Forex retention marketing: Personalize or vaporize!

By Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove

Data-driven Personalization

More and more brokerages are realizing how to leverage the goldmine hiding in their trader data. On a strategic level, effective analysis of rich trader data allows marketers to better understand the various personas represented by their traders’ behavior, preferences and tendencies.

On a tactical level, the successful analysis of trader data allows the marketer to personalize offers and incentives to maximize their relevance and appeal to each individual trader. Not only does this help maximize trader engagement and spend (and reduce churn), it generates goodwill, enhanced brand perception and word-of-mouth promotion.

Evolving Consumer Attitudes to Marketing

Most consumers have become intolerant to the bombardment of mass marketing coming from every website, store and app with which they have interacted. Instead of encouraging engagement and improving brand perception, generic marketing to large swatches of one’s trader base will thus lead to brand fatigue at best, and outright negativity at worst.

On the other hand, there are two encouraging differences between today’s average consumer and that of ten years ago: (1) modern consumers expect that the brands with which they have interacted will try engage them via follow-up marketing communications, and (2) personalized, relevant promotions are no longer considered creepy. This means that savvy forex brokerage marketers—those who discover how to send highly-relevant offers to the right trader at the right time—will enjoy all the revenue and brand perception benefits mentioned above, as well as a hefty advantage against competitors.

Evolving Marketing Technologies

Parallel to the evolution of consumer attitudes is the evolution of marketers seeking technologies that can deliver effective one-to-one marketing. In turn, more and more technology vendors and service providers are developing solutions which attempt to deliver successful personalized interactions with traders, users, customers, etc. Due to the huge market waiting for the winning solutions in this space, both large technology corporations and entrepreneurial start-ups are focusing steadily-increasing resources on creating the ideal solutions.

The complexity of the technologies used is likewise evolving. Some of the more effective science-driven marketing technologies now available include:

Dynamic micro-segmentation – continuous trader segmentation based on the data-driven identification of rapidly-changing trader “personas,” which can be used to simultaneously hyper-target hundreds of small, homogenous groups of traders

Predictive behavior modeling – the science of applying mathematical and statistical techniques to transactional, behavioral and demographic data in order to predict future trader behavior and value

Automated campaign scheduling/testing/optimization engines – fully-automatic execution of single/multi-channel campaigns via email, SMS, push notifications, on-site/in-app advertising, remarketing ads, Facebook Custom Audiences, etc.

Real-time, event-triggered campaigns – personalized offers and incentives delivered to individual traders—at the most relevant moment—based on their last action, their particular trading history, win/lose patterns, deposit history, customer lifecycle stage, predicted future value, risk of churn and other factors

The Future: Personalize or Vaporize

The future is already here: only brokerages that are able to interact with their traders in the context of their affinities and preferences will succeed. Traders expect their favorite Forex brands to understand what they want and need, and it is the marketer’s job to proactively provide those offers to the right traders at the right time in the right way.

When done correctly, broker-trader interactions become more frequent, the brand-consumer relationship deepens and brand loyalty increases. Those marketers who fail to rise to this challenge will foster negative brand equity, lose traders to the competition and will over-pay for the acquisition of new traders.

In other words, Forex brands must learn to effectively personalize… or they will vaporize.