Tony Quiroz

Journey Research + UX + SEO + Content

Business Context

I was working for Ethology, a digital marketing agency that Dime Bank hired to redesign their website. As the account lead and strategist, I was their main point of contact. I’d just finished running a journey workshop when Dime’s Digital Marketing Director pulled me aside to talk about a landing page problem.

Dime had the best Money Market rate in the country, but their landing page was converting well below the industry average. He wondered if the journey research gave me any ideas about how to improve it?

Journey Insights

The journey work made it clear that most people don’t understand how banking products like Money Market Accounts work; and they’re worried about hidden fees and charges. We dug into the SEO data to look at top search terms for money markets, and it corroborated our findings. Phrases like, “money market fees”, “money markets how they work”, etc. were common.

The landing page Dime started out with was simple: Product, Rate, CTA. They believed most people don’t read below the fold, so they wanted to keep it short and sweet. A Chase Bank consultant helped them with the design. But it was only converting at 2.15%, well below the industry average of 3.25%.

I had an idea to add more content, educating people about Money Markets and addressing key concerns about fees and reputation. Dime was skeptical, but decided to try it anyway. I wrote up a quick contract, and they signed on for a redesign + A/B testing.

The design I sketched out was a longer page, but I believed that was a good thing — and it made for a stark contrast to test vs. Dime’s current minimalist design.

I worked with our UX and Content leads to create the mockup, then we did some quick user testing. After a couple tweaks it was ready for the A/B test.

Results

The results were astonishing: Conversions rose from 2.15% to 13.5% and went on to earn Dime over $700M in new deposits over the next 9 months. Even better, our contact at Dime was promoted to VP. This little side project (the journey making and website redesign was our main engagement with the client) also became a featured Case Study on Ethology’s website to help us get new clients.

Takeaways

Conventional wisdom doesn’t always work. In this case, Dime was wary of putting too much content on the page (People don’t read! People don’t scroll!) but our research told us that when it comes to banking products, people have a lot to learn — and a lot of concerns to address before they’ll be ready to make a decision. By breaking conventions to address those concerns in a longer landing page, we got a huge win for Dime and money market customers across the country.