It would be great to see a marketing push this year, I presume it will happen after Plus launches?!
3 Likes
Clearly someone at FT has been listening to you allā¦
I just bumped into a FT advert whilst watching a finance related video (possibly CNBC or Bloomberg) on YouTube. I liked the ad as it was eye catching, obviously the FT brand, whilst also being very clear in terms of the messaging.
If you want to see the FT ad, I imagine that you are going to need to watch a few finance videos on YouTube until it pops up either within or between videos.
Enjoy! 
Matt
16 Likes
YouTube could be a good avenue but they just need to avoid what T212 does with spamming unskippable ads constantly on basically every video, I feel this has put a lot of people off T212 due to feeling harassed by them. YouTube ads are also not the most UX friendly now theyāve got comfortable with double unskippable ads.
Instagram seems possibly the best avenue for social media advertising, their ads are pretty user friendly as they donāt impose their will on you and FTās branding would definitely catch peopleās eye with the bright pink colour scheme on there.
Also on YouTube people are generally there for a purpose to watch a video, while on Instagram people are more passive in their engagement they can click away to an ad at anytime because theyāre usually not looking for a specific thing when scrolling through their feed. I know I am much less likely to engage with a YouTube ad because Iām there to watch the video and I donāt want to be distracted from that, but I engage with Instagram ads all the time because Iām generally just there scrolling passively so if something piques my interest Iāll more than likely engage with the ad.
Sorry for the long post but just some thoughts I had because I did my masterās research project vaguely in this field lol.
10 Likes
Also Youtube ads by their nature select for people who arenāt willing to spend Ā£12/month on an app which might be a sub-optimal demographic.
I completely agree FT should be going harder and itās disappointing user growth rate hasnāt increased materially in the past 6 months (with an enormous tailwind).
I put this down to two things; failing to execute Referrals 2.0 (the fact you can only recommend one person with your code is absolutely mental - hundreds of companies have nailed this) & not enough paid social advertising (when benchmarked against competitors).
I agree the product is nowhere near perfect - but you need to grow the user base nonetheless.
12 Likes
They clearly are doing something to attract users as there 100k more of them since they raisedā¦
9 Likes
It all comes down to money, freetrade canāt just burn thru the cash pile, it all needs to be balanced out and they have their overheads to cover. It easy to just spend money but FT has to do it wisely with what they have.
4 Likes
I think youāve touched on a critical point. To me it would seem sensible to wait until Plus is launched before a major marketing push would commence.
5 Likes
Honestly if FT wanted to mitigate a lot of these concerns people are having with the value of plus a simple solution is to heavily reduce the 0.45% FX rate or just make it 0% entirely I think that would make a difference for a lot of people and itās such a simple fix which adds a lot of value.
1 Like
I think Freetrade would struggle financially to do this. Given that the number of trades per year, and therefore the nominal value of those trades, is not capped, Freetrade could be giving away hundreds of pounds per annum per customer. Whilst this revenue would non longer be coming in, the costs of the FX transactions for Freetrade would still exist meaning every time a person trades Freetrade would lose money.
I believe Adam has actually posted something similar in the past to what I have written above and it is hard to fault his logic.
As an investor I would be happy for Freetrade to reduce the FX rate, it if is proven to result in more trading and therefore greater revenues, but I would not be keen to see the FX rate lowered to zero.
8 Likes
Yea 0% was a big stretch I guess but lowering it a certain amount for plus users Iād expect the plus membership cost to offset the revenue difference. Though Iām not sure how big the larger accounts on FT are but someone making Ā£10,000 worth of US stock buys in a year would only be paying Ā£45 in FX fees and the plus membership costs Ā£120 or Ā£84 (not inc ISA). If they lowered it for plus users but to a level where they still make a fair profit from the transactions it could be a good move.
2 Likes
I think Ā£45/year on FX is a reasonable estimate at half an ISA allowance (assuming just buy and hold) but really itās Ā£90 / year considering you have to sell at some point.
I think thatās enough to put a lot of people off Freetrade. So my view is it would be itās better to try and make FT+ more appealing and hope to make some money from those people than get 0 if they just choose another platform.
3 Likes
Yea I agree that adding actual features to plus is the real goal for increasing uptake and the value of the subscription. I was just thinking of immediate options that they could implement to add extra value at launch, because in its present state I have seen very few people thinking itās good value. Although this community obviously does not represent the entire user base.
I disagree. There isnāt sufficient evidence of effective growth hacking. In particular, the free share referral process is still clunky.
3 Likes
Is anybody able to provide an update on new user sign-up?
It would be good to get a baseline on the latest number before the role out of the new Freetrade advert goes live tomorrow.
Iām hoping the new Freetrade advert will trigger a positive uptick in the new user signup rate.
8 Likes
Thatās a great point. Anyone with new numbers?
1 Like
Hi All, am also trying to get a handle on user numbers now? We must be at the cusp of 250kā¦
3 Likes
You heard it here first 
3 Likes
Looks great. Thanks for sharing.
1 Like