Landing pages drive conversion rates, user experience, trust and overall digital performance for banking and financial marketers. However, creating landing pages that truly engage and convert requires more than just a visually appealing design.
In a recent webinar with The Financial Brand, Vishal Maru, vice president of digital solutions at iQuanti and Amy Radin, an experienced financial services marketer and award-winning author, share their proven three-step framework for building landing page experiences that deliver results.
By harnessing the power of AI-led solutions and advanced analytics, financial marketers can unlock the full potential of their landing pages, delivering seamless, personalized user experiences that drive conversions and foster long-term customer relationships.
Challenges in Delivering Strong Landing Page Experiences
Q: What are some key challenges organizations face in delivering strong landing page experiences?
Vishal Maru: We see a few common challenges across clients. One is that they often lack an end-to-end experience strategy. They have all these tools, which provide data on what’s not working, whether it’s conversion rates or engagement rates — but there is a lack of understanding of the underlying drivers of performance.
Also, having so many different landing pages across so many different campaigns is a big operational undertaking. Obviously, it has become a compliance issue in financial services as well. Another thing often seen is a lack of a structured and rigorous approach to ongoing testing and optimization.
Amy Radin: I would add that the biggest pain points are all surmountable. First of all, there is a lack of an experience strategy that can really be executed. We all want to have a great customer experience, but there’s no end-to-end accountability or ownership in most organizations over what happens throughout the whole experience.
Second, we don’t necessarily pick the right metrics. CFOs are under so much pressure to say what the ROI will be, but we really have to focus much more on the drivers of performance.
Finally, the human challenges of implementing an end-to-end experience strategy and doing everything else to optimize your landing pages will probably require a change from the way you’re operating today. Pain requires its own actions and steps to get people bought in.
Identifying Gaps in the Current Experience Strategy
Q: How can organizations identify gaps in their current experience strategy?
Maru: We see a couple of gaps. One is more from an end-to-end experience standpoint. You have your media, your messaging and your landing page experience, but we often see those things disconnected.
Then, regarding the underlying gaps and the underlying drivers of performance, you have access to the metrics, but marketers often lack insights into some of the specific underlying drivers that are impacting their performance.
This is where AI can play a role. We leverage AI to really identify the gaps in end-to-end experience at scale. We have built an intent-matching algorithm to score the relevance between a keyword, ad copies and landing page experiences.
“We leverage AI to really identify the gaps in end-to-end experience at scale. We have built an intent-matching algorithm to score the relevance between a keyword, ad copies and landing page experiences.”
— Vishal Maru, iQuanti
Q: How can organizations better understand the underlying drivers of landing page performance?
Maru: We use this framework to evaluate the underlying drivers. These include things like decision criteria. Users will have certain decision criteria for every product. Is the information hierarchy on the page aligned with the user’s decision criteria?
Second, people don’t read pages; people will scan through the pages. Is your page scannable? Do you have enough elements on the page that drive action, prominent CTAs and trust indicators?
Is the page’s performance optimal, like page speeds and core vitals? Accessibility. This framework will tell you some of the reasons or underlying gaps causing low performance with your landing page.
Radin: It’s so important to really understand the underlying drivers of customer behavior and how it’s affecting your financial outcomes. Too often, I see teams starting with the outcome.
The problem with that is that an outcome isn’t actionable by itself; you must understand the drivers. So, I think making this switch is one of the most valuable things that you can do to impact your digital marketing results.
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Building Personalized Experiences at Scale
Q: How can organizations build personalized landing page experiences at scale?
Maru: The first thing you want to do is really understand those macro intents. You start by building out broad templates for them.
For instance, if you have a user who has a specific product intent for a credit card, either they’re searching for a specific card or searching around for a travel reward credit card, but they know what they want. What is going to be the decision criteria for this particular user?
You must design the page and the entire template to align with this user’s decision criteria.
You also want to keep in mind these different user contexts, which is basically where they might be coming from. So, you need to understand where the user is coming from and what the context is and build a landing page that is aligned with that.
Once you have those templates, you want to personalize them for different segments. When it comes to personalization, there are three key components: connected data, which gives you information about the user across different sources; having the right amount and variations of those digital assets; and really figuring out the orchestration, like what segments should see what sort of digital assets.
Q: How can organizations implement a structured approach to testing and optimization?
Maru: We have seen across different clients that everyone is doing some level of A/B testing. But most of the time, that testing is very ad hoc. A lot of times, people go in and out of organizations and teams and organizational knowledge is not retained.
We have built a couple of frameworks that maximize the impact of testing. The first one has a very strong, data-driven hypothesis in a framework, wherein we follow the format of “if, then, because.”
Also, prioritization. Prioritization is also typically very subjective based on effort and impact. So, we follow this prioritization framework to remove subjectivity from prioritization. We use things like whether this element that you’re testing is above the fold and whether it is noticeable in five seconds. This way, you’re ensuring that you’re prioritizing the right tests, which will have the right impact on the overall program.
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The other one is the learning management system. With people going in and out of the organization, you have different business units, you have different teams, everyone is operating in silos.
You’re not able to retain and capitalize on organizational knowledge. So, having a centralized documentation and insight center is a very simple tactic for an organization. Whatever testing and optimization you’re doing, you can have it in one place.
Radin: I think only a growing number of organizations are investing in learning. Career success in the world we’re living in now is going to be much greater for people who invest and continue with learning.
The easy part is being committed to not just creating a learning system. But the hard part is committing to actually using the learning, driving adoption within your team and taking time to look back and explore what worked, what didn’t work, why didn’t it work and how we can make it better.
The impact on your personal effectiveness and on your ability to drive quicker and better results is almost immeasurable. It’s an undervalued source of improved results in almost every business I deal with.
The Role of AI in Accelerating Optimization
Q: How can AI help accelerate the optimization process?
Maru: AI can play a role in different areas and really help elevate the entire process. We have trained AI models to evaluate pages based on these different driver metrics. We’ve built this tool, which considers all of these different factors: relevance, decision criteria, scannability, driving action and performance.
While this model does not completely replace a UX expert, it provides a first cut in terms of gaps in the experience at scale. Instead of having a UX person go through hundreds of pages and benchmark your performance against competitors, this tool can do that right away. You can do it at scale and with a very fast approach.
“Career success in the world we’re living in now is going to be much greater for people who invest and continue with learning.”
— Amy Radin
We’re also testing out an AI-powered idea-generation tool. This tool will consider all your historical tests and current gaps in your experience and provide recommendations on tests that you can run.
Q: How can organizations drive the necessary transformation and change management to support landing page optimization?
Radin: I spent a lot of time figuring out how to deal with the issues of change and getting people on board. Having the data and technology is the easy part. It’s how to get people on board with change.
Whether you’re in a big organization or a midsize organization, the problems are very similar. How do you create that seamless end-to-end experience despite the fact that the organization is siloed and people may operate with different incentives?
I think the key is to start by testing and bringing together that group of allies who want to make the change. Bring them together in a highly collaborative process to start piloting. The reality is that these might be the four steps of your journey, but the real journey is going to be very iterative, maybe two steps forward, one step backward. It’s pretty messy, but in a positive way, because you’re just testing and learning and exploring.
You can move through the phases of piloting, which may involve multiple tests and iterations, to learn enough about the drivers of your financial outcomes to start at least developing a rough estimate of returns.
Ultimately, this leads to a credible conversation with the CMO and people in the finance organization to develop the organizational transformation along the way. This starts back in the pilot phase when you assemble that initial group of people who will help you implement change and make this test successful.
For a longer version of this conversation, listen to “Turbocharging Landing Page Success: Leveraging Advanced Analytics and AI Tools”, a webinar with Jim Marous, available here or wherever you get your podcasts. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Justin Estes is an award-winning writer, strategist, and financial marketing expert with expertise in banking, investments, and fintech. His clients include the NYSE, Franklin Templeton, Credit Karma, Citi and, UBS, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Barrons and ThinkAdvisor as well as The Financial Brand.