Kellie Liang
product design, sketchnoting, animation, illustration

Setting a new record for an affiliate landing page

 

Credit Sesame is a personal finance company allows people to check their credit score for free, and also offers online banking and services to improve their credit score. At the time in 2021, over 9 million users had signed up on the platform. Now, it’s at over 16 million.

🤔 Problem
The Penny Hoarder’s traffic to Credit Sesame was one of the highest-converting traffic, and they wanted a higher conversion rate to renew the partnership. We needed to find a way to improve the conversion rate of customers, coming from articles written on their website.

How might we find out what will really work to bring in new customers?

💪 Role & Contributions
I was the sole designer working with on the Sign Up Team. I collaborated with the Product Manager on the team as well as the Content Strategist from the Marketing Team.

I created landing page mockups, visual design, illustration, and conducted user studies to gather feedback from potential customers.

🌟 Impact
The improved landing page increased landing page-to-account creation by 2.31% and overall sign up conversion by +5.05% within the first week. For a company that has visibility on thousands of potential customers every week, it was significant - and it brought hope.

Initial experiments

I tested one of the variants with the control on UserTesting.

8/10 preferred control over variation:

“Straight to the point”
”User friendly”
” Easier on the eyes”
”Variation looks like a pop up”
”More info on the importance of credit score”

8/10 mentioned the plants:

“Feels like I'm growing my credit score”
”Satisfying to look at!”

Have 5 minutes? See comment highlight reel.

As a result…

I illustrated a custom drawing to evoke the sense of hope that our target audience was resonating with.

One version where the copy was exactly the same as control.
The other version used copy from Marketing team following new content strategy to promote Credit Sesame’s banking service.

The results were shocking!

Learnings—ripe for the picking!

  • Supplementing that designer gut feeling with both qualitative and quantitative data was essential for making the right call.

  • Providing audio clips of feedback from potential customers gives that extra punch for stakeholders to understand why something works or doesn’t work.