How I applied heuristic evaluation & principles of persuasion to increase leads by 40%

Start with what you know
I began with a basic heuristic review of high performing templates to get an understanding of how we were communicating to highly motivated requests for meeting with missionaries. From that evaluation, I was able to recognize opportunities to increase trust.

This review yielded two main areas of opportunity for improvement.

1. Basic visual design needed work in the form of communication hierarchy and adding "joy" to the experience.
2. A shift from a highly transactional experience to one of persuasion.

Our process requires a lot of trust
The choice to learn more about a church is not as simple as signing up for a new phone plan. There are considerable social implications surrounding religious beliefs. This often has the effect of a heightened emotional state, or even anxiety, around the decision to continue with the process of learning more with missionaries. When someone followed an ad to our landing pages, they fell into two primary categories. The first was a person demonstrating a high intent to schedule an appointment. The second included everybody else. In this case we treat them as those who aren't yet prepared to commit. We decided to lean into concepts of generosity and reciprocation to alleviate concerns and build trust.

To do this

• We added relevant content to help determine if the service was actually relevant.
• We ensured that messaging was consistent from ad through landing page to onboarding with missionaries.
• We shifted tone from "signup now" to "how can we be of service?"
• We strove to honor the autonomy or agency of the individual as they became more comfortable with the subject matter prior to commitment.
• We utilized multivariant testing to validate our assumptions and hone our messaging.

We borrowed from a lot of experience and known design patterns for this project proving that telemetry data and basic heuristics can take you a long way. While this template redesign was a terrific success, we don't know exactly why. When we applied similar tactics to other content types, we did not achieve the same results. This lead us as a team to shift our research strategy to include qualitative research methods earlier in our process.