Situation
A mid sized UK foreign exchange and international money transfer firm, with a sister brand handling emigration content for lead generation. Two websites, two audiences (private clients and corporate), one small in-house marketing team. Operating in a crowded category against competitors with much larger budgets, and against comparison sites that owned the top of the funnel.
Challenge
When I started, the digital marketing was a stack of sticking plasters. The homepage was failing several Google webmaster guidelines. PageSpeed sat at 58 out of 100. Organic conversion was running at 0.51%. PPC was busy but inefficient, with bounce rates above 80% on key landing pages. Email had no measurable activity. The internal CRM didn’t push or pull data cleanly. Most of the digital revenue came from a single comparison site referrer, with all the margin and brand risk that implies.
The brief was straightforward. Look at everything, online and offline. Tell us what’s wrong. Then help us fix it.
Approach
The first three months were a full audit. I led the programme of works with another consultant supporting digital marketing and a dev team on the new website build. The output was a single document covering quick wins, a roadmap and red, amber and green priorities.
Then the work shifted. Rather than scope another series of projects, I moved into an embedded retainer of twelve days a month, with monthly reporting and conversion linked bonuses. That structure mattered. It meant I was the joining piece between marketing, IT and the dev partners, and could push the slow internal projects through alongside the obvious tactical work.
The work over four years covered:
- A full CMS migration to Kentico, with 301 redirect mapping that protected organic traffic through the move.
- A new goal architecture in Google Analytics, going from a near blank slate to sixteen plus tracked conversions, including individual account opens, callback requests, currency update sign-ups and PPC specific thank you pages.
- A rebuild of PPC landing pages, with a new agency relationship and proper A/B testing, which led to a four-fold lift in paid conversion over time.
- Persona work that segmented seven distinct buyer types and shaped both content and PPC targeting.
- Email nurturing. The CRM didn’t integrate cleanly with anything, so I designed a manual workaround through MailChimp and a preference centre, then wrote the spec for a proper email marketing system integration. By year four we were running successful manual GDPR campaigns and had the integration roadmap signed off.
- A CRM Dynamics and Click Dimensions specification that put detail behind the reporting requirements the internal teams couldn’t quite articulate themselves.
- GDPR readiness in the run up to May 2018.
- A long internal effort to diversify revenue away from comparison site dependency, which by year four had become the explicit top action on the strategy agenda.
I also did the dull but useful glue work. Monthly reports the wider business could read. Sign-off processes that survived staff turnover. Documentation that meant the next person in the chair could pick up the thread.
Outcome
Across the engagement:
- Organic conversion rose from 0.51% to over 6%.
- Overall site conversion roughly doubled, from 1.6% to a steady 2.7%, with several months hitting 4% or higher.
- PPC conversion went from 0.43% to 1.73% in the first eighteen months, then roughly quadrupled again with the new agency in years three and four.
- Mobile conversions rose from 323 to 801 in the comparison window.
- Bounce rate dropped from around 35% to between 14% and 18%.
- Email moved from a non-channel to a measurable contributor, with 175 conversions inside a single six month review window.
- Facebook ad driven sessions grew from 39 to 394 on a deliberately small test budget.
- The site went from failing Google guidelines to a clean technical platform with proper analytics and a CMS the internal team could run.
The harder to measure outcome, and the one I am prouder of, is what the internal team had at the end. A working CMS they understood. A reporting cadence that survived staff changes. A pipeline of work that wasn’t a queue of emergencies. That is the difference between fixing things and building something that keeps working when the consultant goes home.