New investors are flocking to online platforms in droves, driven by their interest in exciting topics such as crypto, big tech and weed. An effective education program is key to sustaining new accounts, ensuring they’re aware of the foundations essential to a positive DIY investing experience such as analysis, diversification, position sizing and risk management.
Attendees of Trading Central’s tenth Online Broker Summit in Chicago on April 3rd had the pleasure of tuning in to the thought-provoking opinions of a panel of investment education experts. Surrounded by global leaders of the retail online brokerage industry, the panel was moderated by Tom Sosnoff, Co-CEO of tastytrade, and included:
• Christine Zalzal, Vice President, Scotia iTRADE
• Sunayna Tuteja, Head of Strategic Partnerships, TD Ameritrade
• Jeff Chiappetta, Vice President of Trading Services, Schwab
• Jennifer Barrett, Chief Education Officer, Acorns
Tom kicked off the session with a good laugh at the irony of moderating a panel centered around education… His views on “traditional education” are both well-known and unfavourable. Rather, he believes that building a new generation of confident and informed investors will be achieved through the creation of interactive, approachable and relevant content. As he explained his views, it became clear that this sentiment was felt across the entire panel and that the industry is witnessing a fundamental shift in how consumers “learn” online.
The key difference between content and education? Modern content weaves a narrative.Potential readers are attracted not by the promise of acquiring a new skill set, but by a genuine interest in the subject matter. New investor cohorts such as millennials are often drawn into the investment space by hot topics such as tech IPOs and news coverage of recognizable consumer brands.
Actionable tips from TC
The panel agreed that there is a shift from traditional education to interactive content creation.Today’s digital age has brought forth a broad swath of new, improved ways to engage your audience. Certain content is “evergreen”, meaning it maintains its relevance for a prolonged period of time. Examples of evergreen content include basic market psychology, determining an instrument’s fair value and financial literacy fundamentals. Since the insight offered in these pieces doesn’t expire, it is a good place to allocate more time and budget in building dynamic content your customers will enjoy. Explore options such as interactive web pages, video tutorials, scheduled webinars with question periods and quizzes to keep investors engaged and constantly challenged.
Content tied to current affairs, initial public offerings or earnings announcements are time sensitive and shed their relevance as time passes. You need to get this content out quickly, when it serves the most benefit to your customers. These type of topics form excellent opportunities to create short, bite sized content for your platform or newsletter. Consider offering a newsfeedor an alert center where your customers can subscribe to topics or instruments that appeal to them so they can stay properly informed.
Actionable tips from TC
The panelists agreed that educational content yields the best results when the story unfolds over time. To accomplish this, less is often more. Engagement decreases as articles grow longer, so the panel suggested breaking up big stories into easier to consume chunks and publishing more frequently. Online reading habits include significantly more “skimming”than in traditional print reading, so keeping content concise, eye-catching and filled with only“above-the-fold” worthy content is key.
Today’s investors flourish when the educational content provided to them is personalized, proactive and data-driven. Unfortunately, the primary challenge many online brokerages faceis catering to the wide range of skill levels amongst their audience. Many on the panel voiced success with data-driven email programs as a solution. These consisted of automated emails sent to their investing customers with personalized portfolio tips based on their account activity.
Actionable tips from TC
Investors would benefit greatly from a change of format and tone from what’s typically found online in today’s “educational” content. There’s a common misconception that things need to be dumbed down, but when all the jargon is cut and writing is made too simplistic, it doesn’t do justice to readers. Instead, empower your customers to feel smart and build their skillset.Make your content approachable with clear jumping-off points, with a relaxed, conversational tone, rather than reducing the quality of insight you provide.
The panelists agreed they’ve seen higher engagement when their content challenges their readers and that their high level events boast higher participation. People enjoy being a part of something, so teach them what the jargon means. Introduce them to a community of others excited about taking control of their investments. Change the typical monologue where the broker knows all and pushes all the knowledge out. A strong tactic is to feed off what excites and unites people but enable a dialog rather than directives.For many, there is a joy to opening a complex platform filled with data dashboards. It feeds our desire to feel intelligent and builds confidence that the support we need to form confident decisions is there.
Satisfaction studies carried out by leading industry research providers such as CorporateInsight, J.D. Power and Celent have shown that a successful education plan is one of the top differentiators amongst online brokers. Trading Central is here to facilitate the success of both online brokers and their investing customers. Our dynamic solutions enable brokers to keep their investors learning and forming confident decisions throughout their entire investing experience, from learning about the markets, filtering for suitable trade opportunities, evaluating strategies through backtesting or discovering what important terms mean in context.