Don't just spend. Fix.

The other day I was talking with a marketer in the financial services space who was sharing that they weren’t getting enough people through their online application. He described their app as like something from the 1990’s, which was causing significant drop off issues. Then, almost in the same breath, he said they wanted to invest more in top of the funnel activities to increase the number of people hitting the application, thereby hopefully increasing the number of people getting through the process.

The marketer in me thought, “that’s fixing the wrong problem.” The budget owner in me thought, “that’s going to be a lot of money.” And the agency partner in me said, “Why pay over and over for low performing traffic, when you can make a single investment in fixing the application and reap the rewards for moons to come?”

I thought back to work we did with College Ave Student Loans and CampusDoor where we optimized their mobile application, reducing time to complete from about 15 minutes to 5. The results were dramatic, with application completions doubling overnight. Obviously, that greatly improved the ROI, and it made the media drivers more valuable. Interestingly, it also meant they could reduce their out-of-pocket spend and still get better financial performance than before.

Creating a traffic driving campaign is almost always going to take less time and organizational focus than fixing a legacy problem with a digital experience. I suspect that’s the primary reason marketers turn to it first, rather than tackling the downstream issue. Another issue is that the person who owns the marketing budget doesn’t always have responsibility for the digital experiences. But in the long run all a company’s dollars —including media spend, creative fees, and site investments—will go much, much further by fixing UX issues in its experience. It’s a truth we see time and again with our clients.

Ready to get serious about increasing ROI by tackling that UX issue that’s holding back your performance? Drop us a note at connect@shiny.agency and let’s chat.

This article was also published on LInkedIn.