Quote.com Grows Long-Term Personal Investor Traffic by Adding Community to its Site

CHALLENGE
Lycos Quote.com’s goal for the year 2000 was to expand to a broader investor demographic beyond its initial audience of day traders. To do so, the site needed to become more attractive to longer-term investors, and get them to return repeatedly even though they weren't trading as often as day traders.

CAMPAIGN
Quote.com decided to add online community to its site in order to new and existing members to interact and return regularly. The site promoted the community a way for personal investors to learn from experts, and communicate with peers.

Rather than just offering me-too message boards, Quote.com tried to make its community offering as appealing as possible to a broad cross-section of investors, by also including online seminars, live chats and volunteer programs.

Perhaps the most valuable service the community offers is the monthly expert seminar. A community manager chooses the topic (culled from posted comments and questions), recruits industry experts to conduct the seminars, and announces the topic on the community home page. The experts then lead daily discussions on this and closely related subjects and respond to members’ questions. Topics are broad enough to encourage participation by all and have encompassed industry investment tactics, tax strategies, and personal finance techniques.

RESULTS
Just 7 months after the community’s launch, Lycos Quote.com witnessed a 535% ROI on the cost it took to build and maintain it. Community registrants comprise about 15% of Lycos Quote.com’s paying customer base, and tend to spend more time on the site than non-registrants. Quote.com is especially pleased that activity in the sections dealing with long-term investing is both high and steadily increasing.

Additionally, industry experts show increased interest and continually request to fill speaking slots as they become available, which helps keep the community growing.

VENDOR NOTES: To create and maintain its community, Quote.com used the Community Management Center service from Participate.com. For more info, contact David Woodrow, Director of Consulting, 312-279-9565, dwoodrow@participate.com.