Multiple improvements on the Essent website made this utility company grow it's customer base and save costs

When I started my collaboration with Essent in March of 2019, I asked different people around the office which sections of the Essent website they thought could be improved most. Depending who you'd ask, the answer would be different. The e-commerce manager wants to boost his online sales, the marketing team wants to reach a bigger audience and wanted to start with content marketing, The people at customer support needed to optimise the FAQ and contact section,...

To help all these people reach their business goals, I made a plan to work on all these tasks step by step. Over the course of a year I worked on multiple mini projects like the price simulation, the sign-in process, FAQ pages, landing- & product pages.

During the first month, I also invested some time every week to put a Design System in place. This way we were able to keep a consistent look & feel across all sections of the website and have some clear guidelines to help our development team.

One of the first projects I tackled when I started working for Essent, was the price simulator. For a commodity like energy, it's important to give your visitors a correct price as quickly and as easily as possible.

By asking our visitor a series of simple questions, we can calculate his monthly advance and yearly payment. We also took into account the fact that not everybody knows how much electricity or gas they use on a yearly basis. For them, we built in an estimation engine based on some key metrics like the size of their home.

I also took a close look at the old pricing module Essent was using and the analytics they gathered throughout the years. This helped me to group certain questions together or even remove them from our new simulator.

After you calculated your personal price, the next step is to sign up and become an Essent customer. To optimise this part of our user journey, we analysed Hotjar recordings and conducted user interviews. We quickly noticed some areas where we could improve the overall experience.

We improved the ease of use of our forms, error handling and the general loading speed of the different steps in the process.

After improving the main user journey I also worked on landing page optimisations, improvements for the frequently asked questions and contact pages and we kickstarted content marketing for Essent.

Results

• By optimising the salesfunnel, we managed to increase the number of people who sign their contract with direct debit. This helped Essent to reduce late payments and costs associated with reminders and debt collection.
• By nudging customers towards electronic billing we managed to reduce print and mail costs by €300.000 per year.
• Our efforts in content marketing and landig page optimization helped to grow the digital sales by about 10%.