This article reflects information as of 2020. For the latest details, please contact us.

Case Study

Case Study: Learning from the Industry Most Serious About Conversion

2020.10.14

Written by: Tomohiro Koizumi, Representative Director, tentus inc.

Q. Which government agency thinks most seriously about Japan's tomorrow?

A. The Meteorological Agency.

That's a corny dad joke, but companies whose sole business — or main line of business — is a given field bring an extremely high level of seriousness to it.

The way companies that sell in physical stores approach EC does, I feel, tend to be a little less intense compared with companies that do EC as their sole business. (Of course, there are also plenty of store-based companies who are fully fired up about it!)

This time I'd like to present, as a case study, a company that thinks most seriously about conversion — the rate at which visitors to a site complete a purchase or application.

Improving conversion rates from user insight

Conversion-improvement projects are often driven by marketing-based approaches centered on attitude change and the customer journey, or by A/B testing that measures conversion numerically and iterates through trial and error. This time, though, I'd like to introduce an approach that emphasizes user insight.

If the Meteorological Agency thinks most seriously about Japan's tomorrow, then what kind of company thinks most seriously about conversion?

EC-only retailers and digital-only companies are very easy-to-understand examples, and they too improve conversion from all sorts of angles.

The requirement one client asked us to handle was a site renewal aimed at improving the conversion rate.

I can't write the detailed figures, but that client was a company where:

• The LTV (Life Time Value — the total revenue obtainable from one customer over their entire lifetime) per user was high

• The share of access from mobile devices was very high

• Monthly ad spend was on the level of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yen

For a company like that, improving the conversion rate by even about 0.1% ultimately brings a very large profit — so of course they're serious.

What industry do you think it was?

The request came from a consumer-finance company.

The unique concerns of consumer-finance firms

What image comes to mind when you hear "consumer finance"?

There are positive images too, of course, but negative ones stand out. It's also a fact that in the past various news stories emerged, and there was very heavy media bashing over interest-rate problems.

As an industry, they've apparently made all sorts of efforts to dispel that.

The easiest example to grasp is the birth of the "bank-affiliated consumer finance" category, created by joining hands with banks.

Because the negative image of consumer finance stems from the low trust of the industry and its companies, the aim was to raise the trust of the brand itself by partnering with banks, which carry a high sense of trust.

And that seems to have gone quite well.

Who is this sense of trust meant to appeal to?

Securing LE0 users and the sense of trust

I hadn't really heard the term much in other industries, but LE0 stands for Leasing Experience 0 — in other words, users who have never borrowed.

Incidentally, it's read "el-ee-zero."

In the finance industry, securing these LE0 users, who have never borrowed from anywhere, is treated as extremely important, and the most crucial factor in securing them was the sense of trust.

The client was not bank-affiliated, so the very important point was: how can we instill a sense of trust in the LE0 user visiting the site for the first time?

Quantitative and qualitative research

We derived the quantitative research from analysis of existing-user data and insight surveys, and the qualitative research from group interviews. The data is highly sensitive, so I'll omit the details.

As a result, across the various surveys, it became clear that the points that generate a sense of trust and reassurance differ greatly depending on how far along the user is in becoming aware of their needs.

The actual production

Once you get this far, the rest is easy.

We divided the site into zones, plotted which information to highlight based on how conscious the user was of their needs, and created UX-conscious pathways.

For each pathway, we compiled the necessary information and placed it as content.

Well — the usual stuff.

Since it's about conversion, of course we improved the application form as well.

As a result of all this, the new-application rate improved significantly.

Summary

I've summarized it simply this time, but reaching this conclusion takes an enormous amount of time and money. This project took over six months.

That's exactly why, by thoroughly benchmarking the company that thinks most seriously about whatever problem you face, you can shortcut and learn a good portion of that know-how.

Of course you shouldn't just copy — but it's a chance to absorb their perspective and way of thinking. So when you look at a site's design, I hope you'll adopt the viewpoint of "what intent lies behind doing it this way?"