Persona Homes
Persona Homes, the home building arm for the social housing enterprise Home Group builds new homes across the country, with all profits from new home sales being reinvested to help provide housing, care and support for vulnerable people across the UK.
We were tasked with increasing the sales conversion rate, driving more leads to the sales and marketing team. We did this by enhancing the user experience for potential customers looking for a new home to buy at every stage in the process and across multiple ownership types.
To date, we’ve increased the conversion rate by 266%.
With Parallax’s help and expertise we were able to redesign the site in a way that really showcased the rebranded offering but importantly, alongside that, it really started to get results with driving more leads via the website. Enhancing our enquiry form saw both the number of leads and conversion rate increase, hitting and surpassing our FY22 target.
Problem
When analysing the data and behavioral analytics, the home page, development and plot pages were underperforming, and as key pages in the user journey to making an enquiry we were brought on board to support the internal efforts from a UX and UI design perspective. So we started here as a way of quickly increasing conversions with it being so close to making an enquiry.
Challenge
We gave ourselves a goal, to ‘Transform the Persona Homes online sales journey with simplicity and transparency to improve the customer experience and increase leads’. This shared goal worked really well in aligning teams and decision making.
We ran a collaborative UX workshop with senior stakeholders across the business, from marketing to sales, in order to build a big picture of users queries, friction points and market trends. This was key to driving improvement areas and understanding the severity of them, so we could go away and develop a robust optimisation strategy.
One of the key reasons for this success is the way Parallax are able to work collaboratively with the in house product and development teams. They seamlessly integrate with the team making it feel like one team with clear responsibilities, deliverables and milestones to meet.
Solution
In order to deliver value early we started by improving the homepage design and storytelling to position Persona Homes as a credible and supportive home builder to buy from, clearly articulating the benefits of their offer and the organisational purpose and value proposition.
We developed five clear work streams ranging from tools they needed to stop them leaving the site, right through to content about aftercare so they knew from the initial enquiry what the process was.
Working in agile, we got to work quickly to start to improve the experience. We started by understanding user needs as well as those from the sales and marketing teams and using this insight to create effective content and functionality roadmaps.
We broke down these work streams into actionable next steps that we could take to improve the primary metric, but also other metrics such as time on page and pages visited for example, that when improved, make a big difference to the user experience.
We’ve overhauled the development and plot pages with refined content, new interface layouts and a simpler enquiry journey, all having an impact on increasing conversions.
We’re continuing to work closely with Persona Homes to improve their customer experience, we’re currently building an after sales portal so that customers can access all their documents, report any issues and in the build up to moving in; get updates on how things are progressing.
Since re-launching the site we have had some great feedback including from the new non-executive director on the development committee within Home Group who said it was one of the best new build property websites he had seen.
This is just the start of the journey for Persona Homes and we look forward to continuing to work with Parallax to continuously improve our offering.