Trade Nation is a fast-growing global financial services brand competing in the dynamic world of online trading. In an industry where the markets never sleep, it is well known for being a data-and-technology-driven sector, where every second matters and where time means ‘money’. They were in need of a holistic CRM solution to help boost their marketing performance.
The Trade Nation team recognised their CRM was underperforming and took the brave decision not to plough on regardless, but to comprehensively audit its CRM ecosystem, in order to help address some fundamental business challenges.
The challenge: low conversion rates
Trade Nation had a CRM platform solution in place, but the challenges pointed to the reality that the system was not fit for purpose, or for its vision to scale.
This was largely evidenced by the low conversion rates they were experiencing across each phase of their sales funnel.
Limited by the unsuitability of their CRM platform, Trade Nation were seeing large volumes of prospects signing up for accounts, but a much smaller percentage (circa 4%) going onto make trades of value or even making a trade at all.
With no in-life and win-back CRM strategies in place, customer attrition was sitting at a staggering 43%.
We were briefed to review and if necessary replace their CRM solution. Starting with a deep dive into their business, we had the opportunity to put an end-to-end CRM solution in place and support from upfront strategy through to implementation and reporting.
Our approach: optimise, elevate, transform
Flourish’s model is routed in assessing each business at a data, technology and organisational level. After an in-depth immersion, which included stakeholder interviews across the business, our assessment revealed gaps in their existing CRM ecosystem which in turn identified a mix of optimisation, elevation, and transformation opportunities.
Understanding the data
It’s been said that data is the heartbeat of your customer.
By the nature of their digital business, Trade Nation produce an abundance of data from different systems, however there was no structured data management systems in place for CRM programme development.
This resulted in a limited understanding of who their current customers were, with no defined customer segmentations in place for targeted campaign development.
This lead us to the obvious need to comprehensively study all customer-level trading data. The output of our analytics produced specific customer value bands, informed by recency, frequency and value of customer trades.
To add depth to our segmentation, we overlaid third-party data to create clearly defined customer personas, which helped us identify and leverage customer insights to be leveraged in future CRM programmes.
Using CRM to drive behavioural change
Next in the process was developing a clear CRM strategy and related framework addressing key moments in our customers trading journey.
To address the significant drop off at each stage in the sales funnel we developed a welcome and onboarding journey tailored to the user’s level of trading experience. The intended effect was to reduce the number of people who opened an account but did not go on to deposit funds.
We also developed Hesitator programmes that closed the gaps between leads who opened accounts but did not go on to trade.
Interrogating and implementing new technology
A CRM framework is only as good as the CRM technology you use to execute it. Trade Nation required a robust interrogation of the current CRM technology in place. Through a process of cross functional stakeholder interviews in the business including the C Suite, Sales, Customer Services and Information Technology, we arrived at the conclusion that the current tech was incongruent with the organisation’s structure and ambition.
Through a considered process, Sales Force Marketing Cloud was selected as the appropriate platform for the business due to its varied functionality, user-friendly interface and suitability for a high frequency, B2C financial services environment.
We carefully facilitated the implementation of this technology into the business and the migration away from their legacy system with minimal impact. This involved comprehensive training with the client to introduce the new system.
Developing personalised, high-impact emails
Part of our transformation included a complete redesign of Trade Nation’s existing email templates. To guarantee maximum relevance, our structured approach ensured all sections of our emails were carefully considered and informed by clear objectives. Content was written based on the stage of the email in the customer journey and the level of experience of the trader.
The results
Our CRM framework, made up of 20 emails, has already started producing results for Trade Nation. Incremental improvements in their overall conversion rates have already been noted.
More customers who open an account go on to deposit money. More of those customers then go on to trade. The business has started to buy into the potential of CRM in delivering on their business objectives.
The emails themselves continue to perform well. Over the first 4 weeks our reporting showed an open rate of 38% and CTR of 3.8% which exceed industry benchmarks of 27% and 2.4% respectively.
When employed effectively, a strategically informed holistic CRM solution can give online trading brands a tangible competitive advantage in amplifying their customer acquisition and retention activity.
If you’d like to learn more about how Flourish can help your business achieve its goals with CRM, get in touch.
