Welcome back to Marketing Monthly, the imaginatively named, once a month newsletter where we look at goings on in the world of broker marketing.

This time around we look at that most frustrating of topics – making people deposit. Enjoy…

Right now you can go on the affiliate site for PocketOption and you will see this…

PocketOption is one of a small number of companies that makes more in revenue terms than most firms in this industry but if you talk to a lot of people, many of them have never even heard of them. These guys are good at app marketing and arguably just marketing in general.

The picture above gives you a simple snapshot of a wider problem that almost all companies face. A lot of people register with your company but huge numbers never do any business with you.

The column on the left is RTD – registrations to deposit. Or in simple terms, how many registrations do I get on average before one client deposits.

So in the top spot you have Pakistan, where for every 4.16 registrations, one client deposits (or in ‘real’ people terms, 416 registrations = 100 client deposits).

This is a common problem for all businesses, so don’t worry, you are not alone. Another, slightly different way you can see this is in app retention rates which plummet after day one.

Source: Adjust

One of the biggest difficulties today for most brokers is KYC. The number of documents and amount of information you have to provide before you can open an account is yuuuge and infuriating. Note that this is part of the reason props have been much more successful at onboarding clients.

Attrition is a natural consequence of the KYC process. For example, about 18 months ago I wanted to buy shares in a company that were not listed on my regular broker, so I looked for it elsewhere. After going through a boring ass KYC process for about 10 minutes I just CBA’d and gave up.

One way around this is to get a license that does not require KYC for deposits. Vanuatu and the Seychelles, for example, allow you to do this. The only other option seems to be to automate the process as much as possible. For example, XTB’s CEO has talked before about developing AI tools internally, specifically to speed up the KYC process.

Beyond KYC, which is basically dependent on regulation and how much you can automate, is payments. From speaking to several industry executives, it seems like this is arguably the key point that defines how effective you will be at converting.

One broker product executive that TradeInformer spoke with claimed – and it’s a big claim – that by improving the payment UX and, more importantly, integrating with certain regional providers, they saw a 10x increase in their RTDs.

I can’t say if this is true but it would also be a weird thing to anonymously brag about to a hack like me. I can also see it being true for certain countries, like Saudi Arabia, which have super high payment decline rates.

There are also methods used here that are less ‘scrupulous’. For example, one broker that I looked at for this article has an almost impossibly good selection of payment providers, tailored to each local market.

When you try to complete the payment process, your URL is redirected a couple of times, with the end transaction looking suspiciously like an e-commerce purchase. So this broker is using some kind of method to cloak what they are actually selling. Another method, similar to this, is to miscode payments to increase acceptance rates.

The ‘problem’ here is obviously that many readers will never get compliance approval to operate in this way. Consequently, you can optimise up to a certain limit but your payment decline rate will never get as low as people doing the above.

Beyond KYC and payments, other factors that contribute to lower FTD are going to be idiosyncratic and unique to each firm.

This feels like a bit of a cop out as an argument, as it is lacking in specifics, but there is really no way to do this aside from capturing customer interactions with your website / platform and looking for factors that slow deposits.

Ultimately at a certain point you have your product and brand and everything just becomes about making small changes that ultimately combine to have a large-scale impact.

For example, the same product person that talked about payments also noted that part of their growth marketing initiatives involved coming up with around 200 different edits to make to their platform. Three quarters of those were launched and 15% were successful.

Another alternative is to be lazy and do what PocketOption’s table at the top of this page implies but does not say.

The key figure missing in the table, which may be why Pakistan is listed as ‘Number 1’ with no real reason behind it, is the cost to acquire a client that registers. If you look at things that way, all you have to do is focus on the cost of acquiring the registered user relative to deposits.

This links back to what we looked at last week with the multi-asset marketing story. For example, XTB’s revenue per client figure has more than halved from the levels it was at prior to the broker adding stocks.

But because the volume of registrants is so much higher, and the CAC also much lower, the company makes far more money that it did previously.

So I don’t know…maybe you don’t need to optimise your product. You just need to figure out how to optimise spend so you get as many clients for as little as possible? Or you could do both.