Bottom of the Funnel Focus: This article is the final part of a three part series: “Why Financial Calculators are crucial to the Customer Journey” Check out Part One: How to Make Your Website Traffic Soar and Part Two: How to Captivate Your Website Visitors
The customer journey consists of three main phases: attract, engage, and convert. While getting people to your site and providing them with information and tools to pique their interest is important, the end goal is to get people to take action. Increasing conversions at the bottom of the funnel means you’ve gained their trust and earned their business. For a bank or credit union website, that means you are getting more applications online, seeing more qualified leads, and setting up more appointments.
If people aren’t converting after finding and spending time on your website, then you run the risk of losing potential customers to a competitor. So, the big question: How can you increase conversions on your website?
More and more people are expecting to open accounts and submit applications online, right on a company’s website. In fact, it’s projected that 83.5% of US consumers will access their bank accounts digitally in 2021, according to research by eMarketer. That’s 8 out of 10 people!
That’s why finding ways to offer a personalized experience that takes your customer from top-of-the-funnel interest all the way down to qualified lead/customer is crucial.
Financial calculators have proven to be an effective way to take someone from first visit to MQL. Here’s why…
Calculators allow someone to get personalized answers, which increases the likelihood of them providing their email to get more information and become a lead for you. Studies have shown that financial calculators capture more leads than gated whitepapers or just asking visitors to fill out a contact form.
Lead generation and customer acquisition costs are very high, so you don’t want too many unqualified leads clogging the marketing pipeline. Calculators are an effective way to pre-qualify your leads. Users are sharing details about their financial situation, and searching for specific answers – for example, they might want to crunch some numbers to see what a home loan will cost them each month. In other words, by interacting with a calculator, you can feel confident that they are not randomly landing on your site. They are coming with built-in buyer intent.
The Customer Journey is a series of questions that need to be answered. Calculators are a tool for providing personalized answers in the right place, at the right time, while also helping you to generate leads. According to one study by Outgrow, conversion rates from interactive content are nearly 30% higher than your typical landing pages. And another eye-opening stat from Kapost found that interactive content generates conversions “moderately” or “very well” 70% of the time, compared to just 36% for passive content.
Paired with strong CTAs (calls to action), calculators can line up next steps for visitors after they provide the answers the customers were seeking. Banks and credit unions can decide what they want those steps to be, whether it’s to ask for their email or phone number so your sales team can follow up, fill out a request form to contact a banker, or go straight to an application. With a well-designed calculator experience, you’ll garner a predictable, scalable lead generation funnel for online account openings. Follow-up sales calls (if using) will also be more efficient.
Chimney calculators increase applications and support digital account openings. For starters, calculator visitors show 7x more intent than standard website visitors. Customer case studies also reveal the effectiveness of calculators on conversion. For example, a Chimney mortgage calculator generated 75 more mortgage applications in just three weeks for Direct Federal Credit Union.
When highly engaged visitors are provided with valuable content and a customized experience, they will feel more comfortable continuing to the final step of the customer journey with you.
Are you ready to ramp up your content offerings with financial calculators?
Take a look at our calculators page to see how they can increase conversions for you today.
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