Growing Customers And Value For American Express

Challenge: 

American Express, a global financial services corporation and the world’s largest card issuer, needed to grow the number of qualified leads they acquired via their website corporate cards and services websites–and to grow the lifetime value of their existing customers.

“Selling” corporate credit and charge cards and commercial payment tools is a complicated business with a relatively long purchase path that requires multiple stakeholders and approvals and a complex account setup process–none of which can be completed online.

Strategy: 

Given that we were asked to sell a product online that can’t be sold online, we focused on what we could absolutely deliver–more traffic, more engagement, and more lead forms completed.

Our approach was simple: Target, measure, and optimize.

We identified the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences for the sites, analyzed the data to understand how those audiences responded to existing website content, online ads, and micro sites driving to the website.

We discovered four insights about our audiences:

  • Virtually all had completed at least some, if not a significant amount of, research prior to visiting the AMEX website
  • The primary audiences visited the site to validate that AMEX products/services had features superior to their existing payment solution
  • While executives would make the final purchase decision, program administrators and managers reporting to those executives gathered the lion’s share of the information on the executives’ behalf
  • Executives were less likely to visit the website for general content but were more likely to read/watch/download more technical or expert content

My Role In The Solution: 

I was part of a great team of talented designers, developers, program and project managers that ultimately developed a new visual design for the website, revised the messaging, copy, and CTAs; identified and included relevant written and video content AMEX already owned; designed landing pages and lead forms; and defined and tagged paths within the website to understand traffic patterns and paths to conversion.

To this team and project I contributed…

  • Leading the creative strategy
  • Developing the content strategy for the redesigned website
  • Writing copy and managing copywriters, designers, and HTML developers who produced content for the site
  • Developing an interactive recommendation tool to help site visitors identify the right product/service
  • Devising a tagging strategy for Sitecore CMS

Results: 

Marked increase in qualified leads generated via sites’ landing pages. AMEX grew their business with us.