Surround Sales Site
Project Overview
Timeline: 2019 – ongoing
Tools: Adobe XD, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Usability Hub and Hotjar for testing
Platform: Inhouse developers
Deliverables: The sales site was originally envisioned as more of a brochure to convince independent agents to sell Surround (B2B2C) and evolved to also be a direct buying (D2C) experience.
My role:
Supporting both experiences can be tricky because agents must feel they’re being supported and not undermined by a D2C experience.
This example deals primarily with the consumer experience.
Discover
Problem statement: The original sales site (pictured, 2018) was made from a template and had very few calls to action or any sense of a brand tone or aesthetic.
Solution statement: Create an online brochure that encourages prospects to learn about Surround Insurance and buy.
Research
Interviews: Interviews with young professionals at the CIC, as well testing mockups and design ideas with paid users through Usability Hub.
Research insights: There’s a lot that young professionals don’t know about insurance and distrust agents because they think they’ll be pressured to buy something they don’t need.
Define
User persona: Jessica was developed to help center marketing efforts. She’s 28, lives with a roommate, doesn’t drive but has a license. She likes biking when she can, talks with her parents when making financial decisions, and hopes to save up to buy a home someday.
Competitive Analysis: Customers appreciate a sales experience that gives them lots of information and is transparent about the price and what’s being offered.
Scope and Constraints
Scope: A sales website mainly for customers, but also agents and investors.
Constraints: Can’t purchase from this site (developed with a 3rd party CMS). Must dump customers into a quote flow that not be as easy to update as the sales site.
Next steps
Improvements to the customer experience that start with the most popular pages.
The most popular parts of this experience is the transparent pricing page that allows users to customize their pack (our word for bundle). The next most popular section was the details pages that explained each coverage in a pack.
This site is consistently used and explored, with users finding a lot of value from clearly explained coverages and the ability to try out different price points.
Additional pieces
Print pieces
Examples of agent collateral available once agents used the sign up form.
Blog
One big expansion starting in 2021 was a blog section that contains over sixty articles about the uses of insurance. These articles were focused on both parents who may be paying for the policy, as well as millennials/gen-z that would be researching insurance for them.
Those articles have been added to and tweaked for SEO. But of the first 60 or so articles, I wrote about 40%.
More research
Two big studies of organic visitors were performed in 2021 and 2022. The main focus was to identify organic consumers while filtering out investors and independent agents. And then to take that data and find improvements that could be made to the site.
About page / Easter Egg
Many investors were interested in our dev/tech side and there are plans to expand on how our seamless insurance flow is built. For persistent users, there’s an easter egg section with facts about sloths.
