Turning a brochure site into something that qualifies its own leads

The situation

Friends Capital advise on a wide range of things: first-time buyer mortgages, equity release, remortgaging, protection, and specialist lending for people with bad credit or self-employed income. Very different situations, very different worries.

The site treated all of them identically. Every visitor met the same information and the same long, generic contact form. Some got lost. Others started the form, realised how much it wanted, and left.

What I did

Rebuilt the site around the journey rather than the service list, with service-specific multi-step forms at the centre of it.

Somebody remortgaging and somebody enquiring about life insurance now follow different paths, each asking for a few relevant details at a time rather than everything at once. It removes the wall of fields that kills so many enquiries, and it means that by the time someone submits, the adviser already knows the enquiry type, their goals and their basic position.

The forms were then wired directly into the CRM, so every enquiry is logged and assigned automatically and nurturing starts the moment someone clicks submit. Their 4.9-star Google reviews were built into the site as well, since in financial services the decision to enquire is mostly a decision about trust.

What happened

The advisers get warmer, better-qualified leads, because the forms filter naturally rather than by rejecting anyone. The Sheffield team stopped re-keying enquiry details by hand, which is dull work that also introduces errors. And first conversations now start from a position of knowing something about the person, rather than beginning again from scratch.

This one is qualitative rather than a chart. The honest reason is that the change is about the calibre of enquiries rather than the count, and that shows up in the advisers' diaries long before it shows up in analytics.