Conversion Rate Optimisation for the Finance Industry
By Earl Rennie, Director of Digital Strategy
4 min readFirst published . Refreshed .
Conversion rate optimisation for banks and credit unions comes down to six things. Make the site feel safe, keep forms short, match landing pages to the ads that fund them, capture the not-ready-yet visitor, work properly on mobile, and personalize what returning customers see. Institutions that get these right convert more of the visitors they already have, without spending another dollar on advertising.
Over 60% of customers want their bank to be as personalized as Amazon or a personal shopper. Sit with that for a second. The institution holding your money is now expected to know you the way your favourite store does.
Most people walk into a branch a handful of times a year, but they interact with their bank through a phone screen up to 20 times a month. Every one of those visits is a chance to convert, and most of them are wasted. The credit and lending industry actually has the second highest lead conversion rate of any industry at 5.6%, behind only job training. Flip that number around and it means nearly 95 in every 100 interested visitors leave without finishing what they came to do. That is the gap conversion rate optimisation closes.
After more than a decade of work with financial institutions across the region, we keep coming back to the same six priorities.
Make It Feel Safe Before You Ask for Anything.
People are handing over the most sensitive information they own, so show them the security is real. Display recognisable trust marks, explain in plain language how their data is protected, and if you offer guaranteed reimbursement for compromised transactions, say so clearly.
One more reassurance goes further than most institutions realise. Tell applicants that an enquiry will not affect their credit rating. It is a quiet worry that stops plenty of finance applications before they start.
Fix Your Forms, They Are Costing You the Most.
The average online form abandonment rate in financial services sits at 79%. The two reasons people quit are the same everywhere. The form is too long, or it asks for too much personal information too early.
Keep forms short and only request what you need at that point in the relationship. Tell people upfront how long it will take and what they will need on hand. Show a progress indicator so they can see the finish line. And let applicants save and finish later, because a saved application with an email address attached is a lead you can gently follow up, not a lost visitor.
Match Every Landing Page to the Ad That Paid for It.
One of the fastest ways to waste ad spend is sending a click on a loan offer to your homepage. The visitor came for one thing. Give them a landing page about that thing, with a single call to action and nothing else competing for attention.
Then test it. Form position, wording, colours and copy quality all move the number, and small lifts compound when the traffic is paid.
Use Micro Conversions to Catch the Not-Ready-Yet.
Most visitors will not apply for anything on their first visit, and that does not make them worthless. Offer smaller steps instead. A newsletter signup, a rates guide, a loan calculator.
The goal is the first connection, ideally an email address, so the conversation can continue after they leave. In finance the decision cycle is long. Build for it.
Make Mobile Work as Hard as Your Branch.
Your analytics will tell you what people actually do on your site from their phones, so find out before you optimize. Then make it effortless. Larger form fields, fast pages, and the correct input types, so a phone number field brings up the number pad instead of the full keyboard.
Small courtesies like that are the difference between a completed application and an abandoned one.
Get Ready for Personalisation.
This is where the compounding edge lives.
McKinsey's research on personalization found that basic programs lift revenue by 5 to 10 percent, while fully transformed institutions see up to 25 percent growth, acquisition costs cut by as much as half, and marketing efficiency up 10 to 30 percent. One example worth knowing, the Credit Union of Texas integrated third party data into its CRM to personalize its messaging and saw a 300 percent increase in home equity and mortgage applications and a 20 percent lift in auto loan leads within the first month.
Personalization is a program, not a plugin, but every step toward it pays.
Financial institutions hold something most industries would kill for, inherent trust. Conversion rate optimisation is how you stop leaking that advantage one abandoned form at a time. The institutions that treat it as an ongoing discipline pull ahead, and they stay there.
