How prospecting and retargeting are paying dividends for Pepperstone

You may not get a second chance to make a first impression. But in online advertising, that may not matter.

For online foreign exchange and CFD broker, Pepperstone, a foray into online retargeting with specialist provider, AdRoll, has since expanded to a broader lookalike targeting that has boosted clickthroughs and overall conversion.

“We didn’t have a large branding budget, and being a financial services company, our funnel is quite long,” says head of marketing, Sheldon Chapman. “We were looking for a cost effective way of getting out messages out there.”

Chapman says his company engaged with AdRoll two-and-a-half years ago, and had the retargeting system up and running in under two weeks, with immediate results. Pepperstone saw a 25 per cent increase in overall conversion rates, with cost-per-acquisition staying under $8, and Chapman attributes nearly 20,000 new conversions in the last six months to retargeting.

“When we first started to use AdRoll we used very basic segmentation,” he says. “Since then we have gone out and built our segmentation models to be a little more complex than most companies.”

Chapman says there are various points within the conversion funnel where there is significant drop-off, such as when prospective clients are encouraged to sign up and provide their ID, get the account approved and make a deposit to start trading.

“What we have done is look at targeting clients that have dropped out within the funnel, such as by sending messages offering them assistance in making deposits, and trying and encourage existing clients to trade more during,” Chapman says.

“Since then, we have dived deeper into our data and identified pages on our website where clients are more likely to convert. And from there we have built out our retargeting campaigns by serving clients ads they are interested in.”

But Chapman says the biggest uplift has come since adopting AdRoll’s Prospecting service, which he says has boosted click-throughs to 0.206 per cent and delivered more than 15,000 new users to its site.

“With prospecting we use CRM segments where we can go and target lookalike audiences through Facebook as well as through the Web,” he says. “Initially we were seeing a 50-50 split between prospecting and retargeting. Now that is 60 to 70 per cent in prospecting, with the remainder in retargeting.”

Chapman says the use of a single tool for retargeting and prospecting across both social channels and the broader Web is well suited to an online business such as Pepperstone, which has a very lean marketing team.

“Pepperstone is an early adopter of technology so we are keen to jump on anything new in the marketing sphere,” he says.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+: google.com/+CmoAu