How we increased Own Up's conversion by +33% AND migrated platforms

Own Up started in 2015 with the goal of helping borrowers get the best rates on their loans. To date, they’ve helped people save more than $100 million on their loan rates.

But in late 2021, Own Up faced a new challenge: Migrating their marketing platform to a longer-term solution that would help them continue to scale and grow faster going forward. 

They also needed a team of marketing automation experts to help them revamp their existing bottom-of-funnel workflows to increase consultation schedule rates with their team of advisors.

That’s where ULAND came to the rescue. We worked tirelessly to not only ensure that their migration completed without a hitch, but also to revitalize their email marketing content and increase conversions.

Our Initiatives

Platform Migration

Own Up migrated its marketing automation efforts from Hubspot to Iterable with the help of ULAND, while retaining its CRM and Services teams on Hubspot. Our challenge was to recreate all automated marketing flows, complete with sender personalization, BCC to CRM, and a refreshed and simplified take on email design.

Over the course of one quarter, ULAND completed the migration, in addition to its other active projects (see below) by creating, testing, and deploying the following assets:

• 8 Automated Workflows
• 20+ Unique & Personalized Emails
• 5+ Custom Events & Integrations
• 5 Landing Pages

ULAND worked with Data, Engineering, Product, and CRM teams to ensure events fired properly, content stayed intact, redirect URLs worked properly, and more.

Automated Flow Optimization

The Approach

At ULAND, we take a very sustainable approach to marketing platform management and do our best to seamlessly integrate into our clients’ teams. This means getting to know each member of the team and understanding their roles and responsibilities and how we can work best together.

We took a deep dive into their historic copy, brand, product, and tone to assimilate ourselves into their mode de parler, so to speak. Additionally, we set up comprehensive, proprietary reporting integrations, and planned URL parameters to help track and evaluate our efforts.

After getting to know their product intimately and laying the foundation, we began the work of content creation and workflow planning.

The Work

Our initial investigation discovered low engagement rates across the email channel. Open rates were steady, but click rates and conversions struggled to improve. We hypothesized that a more simple and personalized approach to email marketing would best improve our KPIs. 

Simple Templates

There are times when emails call for bespoke HTML branding, but most communications can be taken care of with less “clutter.” Design-intensive emails can be labor-intensive to conceptualize, let alone build, and they can lead to deliverability issues as they are almost always relegated to the “Promotions” tab. Lastly, design-intensive emails often bury the CTA below the fold and tend to run into display issues across different email clients.

Our approach was to keep things as simple as possible, with the hypothesis that doing so would increase user engagement and response. 

Using clean, lightly branded and unbranded email templates, we crafted workflows that would not only capture the attention of the recipients, but also spur further engagement.

Personalized Content

Our team of experts utilized the marketing platform features of Iterable to insert personalization logic directly into email content. For example, depending on a user’s response to a given survey or questionnaire, they might be presented with a completely different set of paragraphs than another user. 

We also segmented major messaging groups at the workflow level, which changed how many emails a user received and when they received them, purely based on their behavior. 

This kind of personalization is deeper and more complex than the standard merge parameter tokens, but the results were astronomical.

The Results