How Hughes Federal Credit Union Grew New Account Openings Despite the New Normal with a Sitefinity-Powered Website

Hughes Federal Credit Union had a beautiful website, but since it was built on a proprietary CMS, it was impossible to manage without help from the CMS vendor. With Progress® Sitefinity®, the Hughes marketing team was able to gain their autonomy and work independently. This not only improved their agility, but also boosted several key metrics, including new account openings.

Products:

Sitefinity

Hughes Federal Credit Union

Challenge

The Hughes website was beautiful, but difficult to manage. This limited the marketing team’s ability to evolve the site and keep up with modern expectations.

Solution

Sitefinity's user-friendly interface, is designed with the latest security best practices in mind, so customers can focus their efforts elsewhere.

Result

Improvements to page load speeds and SEO optimization drive better search rankings and approximately 3x more new accounts are opened every month.

Story

Challenge

When Kerry Graham joined Hughes Federal Credit Union as the Marketing Manager - Digital & Creative in 2015, he was immediately impressed by the company’s website. It was several steps ahead of what competitors were doing on the web, sporting a sleek look and some responsive design elements.

Then, he started working on it.

Built on a proprietary CMS, making changes to the Hughes website was troublesome, to say the least. Whether it was launching a new page or simply adding an option to a drop-down menu, any time Graham’s team wanted to make changes, they needed from the CMS vendor.

In the near term, Hughes needed to improve the accessibility of its website and add multilingual content. And that was only the shortlist. Instead of being a simple service brochure, Hughes wanted the website to be the digital manifestation of its at-location experience—customers should be able to create accounts, take out loans and do many other common banking activities.

With how quickly expectations for digital experiences are evolving every day, it became obvious the proprietary CMS would be more hindrance than help.

 

Solution

Graham worked with the other digital stakeholders at Hughes to form a website committee that would plot a course for launching a new website. This committee identified three key requirements that the new website platform had to address:

  • Deliver a great, innovative digital experience for customers without any friction points

  • Give marketing and non-technical users the ability to manage the site independently

  • Stay ahead of the evolving digital world, especially in regard to security requirements

  • While evaluating the marketplace, Graham discovered that many credit unions in the U.S. use Progress® Sitefinity® to power their digital presences. And after consulting Sitefinity Titanium partner Americaneagle.com, he found out why.

“Sitefinity really appealed to me,” Graham said. “Multi- language support, personalization, customization, the fact it’s been around for years, the large development community, the frequency of new updates, these factors were all important for us.” 

Hughes then began working with Americaneagle.com on the new site in August 2018 and successfully launched seven months later in March 2019.

Result

Thanks to the flexibility of the Sitefinity platform, the new website seamlessly translated the in-branch experience to the digital realm.

Sitefinity’s rich feature set played a key role in bringing this creative vision to life. API integrations enabled the delivery of several features, including location/ATM finders, rates data for account and loan calculators and smart internal site search via Hawksearch. To ensure superior web content quality, security and accessibility for customers, Hughes took advantage of Sitefinity’s Siteimprove integration as well.

“Sitefinity checked all the boxes, providing the foundation for Hughes to establish a digital presence that matched its excellence in customer service,” said Matt Annes Sitefinity Director, Americaneagle.com.

Additionally, with the freedom to execute campaigns independently and the ability to collect and analyze customer data, the marketing team was better equipped to hit its KPIs. This includes:

• 3x growth in new accounts openings every month
• Faster load speeds (from 5.34 seconds to 4.12 seconds)
• Demonstrable SEO improvements
• 500% increase in Spanish language views

Months after launch, the website was already paying dividends in terms of customer engagement. The site became even more valuable as the Coronavirus pandemic struck, enabling Hughes to sustain and grow new account openings despite service reductions at physical locations.

About Hughes Federal Credit Union

A member of the Tucson, Arizona, community since 1952, Hughes is dedicated to enriching the financial lives of the people and community we serve.

About Americaneagle.com

Americaneagle.com is a full-service, global digital agency that provides best-in-class web design, development, hosting, post-launch support, and digital marketing services. Regardless of business size, industry or technology, the team has a proven track record of delivering exciting, high-performing digital solutions that produce positive results.

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