Marketing + Sign Up + Onboarding. Improving Conversion Rates.
Marketing + Sign Up + Onboarding. Improving Conversion Rates.
Hi there,
Businesses are letting staff go and cutting costs where possible. The ground is shaky and the future is uncertain.
Is it possible to cut marketing costs and retain (or even increase) growth?
Some things that have worked for Iteration Group clients:
- Take a close look at the top of the marketing funnel. Can we disqualify leads before they even take action on the Google Ad, Facebook Ad, or other offer? Put pricing information in the ad copy? Filter-out the audience by age, location, or other factor that will unlikely yield a sign up?"
- Survey visitors who spend time on the site but don't sign up: "What's preventing you from signing up today?" Understand what could be refined and make changes to the user experience.
- Utilize a quiz to increase leads; a proven, lightweight, unassuming, non-committal engagement instrument.
- Use Live Chat and automated text messaging to engage in a conversation with leads who don't sign up.
- Use a context-aware help system that allows users to get answers to their questions on the screens where they need them.
- Do a rigorous funnel analysis, step-by-step and screen by screen. Understand where and why users are dropping out. Identify possible usability and conversion issues on desktop, tablet, and mobile.
- Analyze the data and performance of the remarketing campaigns: email, ads, postal mail, and others. How can leads be segmented for these campaigns and also in the software user experience to increase sign up conversion?
- Provide better guidance in the form of personalized introductory videos and in-app walkthroughs to increase engagement.
- Identify the key factors that impact retention. Address those via software enhancements, automated messaging, and manual actions.
Need help improving your conversion rates? Designing a new product from scratch? Or modernizing and refining an existing product used by lots of people every day?
We'd love to talk with you about it. Email us or contact us.
Do you know what you need? Are you sure it's just UX or Design?
When we started Iteration Group nearly ten years ago (whoa), usability and user experience design were niche specialties.
Boy, have things changed over those ten years:
- Companies large and small have embraced UX design as an important part of their software and app development process.
- UX design is now a commodity. The number of folks who can create wireframes and design great-looking interfaces has grown massively. At the same time, these newer designers are less grounded in the old-school fundamentals of usability and human-computer interaction.
- The honeymoon is over. The bar has been raised. UX design isn't enough. Standalone, it won't dramatically lift your sales, lifetime value, retention, net promoter scores, and other KPI's.
Most businesses need product strategy, not just UX design.
This requires experience, understanding, and a point-of-view across all areas of the business: sales, marketing, business development, technology, operations, and finance. Things like:
- What are we trying to accomplish? What are the short-term and longer-term goals?
- How is the business doing today? What are the key performance indicators? Revenue, Lifetime Value, Gross Margin, Retention?
- Where does the current software fall short? What do we think? What do the customers say?
- What are the "quick wins?" The stuff that requires minimal work, that can be shipped as soon as possible, and that we think can move the needle?
- How is the team performing? What key hires and outside talent should be brought in? What is the long-term plan here? What talent is strategic to the business?
- How is the technology platform working? What is holding us back?
- What are the marketing plans? How does the software dovetail with these plans to enable smooth sign up, onboarding, and upsells? How do the marketing funnels look today?
Need some help designing a new product from scratch? Or modernizing and refining an existing product used by lots of people every day?
We'd love to talk with you about it. Email us or contact us.
Increase Leads & Conversions With a Sign Up Quiz
Have you considered using a quiz at the very start of your sign up process?
Companies like Talkspace (leader in online therapy), StitchFix (clothing subscription service), and SteadyMD (leader in online concierge medicine) are using them to great success. In direct-to-consumer and also enterprise situations.
We've found that:
- Visitors love quizzes. The expectation is that they're short, easy to fill out, and provide immediate feedback or value on a topic that's of interest. For one of our clients, we saw sign ups double as a result.
- Quizzes enable you to incrementally educate your visitors regarding the product / service / value proposition (rather than expecting them to watch a video or read a ton of text content).
- The mere presence of the quiz questions help establish comfort in the product or service. Visitors think, "ohh, I get it. I see that this service is indeed for me."
- Quizzes help reinforce the feeling that the product or service is customized or tailor-made for the visitor. Again, "this thing is for me."
There's a ton to think about when designing, building, and launching these quizzes:
- Start with some "softball" questions. Questions that are easy to answer and don't overwhelm the visitor with choice. Just get them used to answering.
- Keep the set of answer choices simple. Ideally multiple choice using short text phrases or easy-to-identify icons.
- Keep the navigation simple and drive visitors forward. Just "Previous" and "Next" buttons; no need for fancy progress bars, saving work in progress, etc.
- Optimize for mobile; the quiz should be super-easy to interact with. Design for mobile-first and then the desktop experience should be very simple and streamlined, as a result.
- Leverage the quiz in your marketing copy and marketing campaigns. "Find your perfect doctor" (SteadyMD) and "Get Matched Now!" (TalkSpace) have been shown to increase leads vs. more traditional sign up calls-to-action like "Get Started Now".
- Consider the overall sign up funnel. When do you ask the visitor for their name and email address? For what are you trying to optimize?
Interested in learning how we could work together with you to design, build, and launch a sign up quiz to increase your leads and conversions?
Email us or contact us today!
UX Strategy Consulting
Iteration Group is often hired by our clients to lead UX Strategy Consulting projects.
We work closely with large enterprise companies, consumer brands, and well capitalized startups to help them nail their product vision, distill their rough product ideas into concrete product designs, create wireframes, create final designs, build prototypes, build-out their products, and more.
Often these are mobile apps, web apps, and even desktop apps.
We have designed, built, and launched many of these from scratch. We've also redesigned many products and apps (some used by tens of thousands of people each day).
Some recent notable clients (web and mobile and desktop) include:
Yossi Langer Presents "How to Uncover Your Next Million-Dollar Idea"
Iteration Group Principal and expert on product strategy and user experience design, Yossi Langer, was invited to speak at the 2015 ASI Power Summit this November in Dana Point, California where he presented "How to Uncover Your Next Million-Dollar Idea."
The ASI (Advertising Specialty Institute) Power Summit is an exclusive conference for influential business leaders and decision makers within the promotional products industry (a $20.5 billion dollar market here in the U.S.).
Following his presentation, Yossi led a workshop where executives and staff members from leading companies within the industry discussed how to create great ideas from scratch.
Special shoutout to the ASI Summit team who put together this fantastic event and allowed us to be a part of it.
Creating Products that are (Measurably) Great
We usually recommend a User Experience design process that involves ongoing user testing. We very much believe that we ought to involve users in the design process every step of the way.
Our aim is to prove that we’re designing a great interface by objectively measuring its performance. Not just “wow, the app looks great,” but actual user performance data (fewer clicks, fewer seconds required to complete a task, etc.) that indicates, objectively, that we’re moving in the right direction - that we have significantly improved the user experience for customers.
A Note About Initial UX Thoughts and Observations
Sometimes we are asked by clients to provide some initial thoughts, observations, and feedback regarding the user experience of their existing web site, web application, or mobile app.
In the spirit of imparting a sense of how we think and how we work, we're happy to do so. But, we always caveat our comments by saying that normally, we would first want to spend some time:
- With you, the client, better understanding the situation, what users have told you about what they like and don’t like, what you think is working / not working, what is the business trying to accomplish, etc.
- With users, listening to what they have to say about the application, what they like, what they dislike, how it fits into their life, how they think it can be improved, etc.
- Looking at competing / similar / adjacent applications. What can we learn from the similar products that have been designed, built, released, and refined many times over many years? What do we think about them? What do these products tell us about what we want and what we don’t want? What do users tell us about these products? How do these similar products actually perform when presented to users?
While we are user experience design professionals who can apply web and mobile design best practices and also have strong intuitions (due to our experience designing dozens of products over the years) around how to improve usability, we believe that domain expertise (e.g. knowing the business inside-and-out) and listening carefully to users is critical to designing a great tool to make the user’s life easier.
Creating Landing Pages That Work: Auto Insurance
How do you create landing pages that work? Pages that ensnare users into your process of filling out a form, getting more information, getting a quote, etc.?
We believe that the auto insurance industry, in particular, offers many useful examples around how to create high-performing and persuasive website landing pages.
Let's take a look.
If you go to Google and search for "get car insurance," you'll see something like this:
Notice that most of the screen is covered in advertisements:
In fact, 10 of the results are advertisements, and only 4 are "organic" (e.g. not directly paid for) results. And this is just online!
Here in the US, we are constantly bombarded (online, on television, in print, via direct mail) with advertisements from Allstate, GEICO, Nationwide, Progressive, and other leaders in the auto insurance industry.
One would have to assume that:
- They’re spending incredible amounts of money advertising their products.
- The space is massively competitive. We learned, anecdotally, that some auto insurance companies are paying up to $150 USD per click for Google Adwords online advertising, for example (that’s just for a raw lead - not a person that has converted to being a customer!).
- They’ve worked very hard to optimize their landing pages and their funnels (e.g. convincing and ensnaring folks to “get a quote”) to maximize conversion rates.
Now, back to those Google Search results. When you click on one of those ads, you'll see a page that looks like this:
Or this:
Or this:
Or, if you're on mobile, something like this:
We believe that there’s a lot to learn here:
- How to create a persuasive and effective landing page, using typography, photographs, social proof, and other mechanisms to elicit a certain response and encourage certain behavior.
- How to get folks started in the process.
- How to easily enable folks to resume from where they left off (if they do indeed leave).
- How not to distract folks with other content and information that might unintentionally encourage them to fall out of the funnel.
- How to ask questions in a way that is not overwhelming or intimidating (e.g. perhaps in an iterative, one-step-at-a-time fashion).
UX Designer
Looking for a UX Designer?
Iteration Group is a "boutique" firm that works with a small number of clients, helping them with expert UI / UX Design and App Development for web and mobile.
We work closely with large consumer and enterprise brands to help them nail their product vision, distill their rough product ideas into concrete product designs, create wireframes, create final designs, build prototypes, build-out their products, and more.
Our clients are in Financial Services, E-commerce, Healthcare, Education, Ad Tech, Loyalty, Food Service, Entertainment, and other industries.
Iteration Group's Jaime Levy Releases "UX Strategy" Book, Published by O'Reilly
We're proud and excited to announce that Jaime Levy, Iteration Group team member and Engagement Manager on client projects, recently released her book UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. This guide breaks down the complexities of UX Strategy into lightweight techniques and tools that can be employed on any web, mobile, or desktop software project.
Throughout her career, Jaime has taken a hands-on role consulting in the areas of research, product definition, and interaction design for large consumer and e-commerce web projects at AOL, Honda, Target, Disney, ABC, and other industry leaders. In addition to working on client projects, she served as a Professor of User Experience Design at NYU, Art Institute of California, UCLA, and USC, where she is currently teaching a graduate level course (part-time) titled “User Experience Design and Strategy.”
Jaime has recently held multiple book launches and presentations across the country including New York City (as seen above) and Santa Monica, CA. Over the next few months, she will be speaking at multiple conferences and events to share her knowledge as a world-class expert in User Experience Strategy. Grab a copy of her book today on Amazon.com.