About legacy
Legacy offers sperm testing & freezing services to folks undergoing gender-affirming care therapy, vasectomy, cancer treatment or simply wanting to preserve their healthiest sperm in order to found a family later in life.
Freeze
your sperm
Discovering the reasons behind Legacy's sperm freezing page's low performance and why education is important when selling a high life-impact product.
Responsibilities
Research
Design
Copy strategy
Challenges
Designing a page that can be used as both a landing page and further information, covering the entire conversion funnel
Going against best practices in the service of your own design problems
Key learnings
Purchasing a healthcare product isn't your standard online transaction
Longer purchasing cycles fundamentally change how you market a product
Testing with real prospective customers can get you very valuable data, cheaply and quickly
Using simple, first-degree language is necessary in the context of an unaware customer
Results
Revenue increased by 126%
AOV increased by 54%
Uncovering
the problem
What's going on?
The freezing page was the only place on the website dedicated to explaining sperm freezing. That meant it was used in a lot of contexts, mostly as a landing page when coming from a social media ad campaign.
Quantitative data showed it had a high bounce rate* and low conversion rate**.
A high bounce rate often indicates the content didn't appeal or respond to expectations, and a low conversion rate tends follow that up.
That was the red flag we needed to investigate.
*Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
**Conversion rate
the percentage of website visitors who purchased something.
The data
Legacy has a culture of regularly capturing user sentiment through user interviews and surveys, either through projects or standalone research.
This available information delivered an great launch pad for investigation into the project.
Here are some questions we already knew users were asking:
Creating awareness
The question "Why should I freeze my sperm?" is one most didn't have an answer to - in fact, the level of education around sperm is astonishingly low.
Sperm freezing being a fairly niche procedure, the marketing strategy was focused on creating awareness, eg: "Why should I freeze my sperm?"
A few examples of instagram posts.
Creating awareness is the first step in the marketing funnel - after all, who’s going to buy a product without knowing it even exists?
You are
here!
Unaware
The customer doesn't know about the problem.
Problem aware
The customer is aware of the problem but doesn’t know how to fix it.
Solution aware
The customer understands there is a solution, but doesn’t know how to do it.
Product aware
The customer knows the product or products available to solve the problem but hasn’t yet chosen one.
Most aware
The customer has purchased the product.
This also means what comes next needs to answer the question: "Why should I freeze my sperm and how do I do it?"
With this context, let's look at the problem outlined earlier and try to understand why this high bounce rate is happening.
Let's do a quick recap. We have:
A page with a high bounce rate and low conversion rate.
A target audience predominantly at the unaware stage.
A marketing strategy aimed at creating awareness.
As previously mentioned, a high bounce rate indicates the content fails to meet the users’ expectations - understanding why they should freeze their sperm.
Let's look at the culprits.
Wrong place, wrong time
Starting with the information presented above the fold, let's see if the content answers the fundamental question.
1
Value proposition
“Avoid the clinic” answers the “how”, but not the “why” you should freeze your sperm.
Knowing you can do it from home is interesting, but not the main driver.
I need more info on the process and sperm freezing before buying.
pricing
Price isn’t the main concern at this stage — the customer still doesn’t know what sperm freezing is or why they should do it.
From previous pricing experiments, we discovered a high amount of price elasticity.
We saw little correlation between price and number of orders, meaning customers are willing to pay if they believe the solution is right for them.
This is a big decision; I care more about getting the right package than what it's gonna cost.
imagery
Showing the physical product as the hero doesn’t communicate what Legacy is fundamentally selling — preserving your ability to have children.
The product isn’t the seller, the outcome is.
What is the box?
The content a prospective customer sees when they first land on the page is better suited to the consideration stage of the funnel — we’re skipping fundamental steps at a crucial time in customer’s purchasing journey.
Educating the customer
As previously mentioned, creating awareness overwhelmingly has to go through education for Legacy. Few know about it, and even less know about why and how.
more than half
of men don’t know what affects their fertility.
70%
of people overestimate the age at which male fertility decline begins.
72%
of people believe that taking testosterone improves a person's fertility. (It actually brings it down to 0)
Let's look at which sections on the page that answer customer's concerns.
The page rarely takes the opportunity to educate.
Most of the questions that were identified come late (if not at the very end) in the experience, way past the point where we see users drop off on the page.
The solution
By focusing on education and human stories, AOV & conversion will go up.
Sell the dream of having children, not a green box.
The
solution
Telling a story
Having a family is fundamentally a human thing — the old page had an anemic amount of actual humans on it.
Taking a more direct human approach to how we communicate should help customers understand what Legacy is proposing.
Video as a storytelling device
The hero video is meant to plant the seed (ha) that things one might never think would affect their fertility can actually significantly hurt your chances. We want to say “Hey, if you freeze your sperm, you can do all these things and be a parent too.”
Use cases & familiar language
Legacy has a history of using complicated or overly second-degree language. To avoid any ambiguity, we clearly show use cases to the user by saying "you should freeze your sperm if" so that they can recognize themselves in those situations and understand why folks might want to freeze their sperm.
Outcome
Users can understand, relate, and insert themselves in situations. create awareness of their own situation before getting into specifics.
The product grid
By breaking down the bundles into their functions rather than their contents, we hit the double whammy of education and explanation.
The new product grid.
The grid is also a continuation of using real language. Products were previously presented as cards, focused on conversion by following traditional e-commerce practices.
However, with a jargon-heavy list of contents listing things like number of vials, or collection kits, users were left with more questions and answers.
88%
of users already referred to product bundles informally by their timeline (the 5 years bundle) or numbers of collections (the one with 3 collections).
62%
of users preferred first-degree language in the context of product offerings.
25%
of users were actively turned off by the more flowery language like "For Today".
An example of our previous product cards.
Through our research, and historical failures using those standard practices, we realized that Legacy was essentially selling insurance — that was a big "ah-ha!" moment. From that moment on, it became a lot easier to understand how we should be explaining and selling our product.
A phrase I used a lot to remind myself and the team of that was: "we're not selling t-shirts". We had to find our own solutions for our business and user needs, even in the face of tried and true best practices.
Outcome
Users understand better why they should pick specific options based on their own situation.
How it works
We've established by now the overwhelming amount of questions customers had about the logistics and security of Legacy's sperm freezing process.
It's important to get into the real technical details here. Asking customers to trust you with their genetic material is a big ask, so we need to show them the respect they deserve by answering their questions in-depth.
By distilling the steps of ordering and using the kit into 5 simple steps, we ease prospective customers into the idea that it’s a quick and easy process. If they want to know more, they can go to the more comprehensive How it Works page.
Outcome
Users understand how safe and secure the business operations are.
Now that we've executed on our hypotheses, let's see how it performed.
The wins
3/6 users mention they like the brand - this means what we’re doing with the brand is inspiring trust.
“I really like the visual aesthetic of legacy, the color scheme, the fonts, it makes me feel like I’m walking into a real life clinic that’s really well run”
“I like the animation, I’m a big fan of websites that use live videos”
“I do like the layout and the colors, the white background and forest green is beautiful”
5/6 had a rudimentary understanding of sperm freezing at first, 1 said he knew nothing and mostly associated it with sperm donation.
1 knew about the decline of sperm health with age
1 gave the vasectomy use case as an example
1 understood it as an insurance policy, reflecting the proactive freezer (and asks if it can be covered by insurance)
6/6 mention the vast majority of the information is new to them.
6/6 mentioned answer nothing is confusing.
“everything in the page communicates information really well, really simply as well”
“nothing is confusing, it explains everything very very well”
“nothing is confusing, it’s written in a very cohesive language, it’s very easy to understand”
“the website is very informative, very easy to understand”
5/6 contributors mentioned they had no unanswered questions about sperm freezing.
One had questions about bundle customization. “can you mix and matchsome of this? can you do the standard but then add advanced analysis? or are these packages rigid?”
Later in the questionnaire, when asked to describe their understanding of sperm freezing in their own words, 6/6 get it right.
One even mentions proactive freezing, which we don’t touch on a whole lot.
For their next steps, 2/6 say they would take the quiz, and 4/6 would go deeper and go to PDPs.
6/6 mention they are drawn to the bundles comparison table section.
“I like the layout of the options, it’s easy to understand what’s included in each plan”
Further improvements
1 user mentions “I don’t foresee anything happening to me so this might not be for me, but if anything happens this is certainly something I would consider”
We know this already, we haven’t cracked that nut just yet, but we fail to convince potential proactive freezers.
1 user mentions he’s interested in seeing data for the decline with age.
We need to figure out this part of the messaging, I feel like we still don’t know very well if stats and numbers are important to people.
1 user had a question about the possibility of only testing.
We need to consider if we want to mention testing here, balance user needs versus business goals. If we’re prioritizing freezing, then we can allow a little friction and let users figure out where they can find testing on the site.
All in all, I don’t see any need for big changes, I think this page is going to perform well. I’m confident about applying the same recipe to the testing page.
While we explain very well what sperm freezing is and why you should do it (especially with our examples and personas), I think it’s confirmed we should next look at how we can reach proactive freezers.
Results &
learnings
Business results
Average order value
↑ 54%
Revenue
↑ 126%
Conversion rate
Conversion rate (compared to Shop All page)
140%
Key learnings
Purchasing a healthcare product isn't your standard online transaction. Longer purchasing cycles fundamentally change how you market a product.
Using simple, first-degree language is necessary in the context of an unaware customer.
Best practices aren't always gospel. Sometimes you have to find your own design solutions tailored to your problem.