- Results
- Driving Mortgage Leads...
Cardinal Credit Union
Driving Mortgage Leads in an Unprecedented Market
Delegator teamed up with a Cleveland-based credit union to help optimize their landing page for conversion tracking with strict compliance guidelines.
2020-2022
Banking
B2C
Services Provided:
- Paid Search, Social, and Display Campaign Creation
- Audience & Creative Testing
- Ad Writing
- Reporting & Analysis
- Strategy Consultations
- Conversion Tracking
- Custom Landing Page Development
- Keyword & Audience Research
The Client
Cardinal Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative that has been providing financial services to residents of nine counties in the Mentor/Cleveland area for more than half a century.
The Opportunity
As loan rates dropped to record lows, Cardinal Credit Union wanted to leverage the power of digital marketing to generate additional refinancing applications. Cardinal CU already had a landing page that led to a secure application portal, but they wanted to hire Delegator to help them navigate the world of paid advertising to promote their offerings.
The first hurdle Delegator ran into was setting up conversion tracking on their landing page. We needed to be able to track the success of their advertising campaigns, but the compliance regulations that apply to financial institutions meant it wouldn’t be possible to track applicants after they began the process. Undeterred Delegator, coordinating with Cardinal CU’s internal IT team, set the tracking event for the ads to log whenever applicants clicked the “Start Application” button on their website, giving the ad platforms an event to optimize toward.
Delegator launched the ads, and the data rolled in. The ad campaigns were connecting with their audience. There was lots of engagement — especially from social media — but every time Cardinal CU cross-checked the applications, there were no matches. No one was completing the applications.
Given the sensitive nature of financial services advertising, we knew we needed to find someone we could trust to do it right. Delegator fit the bill perfectly – they were knowledgeable, professional and, above all, effective.
— Mario Duvnjak, Chief Operating OfficerThe Plan
Delegator could see the interest was there — people were interested in the refinancing options Cardinal CU offered because they were clicking through from the landing page to the application — but clearly something about the application process was keeping them from completing it. Cardinal CU needed a way to turn their marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads, and to do that they needed more information about who their leads were.
Cardinal CU needed a second, new landing page that captured the leads’ information for them to follow up on — not just with ad targeting, but with actual conversation.
Delegator brought in their conversion tracking and data analysis specialists who came up with an elegant solution: build a new landing page that “started the application” without starting the application. Instead, it would give Cardinal CU’s Mortgage Lenders enough information to get in contact with the applicants and walk them through the process, not only to help them finish the application, but to show off what it means to use a local credit union.
Direct Response Leads
160+ New Leads
Conversion Rate
The Results
On their first landing page, Cardinal CU was getting the most engagement from social media — Facebook, especially. But after getting the second version of the landing page in place, and as our partnership continues, it became clear that search ads, rather than social ads, were driving the highest quality leads.
This is because search allows far more intent-focused targeting, whereas social is outbound marketing — only allowing us to target a particular type of person we think might be interested in Cardinal CU’s products. Even though the cost per click on the keywords we targeted is extremely high, as competition is fierce, it made more sense to spend extra for quality clicks that lead to qualified leads than to simply get clicks that result in bad leads. We were only able to learn this by developing the second landing page that allowed Cardinal CU to follow-through with their customers.
With the success of the second page, we were able to optimize it even further and increase conversion rate and direct response leads.
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