Case Study: Optimizing Design for Conversion Goals

I wanted to share a case study about a new home page design that helped a client in the estimated tax business improve conversions. The results have been great so far – up 83%.

First, let’s get the background info on the client (Easy Estimated Taxes) out of the way. Easy Estimated taxes is a site that allows taxpayers to manage their quarterly estimated tax payments. Taxpayers can pay their estimated tax payments out of their bank account, keep record of their payments, and they get reminders of when their next payment is due.

Probably the most important thing to know about the business is that it’s seasonal. There are four payment periods per year and their traffic peaks during those four periods. That means those four periods are super important to them – it’s how the business sustains itself for the entire year. By now you’re putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that their site needs to perform during its peak period. If not, then they have to wait 3 months for another peak to come around.

The client had the following goal: get more of the existing traffic into their sales funnel. Put another way, get more of the people that visit the site clicking on the right call-to-action.

Accomplishing this goal goes beyond making the call-to-action button larger. There are some subtle details we had to address to make people comfortable with clicking that call-to-action. In other words, not only should people click it, but they have to want to click it because they were confident that Easy Estimated taxes would provide the services it claims to provide.

Here’s the design before we got our hands on it:

Here’s what we noticed needed to be adjusted to help accomplish the client’s goals:

1. Above the fold was actually decent. There is a clear call-to-action with fairly easy -to-understand text. There is always room for improvement, however.
2. Everything below the fold looked inconsistent with the rest of the page. In the tax-related industry, it’s incredibly important to convey a strong, professional, and trustworthy appearance. Users in this industry are highly skeptical of sites that don’t appear to be run by the government.
3. It wasn’t clear to the user how much the service cost.

After some iterating, here’s the design that we launched for the client in time for the last peak period (September 15, 2011):

We focused on conveying more trust, tweaking the text to better educate potential customers, and increasing the perception that the site is a legitimate, trusted way to pay estimated taxes online.

The results were all very positive:
When compared to the previous quarter, 83% more customers completed the signup for the site. Most importantly, the client was psyched!

Thoughts, comments, or questions? Let’s discuss i the comment section below.