Sometimes redesigns are unnecessary. We do it just to scratch our own creative itch. You have to understand why you’re doing it. The goal of With Jack’s redesign was to:

• do a better job of showing the value of insurance and explain how it can help freelancers
• show With Jack is growing up and moving into a new stage of its life
• illustrate Jack will be there for you, watching over you and ready to act when you need him

Read more about the process and reasons behind With Jack’s rebrand. Not only did we make aesthetic changes, we also rolled out instant quotes.

I love how the redesign turned out and the response to it has been positive. But I won’t lie, once the post-launch dust had settled there was one niggling fear I had…

Will this new website still make money?

Prior to this redesign I was manually processing everything. I had gotten to the point where I was shipping an average of £9,000 of products a month.

Launching instant quotes was scary because I had refined my manual processes over 2 years. I was converting 44% of quotes to customers through a combination of the conversational form, scripts I’d experiment with and well-timed follow-ups.

However, I understood the importance of removing myself from the customer journey so everything is automated. People should be able to buy and manage their insurance with a few clicks of a button. This redesign is a step towards that.

Plus, I was looking forward to having more of my time freed up from not having to manually process everything!

The numbers

So, how has the redesign and new quote system converted now it’s been live for 4 months?

• 181 policies sold
• £48,400 of sales

Let’s compare this to the previous 4 months with manual processes and the old brand:

• 141 policies sold
• £38,850 of sales

It’s worth mentioning that we launched the redesign at our quietest time of the year. November and December see a dramatic dip in sales. Especially December. Over the week of Christmas I sold one policy. One! It’s a relief to see the numbers have gone up despite lower activity over those months.

The answer to my question, “Will this new website still make money?” is yes. Phew.

Another upside is not having to process and follow-up with every dead lead that comes through. Having to process every quote myself was time consuming. Sometimes I’d get to mid-afternoon and hadn’t done any work that would bring people to the website. Instant quotes eliminates leads that have little to no intention of becoming customers.

Let’s zone in on January and compare the figures to the same time last year.

January 2019

• 67 policies sold
• £16,500 of sales

January 2018

• 29 policies sold
• £7,500 of sales

That’s both a significant increase in policies and premium written!

Being profitable was hugely important, but the goal of the redesign was for other reasons. Namely to do a better job of showing the value of insurance and explain how it can help freelancers.

Whilst it’s difficult to measure the success of that, sign-ups have grown, the converstion rate’s increased by 6% and I receive fewer questions from confused freelancers.

One thing I was worried about was the decision to not take contact details upfront. You can get a price for insurance without committing your contact details. It’s a small way of showing that With Jack respects and puts you first.

I decided to do this because of the mistrust around companies selling our data or extracting more information from us than they need. I felt the right statement was, “We trust you to make a decision that’s right for you and if you think that’s With Jack, then we’ll take your contact details”.

Here’s a recap from my blog post about the redesign on that decision.

We made the decision to display the price upfront, before collecting your contact details. It’s potentially a terrible business move as it’ll reduce my number of follow-ups. It hasn’t been long enough to see how this impacts the conversion rate and cash flow, but it feels like the right thing to do.

Based on the performance of the new site it hasn’t been a terrible business move. In fact, since launching the new site we’ve had several £5000 weeks for the first time ever!

What I've Learned

Shipping at a quiet time has upsides and downsides. It was good for ironing out the kinks and taking time to discover bugs without it impacting too many people, but the downside was that it was difficult to guage how the redesign performed. Is it quiet because of the time of year or does our new website suck? This toyed with me emotionally. It’s only since we moved into 2019 and normal service has resumed that I can see the positive effects it’s had on conversion rate, cashflow etc. That’s something to be mindful of if you have a seasonal business.

I felt just as big a fear shipping the redesign as I did the day I launched the business. Things were working well with manual processes and the previous brand. I had my workflow refined and I was getting results. It was tempting to keep things the way they were instead of iterate. However, I was aware of the dangers of becoming complacent.

The best investment in any project is a good team. I can’t take credit for the performance of the rebrand. Scott (design and dev), Vic (illustration) and Sabine (words) have made this the success it is. As a bootstrapper it can be tempting to cut corners to save money, but I’d advise you not to do everything yourself—invest in your team.

We increased sales not by adding new products, but by improving existing processes. A lot of founders fall into the trap of upselling or adding to their product line to improve cashflow. Maybe you can squeeze an extra 5% from conversions through iteration. Try it!