Despite officially announcing a drop of 7% in trading activity across its entire operations in August, falling to $165 billion, Alpari remains a major player both in the forex as well as the binary options online retail trading scene. Alpari is also known for being a firm that tends to often adopt innovative methodology in its operations, not least in its efforts to acquire new clients.
Having recently discussed the differences in trading behavior between forex traders and binary options traders, making also reference to the fact that the latter often have a much shorter lifetime value than retail FX traders, it is extremely interesting to point out a new kind of passive binary options clients’ acquisition which has recently started to be implemented by Alpari Russia.
In the fiercely competitive environment of binary options trading, offering free demo accounts to prospective customers was a mainstream tactic adopted by most brokers in order to achieve a constant flow of new client leads, which eventually move from demo account holders to actual depositing traders.
Usually, this was achieved by advertising the possibility of obtaining a demo binary options trading account for free, through conventional media campaigns, aiming to the attraction of interested potential clients who would provide their personal details in order to be able to open the demo account. This would create a pool of people who would then be targeted by the brokers’ sales teams’ with the view of converting them into proper, depositing, active traders.
Interestingly and in deviation from current practice, Alpari Russia has instead decided to render binary options demo accounts available without requiring any form of registration or the provision of any other details, therefore allowing potential clients to familiarize themselves with the platform and conduct demo trades, without any means of the sales team being able to contact them afterwards.
One could argue that this move might signify how confident Alpari is about its product and therefore explain this more relaxed approach as a conviction that the product so good that it sells itself. However, a more plausible explanation, especially taking into account Alpari’s track record in adopting innovative, ground breaking methods, is that this is in fact a strategic move that achieves a brand differentiation for Alpari and which aims at taking away the pressure from prospective binary options traders and putting their minds at rest, since they can practice away through the demo account without being targeted in order to be persuaded to open live trading accounts.
This is important for two reasons. First because most first time binary options traders are complete novices in the world of online trading and thus a more relaxed approach matches their profile better, while it also means a better allocation of resources on behalf of the brokers’, since demo account holders often generate many unwanted ‘dead leads’ for the sales teams of companies, resulting in an unnecessary and expensive procedure of assigning sales resources to conversion.
