading

Client engagement and retention are crucial to all businesses. Still, in the world of trading, where client acquisition costs are high and the learning curve is steep for new traders, it’s even more important for retail brokers and exchanges to get this piece of the client onboarding puzzle right.

Retail trading venues broadcast their messages far and wide when it comes to acquiring new traders, aiming to onboard as many new signups as possible through their various marketing efforts. This is done in full knowledge that client churn rates are high and that not all of those registrations will make it as traders.

Various best practices have been established to ease beginners into the world of trading, such as providing courses and other educational material, offering a “lite” version of the main trading platform, which simplifies trading by hiding more advanced features, and having retention teams regularly checking in with new clients to see how they’re doing. 

These efforts are all thinking along the right lines, but they often lack the unifying thread of actionable customer data and automation, which can be the differentiating factor when it comes to running revenue retention and growth  initiatives at scale. 

Mind the gap

At Devexperts, we’ve attempted to address this pain point for our clients by providing them with ways to make the most out of the abundance of data that their traders generate, as well as the means to do something useful with that data. 

In our experience, it’s not so much that brokers aren’t aware that they have access to a great deal of valuable data, or that they don’t know what to do with it; it’s more that it falls through the cracks of their various systems and is not harnessed in a manner that could benefit both the client and the business. 

Below, we’ll explore how Devexperts is working to bridge the engagement gap in online trading, which often results in clients dropping off before they’ve had a chance to acclimatize.  

Devexa, our AI client engagement agent, and Acomotrade, our AI-powered personalization solution, are both products of the work we’ve been doing in user engagement and revenue retention for brokers and exchanges. Each is designed to harness a different type of user behavior.

User inputs & trading data

Broadly speaking, we can divide the types of data that brokerage clients generate into user inputs and trading data. User inputs include questions asked, preferences, and engagement touchpoints, whereas trading data encompasses platform telemetry and account behavior. 

The former paints a picture of a trader’s interests, content preferences, and what they’re trying to achieve, whereas the latter describes how they trade, their habits, risk profile, and how well they manage their money. Both are beneficial points of reference, opening up a host of client communication possibilities that can encourage engagement, combat low activation rates, provide early churn detection,and improve revenue retention.

Hey Devexa

We call her Devexa, and she’s an exemplary addition to human teams. Ideal as a front line for customer inquiries, she helps customers to get the answers they require quickly, easing the load on customer service teams, lowering support costs, and improving customer satisfaction scores.

However, Devexa is far more than just a chatbot. She excels as a full-time trading assistant, guiding users through their trading journey and gaining deeper insights about them with each interaction. 

Devexa excels at conversation-driven engagement. The data she gathers from her interactions with clients can be used to send timely alerts, suggestions, articles, and audiovisual content, all crafted to keep users interested by ensuring they receive the correct communications about their areas of interest at the right point in their development as traders. 

This timely and considered outreach results in increased engagement and, over time, contributes to increasing their lifetime value. Further, it reduces client drop-offs, enabling the business to retain clients who would otherwise struggle to sustain their interest in learning to trade independently. 

Devexa is also fully integrated with Discord, Telegram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, meaning that she’s available for clients via their preferred communication channels. This reduces the friction associated with adding a new interface to users’ regular rotation, effectively borrowing some of the “stickiness” of these highly popular apps that are mainstays on user home screens. 

Communicating with Devexa is a breeze, and she’s also up on her trader lingo, meaning that she understands trading terms and slang. Beyond this, she can be trained by in-house teams better to suit the trading segment of the business in question and to respond to new or market-specific buzzwords as trader jargon evolves. This is performed via a unique administrative interface, with no coding required, and can also be used to communicate with individual clients, send bulk messages, and analyze client data.

For those few clients who inevitably slip through the cracks, she’s able to call on her human colleagues for assistance.

Acomotrade

As Devexa becomes familiar with your traders through their interactions with her, Acomotrade, our new revenue retention and growth tool for the DXtrade platform, focuses on providing behavioral insights at scale. By focusing on their trading activity and account management choices, the system provides them with the most relevant information and instrument recommendations. 

As a result, the platform becomes more tailored to the individual’s needs the more they use it, which can take the form of a timely educational primer, an unexpected search box suggestion, or news of an imminent high-profile economic event.

Today’s content and marketing teams are not short on ideas when it comes to client communications; the hurdle is usually how to inform these ideas with real user data. That is, how to target them and how to execute these initiatives in a scalable manner, rather than relying on human teams to reach out manually. Acomotrade bridges this gap.

Using machine learning models that are trained on user trading data and platform telemetry, Acomotrade is able to clue brokerage teams in on what’s really going on with their clients. This allows them to prioritize high-value clients in their revenue retention and growth initiatives, and deliver highly personalized content to their users.

By identifying events that indicate when a client is most likely to be receptive to a particular message (e.g., repeated deposit failure, difficulty in placing stop-loss and take-profit levels), numerous possibilities for tailored communications are made available.

Additionally, the system offers powerful segmentation capabilities, allowing brokerage teams to implement communication funnels tailored to specific groups. It’s even able to predict client churn based on account activity, which brokerage teams may choose to address with a more personal touch, such as by prompting human retention teams to reach out, performing save and rescue operations before certain accounts go dormant. 

The key is in knowing which group is most receptive to what message, and when. Acomotrade keeps track of users’ preferred symbols and asset classes, trade frequency, trade duration, risk tolerance, as well as how consistently (or not) they’re able to buy low and sell high (or vice versa). These behavioral indicators are actionable and can be used to inform marketing and retention efforts.

Common ground

What unites both of these engagement and retention tools is an understanding that personalization is no longer to be regarded as an extra feature or value-added service. 

Personalization is often taken for granted in the digital products and services we use daily, but it should be equally crucial in trading, given the significant stakes for both traders and the venues they use.

Fragmented software ecosystems may have historically hindered trading firms’ ability to utilize valuable client data effectively, but this is no longer the case. 

So, whether it’s learning from what brokerage clients say and do, or what their actions on the markets reveal about them, at Devexperts, we have solutions available to ensure that traders don’t slip through the net.