enhancing the

application experience

Fidelity Bank found that although their digital campaigns were driving a high volume of traffic to their website, their mortgage originators weren’t seeing the same number of valuable submissions as a response. There was clearly a disconnect between clicks on the Apply Now CTA and actual mortgage application submissions. Pannos Marketing stepped in to be their strategic partner and help the bank solve the disconnect.

The Ask
Fidelity Bank wanted to decrease the overall drop-off rate within the application, driving more users to the ‘submit’ page.

The Answer
Pannos worked with the bank to implement cross-domain tracking. We submitted a test application to review the functionality and experience of the application and from there suggested three main adjustments to the application to help improve the drop-off that occurring from page 1 to the submit page.

We implemented cross-domain tracking focused on pageviews to gauge user progress within the application. Next, we added tags to track scroll data, event interactions, and a cookie preserver to give us a more holistic view of application performance. Finally, we tested the original application’s functionality and overall experience and found several issues that were affecting the user journey, including inconsistent question flow and intrusive declaration explanations required to proceed.

We recommended that the client reorder the flow of questions to keep pages and content intuitively grouped and remove the required declaration explanations as we saw most of the user drop-offs happening in this specific section.

The client worked with their mortgage provider to revamp the application, enhancing the overall flow and structure, keeping each section grouped properly to help ease unnecessary repeated questions and confusion. The client also took our recommendation to remove the requirement of an explanation on certain declarations.

Along will the application adjustments, we added a custom cookie preserver to place accountability on sources that could be driving traffic. The preserver allows us to retain first-part cookie data showing which source and medium users came from and to successfully attribute loan applications to various marketing efforts.

After the adjustments were made to the application, the application completion rate increased 24,067% from the original 0.3% to an average of 72.5%. Since the implementation of our cookie tracking code, we saw that 14 submissions came from paid campaigns in September, 18 in October.