The desktop website is a crucial part of the sales journey for a new investing-account customer. More than half of US and Canadian online adults who opened an investing account use a computer to research the product. To better understand and identify investing sales best practices, we evaluated the sales digital experiences of 13 North American investment firms for opening a new self-directed account across the first four phases of the customer lifecycle (discover, evaluate, commit, and initiate).

Our research reveals that:

  • Investment firms are not making it easy to get help when needed. A prospective customer may need assistance with the nuances of a self-directed account such as fees, trading options, and its rules and regulations. Live chat is readily available from most firms for existing customers. It should also be available to prospects throughout the process of researching, evaluating, and buying a product; most firms in our evaluation failed to offer this, and they are missing an opportunity to address a prospect’s concerns early in the customer lifecycle and increase the chance of converting interest into a sale.
  • Investment firms need to make it easier to navigate the website. Investing websites have a ton of resources: product information, tutorials, articles, and more. It can be difficult for a prospect to find what they need quickly. Many firms in our evaluation struggled with having a consistent and easy-to-understand navigation menu. Their search features were likewise not easily accessible, failing to yield relevant results for a query. A prospect who cannot navigate the website effectively or find what they are looking for will quickly lose confidence in the brand and look for another firm that can meet their needs.
  • Investment firms in the US lag behind Canadian firms. Firms in the US scored higher than the Canadian firms in just nine of the 26 digital experience criteria we used. US firms performed below-average and struggled across most criteria in the buying and onboarding phases of the customer lifecycle. Specifically, the majority of US firms lacked adequate access to human help from within the product application, relevant cross-selling capabilities in the application, and informative post-application communication.

For a deeper dive into our Digital Experience Review™ research, further insights from our reviews, and specific best-practice examples, Forrester clients can check out the full report here: The Forrester Digital Experience Review™: North American Investing Sales Sites, Q1 2025. If you are interested in evaluating your own firm’s digital sales experience and want to use the same criteria we did for our reviews, be sure to check out our interactive self-assessment tool: The Forrester Investing Sales Website Digital Experience Assessment. If you want to discuss any of our findings, or the results of your digital experience self-assessment, please reach out to your Forrester account team.