How SiteSpect Improves Conversions, a Use Case for the Financial Sector

Blogs are a popular way most businesses look to communicate with their customers and prospects to share helpful information, as well as news or details about their products or services. Often used as an integral piece of a content marketing strategy to allow a company to host all the content it creates. The ultimate goal of which is to attract new customers organically to consume the products or services the content promotes. It is evident that many businesses continue to invest significantly in this strategy. 82% of organizations report using content marketing in 2021 up from 70% in 2020 according to the HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2021.

It is clear a lot of effort and resources are being committed to producing helpful content for customers and prospects. That said, the implementation of a blog into the wider digital platform can often come as an afterthought, resulting in good content performing suboptimally. It feels like many organizations assume prospective customers will just navigate to their products and services from the content even with very few links or encouragement.

The need for strong content and supporting information is all the more important when products and services are of a technical, complex, or high value in nature. Customers will likely conduct more research and need more time and help before committing to a decision. This is especially true for financial products and services such as loans, mortgages and insurance.

Strengthening the Connection

In this case, a UK-based bricks and clicks financial services provider worked with the SiteSpect professional services team to identify that the connection between high traffic content pages on the blog and their products and services could be improved.

An A/B test was devised to introduce three calls to action to strengthen this connection and support a user’s next step towards the organization’s products and services.

• Get a Quote
• Speak to an Advisor
• Check out our Calculator Tools

These call-to-actions (CTAs) were implemented across all content pages in the same location to ensure a consistent pattern for users. For the desktop, they were deployed in a blank space within the rails of the page. For mobile devices, the call-to-actions were integrated within the body of the content towards the end of the pages.

The results of the A/B test confirmed the hypothesis that the link between these content pages and the products and services was suboptimal. Introducing these three call-to-actions saw:

• 23% increase in users contacting or calling for more information
• 39% more users started a quote
• 26% increase receiving a quote result

Iterating on the Success

As a result of the experiment’s success, the team rolled out the winning experience through SiteSpect to 100% of users and scheduled the change to be hardcoded. Since the content pages were under review for a redesign later in the year this improvement was factored into the planning and design of those new pages.

Further analysis of the click patterns on the three call-to-actions in the A/B test showed that all three experienced good engagement from users. However, the Calculator Tools demonstrated a significantly higher rate, receiving approximately 60% of the total clicks. This insight resulted in a recommendation from SiteSpect to explore how the Calculator Tools pages that now receive more traffic could be optimized to guide those additional users to the products and services areas of the site.

This added insight also highlights the importance of well-structured metrics within A/B testing to not only determine success but to better understand how success was achieved, what further opportunities exist and the optimal next steps. The goal of approaching your A/B testing in this manner is that it helps to facilitate an interactive practice of testing and experimentation that over time will be more successful. Something I think we can all agree is a desirable outcome!

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