Increasing revenue by £5.9 million through conversion optimisation of a callback form

About the Client

Aldermore Bank, established in 2009, is a dynamic and innovative financial institution committed to providing tailored financial solutions to individuals, businesses, and property investors. With a focus on serving the unique needs of its customers, Aldermore has rapidly grown to become a prominent player in the UK banking sector.

As a modern challenger bank, Aldermore is known for its customer-centric approach, agility, and commitment to delivering exceptional value. The bank offers a wide range of products and services, including savings accounts, mortgages, business finance, and asset finance, catering to the diverse financial requirements of its clientele.

Business Challenge

Their digital team needed more insight into customer decision-making and behavioural drivers in order to increase the number of people completing their callback request forms. Previous changes they’d made to the website hadn’t impacted behaviour.  

Our objective was to increase its callback form conversion rate by 10% over 3 months.

Our Approach

We kicked off our collaboration with Suits Me by We developed a programme of research and analysis designed to reveal deep customer insight, which then informed a programme of changes on the website callback forms to increase effectiveness. 

Our process recognises that, in financial services, the customers’ purchasing journey may begin on the website, but the buying decision is often completed offline, sometimes weeks or months after the initial website enquiry.

These types of business are often selling complex products/services which require a deeper understanding of the customer than typical web analytics data analysis can provide. This meant we needed to innovate and create our own unique research and analysis framework to help these types of business improve their website’s conversion rate and sell more.

Understanding Customers

Our target audiences were the following segments (all looking for mortgages):

  • People with poor credit
  • Self-employed people
  • First-time buyers
  • Landlords
  • Business owners

We wanted to answer questions such as: 

  • How are people behaving on the website?
  • Where are people struggling and why?
  • What do users think and feel when purchasing
  • What are the behavioural drivers?
  • What do people want and/or need?
  • What’s impacting decision-making?
  • What choices do people have when buying this product/service?
  • Does the website function as it should on all devices and connection types?

To answer these questions, we used:

  • Deep Google Analytics data analysis
  • Customer and staff interviews
  • Customer service centre call listening
  • Surveys/polls
  • Heatmaps, scrollmaps and screen recordings
  • User testing
  • Competitor analysis
  • Quality assurance analysis

We considered all the areas of a business that interacted with customers and made a list of potential sources of insight.

We involved all our team members from project managers, to analysts to designers so we could examine all our options. We knew that web analytics data and user research would tell us about website behaviour but we wanted to go deeper by extracting insight from the whole customer journey which could then be used to inform changes on the website.

Our programme of research and analysis revealed that many of the people in these audiences are high anxiety users because they are new to the process, have debt or are self-employed which complicates their case. 

The Changes We Made

We helped users to complete the forms by:

  • Reassuring people by telling them what to expect on and after the call
  • Conveying that people will be speaking to a qualified mortgage advisor to build value/credibility
  • Reducing the number of fields and improving field usability/validation rules

Results

Aldermore was so happy with our service innovation they have commissioned us to completely rethink their savings account signup process to gain £1 billion in additional deposits annually. 

Our service innovation allowed them to go beyond broad demographics and understand consumers’ behavioural drivers, wants and needs and be truly human-led, increasing borrowing and lending via call-back forms by 15%.

  • Conversion rate uplift = 15%

  • Additional revenue over 12 months =  £5.9million*

  • £393 returned for every £1 spent with us

*The revenue uplift is the client’s conservative calculation based on the data available.

"[CTI] have been instrumental in helping to optimise our conversion rates. The success of our business relies on being able to effectively convert website visitors into leads. Through user research, heuristic review and analytics and design, [CTI] have increased form conversions by 15%. This has had a profound impact on revenue generation and the overall user experience. They’re a fantastic partner and an agency that I’d highly recommend!"

Adam Brassington, Head of Digital at Aldermore Bank