Case Study: L&DI

Summary

The Irish Institute of Training and Development (IITD) rebranded to the Learning and Development Institute, or L&DI, to stay relevant and better serve its members. Designing and building a new membership website was critical to the rebrand project. The website needed to:

Feature new branding
Work on a user-friendly CMS, allowing L&DI to update most website pages easily
Have membership functionality with gated pages
Automate billing invoicing and online payments
Enable events and training course bookings with customised pricing, depending on the user’s membership levels
Capture/segment data from website forms into HubSpot.

The challenge

The client had a tech stack with multiple suppliers, which was hard to manage; they wanted to combine everything into HubSpot. The website was outdated, hard to use and incredibly difficult to update.

Members had very little autonomy to amend and complete their profile and account section, and weren’t interacting with the website much, if at all. Because the website content was hard to update, the business used several disparate WordPress websites to house content that should have been part of the original website.

There was no purchasing facility for event tickets or courses on the website.

Users could sign up to become a member and pay online, although the membership sign-up process was a whopping nine steps long!

Notable findings

Overall

Users felt overwhelmed by the homepage and the navigation; it was cluttered, and the naming and grouping of navigational items could have been more straightforward.

Membership sign-up

Users were frustrated by the number of steps needed to complete the process (nine in total). They were also taken aback at the fact that they needed to upload their qualifications to achieve membership.

In addition, they weren’t sure what the various membership levels meant or if there was a different price point. There was also mass confusion about the pay-by-invoice choice at the end of the process.

Book a course

The old website directed users to various external websites, PDFs and links when viewing and booking courses. Consequently, they found it difficult to understand the information as the format in which the data was presented lacked consistency.

One user quipped, “I’m bamboozled!” when trying to book a course.

Book an event

Users found the calendar format utterly confusing and didn’t understand why some events in the future had 'book' buttons and some did not.

Corporate memberships

Corporate member enrolment was a very manual process - this caused enormous administrative work and was prone to error. In addition, the website had no facility for corporate members to enrol, and the account section had no corporate member management or view whereby the corporate admin could view and manage the members on their account.

Membership sign-up

In order to simplify the membership sign-up process, we:

Removed all superfluous elements on the membership sign-up page so the user could focus on the task at hand
Reduced the steps from nine to five by chunking relevant information together. We implemented a postcode look-up field to enable users to add their addresses quickly
Ensured that users could skip adding qualifications and experience, but understood that it meant joining as an affiliate member. We added a tick box with a pop-up window, informing them what the various levels were
Added tooltips to help guide users and inform them why we were asking specific questions
Removed pay-by-invoice choice as this didn’t make sense for the individual membership use case.

Book a course or event

We used progressive disclosure on the booking forms to ensure we broke the questions into manageable chunks.
On the course booking, where some questions could feel quite personal, we added an info tooltip to explain why we were asking the question and that they were going through a qualification process to receive a discounted course via the Skillnet grant.
We added a tick-box where the user could say if they were an attendee so that they didn’t have to fill all their details out again, as they would have given the information in the earlier steps.
We removed the calendar view and replaced it with two simple tabs, “past” and “upcoming”.

Corporate memberships

We created a Service Blueprint which helped us plan and visualise the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touch-points in the corporate customer journey.
We designed a corporate admin section with two unique views:

Admin users can see the members in the package and edit as needed.
The corporate member user can’t see other members and can only see their own details.

We designed a bespoke corporate sign-up flow that enables corporate members to sign up via the website.

Solutions built from Diagnostic Engagement

To improve the membership sign-up process, we:

Created an automated process to allocate membership tier, status and sign-up date, and trigger welcome emails and membership registration
Created an automated tier-review process whereby a task is allocated to L&DI when a member is eligible for a tier upgrade, and confirms this via email to the member
Automatically set a membership lapsed stat to trigger lapsed membership warning emails, and reduce membership churn.

Book a course or event

We utilised HubSpot's HubDB table function to generate dynamic event and course pages

We used a custom object to collect data on each event or course booked to allow greater segmentation of L&DI's data.

Corporate memberships

We created a sign-up process to identify the admin contact on a corporate membership
Now other corporate members can complete their profiles individually using workflow actions and automated emails
We automated the 'Corporate code' allocated to members as a unique identifier for the corporate membership
We created the ability to change and update members associated with the corporate membership via the membership portal.

Results:

A reduced bounce rate of direct traffic from 60.75 to 51.41% = 9.34 % in the first three months after launch.
Increased Individual Membership sign up by 33.33%
Membership website and a merged tech stack with all purchases and bookings done on one website, via Stripe and Sage integrations
A robust HubSpot theme and dynamic (HubDB-powered) pages enable the business to update events, courses and resources quickly and easily
An automated booking process that enables users to book courses at a discounted rate if they qualify for a Skillnet grant
Different price points for members and non-members on events and courses using HubSpot custom objects.

"ESM Inbound is fantastic! I'm very happy to recommend ESM Inbound for web and email (and everything else HubSpot related)."

Richard Tank

Feefo

"Proactive, practical, pragmatic, professional, praiseworthy - as a HubSpot partner, I couldn't have asked for more!"

Su Planta

Causeway Technologies

"Deliverables and timelines are always mapped out very clearly in consultation with us, making it easy to find the right options to fit our projects and budgets."

Marcus Twitchin

Trinity College London

L&DI

Learning & Development Institute
Membership Website

Case study

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Summary

The challenge

Users & audience

Our design process