Helping Economist Careers optimise conversion rates

Business challenge

The Economist GMAT Tutor is a market leading adaptive learning platform to help students prepare for the GMAT exam. The platform uses machine-learning algorithms to identify learning habits and tailors practice sessions to make the biggest impact on student's scores.

We were approached to re-design the marketing website to increase conversions and tell an engaging and persuasive story about this innovative product. The challenge was the existing marketing website was already highly optimised and our new design would be A/B tested against the existing solution and would only go live if it increased conversions.

Understanding how students make purchasing decisions

We got started by understanding the product, why it was successful, how it differed from competitors and ultimately why students would make the decision to sign up with GMAT Tutor. We read all customer reviews, both positive and negative to build up a well rounded picture of the product.

Once we had an understanding of purchasing behaviour we analysed the current marketing website and outlined our set of recommendations to work alongside the Economist's ideas.

Feature recommendations

It became clear that aligning the product more closely with The Economist brand would make sense with students tending to try out the product because of the The Economist association.

Not enough emphasis was being placed on customer reviews which were 'outstanding'. With reviews having a significant effect on conversion rates we recommended they be prioritised higher up on landing pages.

Specific product features that made a difference over competing products needed more explanation with easy comparison tools and emphasis on key landing pages.

We were also keen to move from a three field sign up to only asking for an email address to test the impact on conversion rates as well as placing more urgency around price promotions.

Design approach 

As with all projects of this nature we started by creating wireframes to discuss page hierarchy before moving onto more detailed high fidelity designs that could be taken forward into front-end development. We took a mobile first approach to the design that would work across any screen size. We also created page components with A/B testing in mind, so they could easily be rearranged to fit with the Economist Careers teams test, learn and repeat approach to marketing optimisation.

We also designed a new set of email marketing templates and helped the team categorise their blog content into a more useful help and support library of searchable articles that users could dip into at different points in their study. These articles would also act as a great SEO support for google search results. 

Results

We were pleased to see our revised design outperformed the existing website, confirmed by the results of the Economist’s A/B testing and GA data. Once the updates went live we helped the team roll out the design to their sister GRE marketing product and continued to support the team with both online advertising.

We continue to support Economist Careers with the digital design of their marketing initiatives. 

Services provided

• Discovery
• Wireframing & prototyping
• Design direction
• Interaction design