CONTEXT
Chegg is the largest EdTech company in the United States, with over 8 million paying subscribers last year. In 2021, Chegg moved forward with a major re-brand and product refresh, with the intent of addressing some of the tech debt and design debt that incurred over several years of rapid growth and acquisitions. While some aspects of the initial rebrand were a success, the marketing landing pages were initially experiencing an alarming dip in performance. At this point I was on-boarded to the project and placed in charge a small team leading the effort of turning around the website's performance.
BUSINESS GOALS
• Improve the conversion rate (rCVR) of website
• Generate incremental revenue from our subscription services
KEY RESULTS
• Improved rCVR by over 2X
• Generated millions of dollars in annual incremental revenue from subscription services
• Reduced bounce rate and frustration clicking
A refreshed version of chegg.com/study
MY ROLES
• Managing small team of interdisciplinary creatives
• Stakeholder management and presentation
• Identifying and prioritizing opportunity areas
• Setting up A/B tests and qualitative research experiments
• Prototyping UX solutions leveraging our design system
• Implementing and scaling best practices
KEY COLLABORATORS
• Product Marketing Manager
• Creative director
• Marketing copywriters
• UX Designer
• UX Researcher
• Engineers
• Data Science & SEO
CREATIVE CONSTRAINTS
• Working within a defined design system and with existing brand assets
• Leveraging an established marketing voice and feel
• Utilizing a defined pricing/package structure
• Limited palette of web components available through our content mgmt. system
PRIMARY USER GOALS
• Validate the legitimacy and trustworthiness of Chegg
• Identify if Chegg has the right type of help for their specific study needs
• Understand what is included within their subscription
• For existing and previous users, sign in or sign up quickly
THE STARTING POINT
This was the version of the signed out homepage (Chegg.com) that went live right after the rebrand. It was shortly after measuring the negative impact on conversion rate that I was brought on to lead the optimization overhaul of this page as well as the other high-impact marketing landing pages. One of the biggest challenges of working on the homepage is that this single touchpoint needs to represent and carefully balance the needs of the different business units, the user, and the brand in harmony.
Once I was equipped with the available marketing data and a small team to support the project, the first thing I did was work with our UX Research team to conduct a quick qualitative study with our target users to identify some of the most common pain points and opportunity areas for the website. A handful of the most valuable qual and quant insights are annotated below.
Chegg.com key metric: -30% Conversion Rate (rCVR) vs old version of website
OPTIMIZING CHEGG.COM
By leveraging the qual and quant research insights, I directed a series of rapid iterations to the website which were then A/B tested against the control version. While the hope and expectation from our business stakeholders was mostly to 'stop the bleeding' and restore conversion rate to where it previously was, we ended up surpassing the rCVR of the old website by a wide margin within just a month or so of optimizing the landing page, generating substantial incremental revenue and subscriber growth (specific numbers are confidential).
Some of the roles that I played at this point included identifying and prioritizing the largest opportunity areas, doing rapid prototyping in Figma to communicate ideas to UX designers and copywriters, working closely with our business stakeholders to ensure that the product representation met their needs and expectations, and facilitating a smooth handoff with our developers. The corresponding solutions to the research insights from the screenshot above are annotated below.
Chegg.com key metric: +33% Conversion Rate (rCVR) vs old version of website
SCALING IMPACT: END-TO-END OPTIMIZATION
After the success of optimizing our three most impactful landing pages, I got the green light to scale this work to the rest of our marketing landing pages as well, which collectively generated a significant amount of traffic and conversions annually. In total over 25 marketing landing pages were soon in scope! Many of the individual product/feature pages (represented at the bottom of this diagram) have different subscription models and product constraints, so they each required close collaboration with the product stakeholders in order to understand the business requirements and goals.
In addition to focusing on individual page-based optimizations, at this point I was able to step back and focus more on the end-to-end user experience. What were the most common starting points for different user segments and what pathways were those users taking to find what they were looking for? How could we organize information in a way that corresponds more closely with the common buckets of needs that students come to Chegg for, such as homework help and exam prep support?
PUSHING BEYOND 'GOOD ENOUGH'
While we had successfully reversed any harm done from the initial launch and managed to establish an effective process for testing and iterating the website along the way, there were still plenty of opportunities for improvement. Just like any digital product, every landing page is just a 'version' and there's always room for incorporating further updates as long as the measurable impact is worth the effort. For the sake of keeping this case study relatively compact I won't go into too much detail, but here are a few of the bigger ticket website initiatives that I led over the following year or so;
1. Optimizing for mWeb performance and accessibility - reduce excessive scrolling with component modifications, audit and address accessibility concerns
2. Incorporating seasonality into the experience - schedule 5 'student moments' based on shifting user needs (such as back to school, midterms and finals), refresh the content seasonally
3. Building pages that can scale to our international markets - audited all copy for simpler translation, created alternative versions of the pages to highlight regional offerings
4. Ongoing site maintenance - documenting processes, adding new featured products, monitoring performance, and conducting ongoing testing and iterations of the most impactful landing pages.
