Justin Cox
Senior UX Designer
Rasmussen Referral
A landing page redesign that led to a 68% conversion increase
Paid Search | Conversion Optimization | Wireframing | Visual Design
About Rasmussen University
Rasmussen University is a private for-profit university with multiple locations throughout the United States. I was brought in to evaluate an under-performing campaign initiative and was then tasked with improving it.
The Problem
Rasmussen had a refer-a-friend program that was doing well at on-campus table events, but the referral webpage was vastly under-performing.
After auditing the current page and having a quick discovery with the Ras team, it became clear that a proper content flow was not being established on the page. This was causing users to bounce instead of converting because they weren’t getting the information they needed.
In this example, you can see the old refer-a-friend page broken down by component type. By breaking down the page, issues with content flow become more clear. As confirmed during a meeting with the team, this page had never performed any iterative testing and was laid out using a “Throw it all the wall and see if it sticks” methodology.
In order to improve Ras’ campaign performance, it was crucial to address these issues and test my solution live.
In the low-fidelity wireframe, you can see the breakdown of content is more streamlined. The page is more direct and ‘to-the-point’, but more importantly, the page now gives users a clear view of of what refer-a-friend is and how it can benefit them.
Since most traffic is driven from in-person events, we greet the user with the form they need immediately. This is to efficiently serve our users who already intend to convert so that we don’t lose conversions unnecessarily.
For anyone else, we want to carefully plan how we should guide this user through information in order to convert them. Firstly, we tell them exactly what they need to know if they came across this page without being informed in person, so upon the users’ scroll, they are met with a section explaining what this program is. Then, we tell them what they gain from this. We follow that up with social proof, then provide the fine print. After that, we attempt to collect a conversion.
High-Fidelity Design & Live Testing
I expanded upon the wireframe design by adding high-fidelity graphics and reflecting Rasmussen’s existing brand styles. I then updated the content to the new initiative, preparing the page for live testing.
After proven successful, the page was launched alongside the new initiative and closely monitored for three months.
68%
increase in on-page conversions. Translating to $70 million dollars avg. potential revenue over the three month observational period.
“I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Justin on the creation of a new web page for our referral program. This program drives a ton of high converting inquiries for the university, and has lots of eyes on it. The landing page is where more than 100 assets point to, so it needed to be PERFECT. I cannot express enough how impressed I am with the results. From the initial consultation to the final layout, Justin demonstrated a level of professionalism, creativity, and dedication that truly set him apart.
What truly sets Justin apart was his dedication to the success of this page. He used the prior pages performance metrics, as well as my teams opinions on the content that would perform best and made a page that was visually appealing, easy to navigate and utilized all of the content we wanted to see, while ensuring the pages functionality and intuitiveness for users who would land on the page without enough prior information to understand the program.
Thanks to Justin’s expertise and dedication, Rasmussen now has a referral landing page that not only looks amazing but also delivers an exceptional user experience. I have received nothing but rave reviews from members and leaders throughout both Rasmussen and APEI about how awesome the page looks. “
-Stephanie Eggerth
Senior Manager - Journey & Audience Strategy | Rasmussen University
Get In Touch!
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