Online Application Form Optimizations

Situation

As a customer-focused marketer, I search for ways to improve customer experience. CNG’s loan applications weren’t optimized. This was mainly because the product team who was responsible for the applications due to limited capacity.
Besides improving UX, my main concern was that my content strategy and paid campaigns were negatively impacted by the poor experience applicants were exposed to. This was a great opportunity to lower my campaigns’ CPAs. To get this project green-lit, I needed to influence the right people.

Action

I began to proactively audit our online applications and reached out to the product and dev teams for application QA credentials. I analyzed the online applications of a group of competitors and identified what best practices were missing. This I considered low-hanging fruit. Then I conducted a data analysis of our own applications using Google Analytics 4 and Mouseflow. I learned where users dropped off the funnel and what friction they encountered.
Finally, I put a deck together with my findings, recommendations, and UX mockups that I created in Adobe XD. The presentation included optimization testing recommendations broken down by iterations. I presented it to the Chief Growth Officer, and then a group of about 30 stakeholders spanning from various departments. I received approval to move forward, with myself as the lead.

Results

After the first month of going live with the optimizations, the application abandonment rate was reduced by 16% and applications increased by 10%. Each iteration resulted in an improvement in these KPIs, and UI/UX was improved for customers.