Canadian Small Business Financing
iCapital is a Canadian financing company offering loans and cash advances to individuals and small businesses.
Client Background
iCapital is a Canadian financing company offering loans and cash advances to individuals and small businesses. While they had an existing website, it was starting to look too similar to their competitors and needed added functionality that improved the user experience and made the application process more seamless. Backbone provided the creative and technical expertise to deliver a refreshed site with increased performance.
Smart design and technology
Their updated logo, colour palette, icons and images, along with their new brand concept, “Seeds of Growth,” informed both the design and digital experience of the new site. Looking to communicate the value of what iCapital has to offer, we designed more prominent product pages and implemented a more streamlined application process that integrates with Zoho and Flinks.
We built iCapital’s previous site with Expresia so the foundation was already in place. The overall wireframing was similar to the previous site, but we created a custom solution that further improved the user experience. A key area of focus was the application process. This transaction needed to be quick, easy, and entirely safe. Applicants are sharing personal information and bank statements to iCapital, so security was the highest priority. To meet this requirement, we integrated a new third-party tool, Flinks, that allows applicants to instantly and securely grant iCapital access to bank statements from their financial institution. The integration of Flinks removed a number of manual steps previously undertaken by iCapital thereby creating a more seamless experience for the applicant and allowing iCapital to process applications even quicker.
We knew the application process also needed a clean look that visually communicated a fast and easy experience that customers felt compelled to complete (past testing with iCapital showed that applicants tended to abandon the page if there were more than four steps). Our solution was a simple four-step interface that takes the complexity out of applying for financing.
iCapital is in a tremendously competitive space so it’s vital to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
To this end, their marketing agency, Hop Skip Marketing, was constantly fine-tuning their brand and messaging but no sooner would iCapital release an update than their competitors would align their branding. After four refreshes, the competitive landscape was still frustratingly cookie-cutter with similar language and imagery. iCapital’s customers couldn’t differentiate between one lender to the next.
This led the company to invest in a significant overhaul. Hop Skip analyzed all of their competitors’ websites and approached us to bring our technical experience and knowledge to the next generation of the iCapital website.
Satisfied that applicants would use the form, we turned our attention to nurturing leads through marketing automation.
Using our Expresia platform, we built the site to gather required information, including pre-qualification questions, and set up tracking. Once an applicant goes through the application process, the Zoho integration gathers their information and tracks exactly where they came from—social ads, search or display ads, or organically—and what content they engaged with on the site. If the applicant was from an ad, the data gathered drills down further to exactly what ad they came from.
Furthermore, when iCapital determines the applicant’s eligibility, the system feeds the data back to Google to ensure ads like the one shown to the approved applicants are presented to more people. This helps improve conversions on their Google ads by gathering and sending back marketing data to Google.
A stand-out website
From a digital perspective, this new site has brought the iCapital brand to life. Now, when prospective customers visit the site, they’re met with a fresh look, relevant information, and smart, responsive functionality. And when they leave, they aren’t left wondering which financing company they just visited. For iCapital, this has furthered their digital transformation, providing efficiencies to their business processes and leveraging data to work smarter.
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