See how a straightforward redesign can boost conversions by up to 56.75% for your Lead Gen business.

Case study: Maleads.com

Maleads is a special lead generation agency focused on home improvement, limited to serving to a specific number of customers. To boost revenue and provide top-notch leads, the agency exclusively operates in Europe. They’re now expanding to develop a lead management application as a SAAS, which was previously only available to their customers.

My responsibilities: Research, customer interviews, user testing, persona development, wire-framing, UI design

Scope of work: Landing page, web application

Reached goal: 56.75% increase in leads

Back story:

So, here’s the story of how Adam and I got into this exciting journey. Back in the day, we were both rocking it at the same performance agency. Yours truly was the UI designer, and Adam, well, he was the media buying maestro. The agency itself was buzzing with lead generation gigs across different sectors, from finance to home improvement. Good times..

After Adam ventured into his own project, Leadsgo (now Maleads), we stayed in touch, catching up on video games and chatting about work and life. Adam was running a PPC campaign on Google at the time, and you know how those CPCs can get crazy. He was using a basic WordPress template from envato, and although he had decent ROI, he wasn’t delving deep into analytics. His campaign was getting him some customers, but the expenses were piling up.

One day, Adam opened up about the challenges he was facing — rising CPCs, low conversion rates, and the temptation to ditch paid ads. That’s when I decided to take a peek at his landing page and sales funnel. I couldn’t help but exclaim, “Broooo, how does this even convert?!” The landing page lacked a clear CTA, looked spammy, and had no social proof. I suggested implementing Google Analytics, adding tracking to the CTA, and using tools like Hotjar and Smartlook for insights as a start to detect pain points.

Adam had this notion that design wasn’t crucial when you had traffic, and traditional designs were effective. We had a little friendly disagreement, and I explained the importance of user experience and design thinking. Convinced, Adam asked me to redesign the digital phase of the project, application and landing page. However, I was swamped and had to decline. I did offer to help in the empathise and ideation phase, and we left it at that for the day.

That night, I couldn’t shake off the thought, especially since I lacked a case study for my portfolio. With Adam already driving traffic, I saw it as a golden opportunity for a project with A/B testing potential. The next morning, I emailed Adam a simple, “Bro, I’ll do the design.” Adam was thrilled.

Honestly, I didn’t have a good reason to say no, so I took a short break from my work on CRO for ecommerce stores and jumped into this exciting project.

Problems

• User Experience Issues, The current landing page has usability issues that hinder a smooth and intuitive user experience. Include complex navigation, unclear information hierarchy, lack of mobile responsiveness.
• High Bounce Rate: Upon integrating heatmaps and analytics, we found that 65% of visitors leave the landing page shortly after arriving, it suggests a problem with engagement. This could be caused by unappealing visuals, or irrelevant content.
• Limited Trust and Credibility: The landing page lacks trust signals such as customer testimonials, reviews, or industry certifications, Fail to establish credibility with visitors.
• I didn’t have a precise understanding of the demographics of Maleads customers, except that a majority were involved in home improvement.
• Adam was determined about sticking with WordPress and the theme he had chosen, as he was more familiar with it. Therefore, the design needed to seamlessly integrate into that existing theme.
• The application wasn’t catering to a broader audience, necessitating a redesign to compete effectively with other SaaS lead management solutions.

Goals

We wanted the new landing page to do more than just get people to visit — we aimed to turn those visits into actual booked calls. Our plan was to design something that grabs attention and feels trustworthy, which is super important in the home improvement sector where there’s a lot of competition. And, of course, we made sure not to mess up the branding we already had in place.

For the web application, the objective was to improve its intuitiveness for first-time users providing a trial, our goal was to increase the conversion rate from 7-day trial users to committed 6-month customers.

Initial research

I jumped into a quick research on home improvement lead generation, pulling from my past experience in the field. I wanted to figure out who actually uses these services and why. I checked out the current pages, like the sales page, videos, sales emails, and user comments, to get a feel for what’s happening.

To gain a broader perspective, I explored competitors’ landing pages, noting their effective strategies and areas that needed improvement.

Interviewing Adam:

Armed with my research, I created a list of about 10 questions for Adam. These questions spanned topics such as the lead generation process, updates on PPC, Meta, and LinkedIn campaigns, insights into the customer base, and general updates on the home improvement industry. I aimed to understand what Adam thought his service accomplished and who his target customers were. Often, founders may not fully grasp the specific problems they solve or the “easy wins” in their industry, and in our case, this seemed partially true.

Customer interviews:

Selecting five users from Adam’s customer list, we conducted 30-minute google meet interviews to explore who these individuals were, their professions, preferences for Adam’s services, the importance of the management tool, and their likes or dislikes about it.

Which specific niche sectors derive the greatest benefits from Maleads services? For example, are there particular areas such as roofing, plumbing, interior design, and so on, that find the services particularly useful compared to others.

More research:

Building on our initial findings, I proposed a survey campaign on Meta and LinkedIn, retargeting Maleads visitors from past campaigns. This survey aimed to gather insights on whether individuals attempted the service on their own, the size of their businesses, the challenges they faced in acquiring leads, and more.

Personas Emergence:

Combining the interviews and survey results, we identified 2 to 3 typical “personas” that stood out. Armed with a comprehensive understanding of the problems Maleads services solved, we could now shift our focus to the design phase.

Landing Page

In the initial phase of the redesign, we took the old page and gave it a modern and trustworthy makeover. Now, I get it — you might be thinking, “It’s a short page, like a flyer or a poster?” I hear you. But here’s the deal: with effective and to-the-point copywriting, it can be incredibly powerful, especially in this type of business, considering the behaviour and demographics of the chosen persona, even if it’s just 6,000 pixels long!

Customer Interviews:

We conducted another round of 5 customer interviews, this time with new small business owners who hadn’t used a lead service before but were considering it in the near future. This was to get a better understanding of their perspective, especially since some had already done Google searches on this type of business and checked out a couple of agencies.

Low-fidelity ( Sketching, Wireframing ) & Copywriting

Using the insights from these interviews, along with those from our initial research, and some sketches on my paper note, I created wireframes and sales copy (with the assistance of a copywriter from Upwork) specifically tailored to customers visiting the website in the early phases of awareness.

And yes, before you say anything, I still rely on sketching with good old paper and pen! It’s a practice I’ve stuck with because I enjoy putting my ideas down this way. With some soothing music in my ears, I let the pen and paper guide me as I play around, especially when creating layouts and figuring out different elements.

Design

After completing the wireframes and sales copy, I created a modern design for the landing page, keeping it simple.

We installed heatmaps through Hotjar on the existing design to track visitor behaviour, like how far they scrolled on each page, what they clicked, and where they tended to drop off. However, we realised that the current design didn’t have many anomalies that heatmaps could highlight, so this part didn’t provide much insight. We also integrated Google Analytics, where we checked if all the goals were correctly set and looked for any conversion glitches in the funnel that could be easily addressed.

A/B Testing

Adam worked his media buying magic and applied a secret sauce through an A/A/B test, evaluating different paid traffic sources (PPC, Meta, LinkedIn, and affiliates) using the new, modern landing page.

Why did he choose an A/A/B test instead of an A/B test? In an A/A/B split test, he directed 20% of traffic to version A, 40% to another version A for double control, and 40% to version B, our new long-form sales page.

After 4 weeks, we obtained statistically significant results.

The new modern landing page outperformed the old landing page by:

76% on PPC

74% on Meta

49% on LinkedIn

28% on Affiliate

Our hypothesis was validated: the results from the initial split-tests were crystal clear. The newly designed landing page consistently converted better than the old long-form page, as expected.

SaaS Lead Management Application

Now, it was the final leg of my design journey — the redesign of the Lead Management Application. As Adam ventured into SaaS, offering a comprehensive solution for lead management, including the seamless transition of leads from cold to hot, tracking, and follow-ups.

The objective was straightforward yet challenging to execute. We aimed to enhance the web application’s intuitiveness, particularly for first-time users. Additionally, we sought to introduce innovative features not commonly found in conventional lead management softwares.

Testing an Existing Application with Users

We conducted tests on an existing lead management web application, involving five of Adam’s customers who were familiar with Leads CRM but hadn’t used one before.

Adam and I collaborated to establish a goal. For each potential customer, the main objective was to efficiently acquire leads, make calls, handle data, and automate the entire follow-up process.

The tests provided quick and insightful information on where our focus should be during the redesign. As we delved into the redesign process, the tests highlighted that some elements we initially brainstormed were challenging for brand-new users. This discovery emphasises the importance of ongoing research in refining our design.

Wireframing, Prototyping & Prototype Testing

User testing provided valuable insights into the flaws and glitches of the application. Armed with this information, I restructured the information, grouping features based on their frequency of use by actual users. A fresh visual hierarchy was also established to emphasise important actions and provide users with a clearer understanding of their progress in automating leads.

Drawing from user test insights, my experience, and heuristic methodology, I refined the user flow. Wireframes were connected to clickable prototypes, enabling new user tests with revised goals and participants.

The subsequent tests immediately showcased significant improvements in goal completion time and user progression clarity. After the second round of testing, some adjustments were made to the visual hierarchy, but the flow was now solidified.

Moving forward, I collaborated with Adam to assess the development cost versus improvement for the new features. As an ongoing project, continuous additions to the application are in progress, with me serving as the primary designer and researcher for Adam’s business and customer base.

Design

Subsequently, I translated our refined prototype into a visually stunning design, utilising the same design system implemented for the new landing page.

Results

From the outset, I was confident that the redesign would significantly enhance Adam’s conversion rates. Over the next six months, my redesign increased Adam’s business revenue by 56% compared to the preceding six months, resulting in additional profit margins for two quarters. The project is ongoing, and we continue to refine and enhance the application before the SaaS launch.

7- Takeaways

Once again, we’ve found that the more research you conduct at the project’s outset, the smoother it is to create a design that performs well in the end.

While user testing might initially seem like a time-consuming endeavour, especially for interfaces that appear obvious and straightforward to us, these tests consistently provide valuable insights and are almost certain to yield several “easy wins.”

Skipped some of the fancy UX terms that we did, like journey mapping and persona selection (“Meet Jack, he’s 30 and loves Sunday evening football”), to keep this case study punchy and packed with what matters most. Your time’s precious, and there are countless case studies showcasing that whole process.