Client Story: EZShield

The Situation

In the information age, identity fraud is a real and present danger. EZShield provides comprehensive identity fraud protection services, offering several different ways to keep information secure and restore the integrity of compromised identities.

In late 2010, EZShield was preparing a full web customer experience overhaul. As the company began to plan this project, it realized that the user experience should flow from a broader marketing strategy—something the company had not placed the appropriate emphasis on. EZShield turned to Right Source Marketing to execute an assessment, or what Right Source calls its Interactive Shift.

The Work

EZShield tasked Right Source with evaluating and generating a set of concrete recommendations covering areas including the following:

• User Experience/User Interface
• Consumer-Facing and Partner-Facing Messaging
• Interactive Marketing Tactical Execution

After an initial set of discovery sessions with members of the EZShield management team, as well as the marketing and design teams, Right Source began evaluating each area.

The Interactive Shift was exactly what we needed, when we needed it. As is the case for many companies, EZShield is full of experienced employees who all have great ideas, but what we needed was an outside perspective. Right Source provided exactly what we needed and offered a set of concrete recommendations in every single marketing area.” – Andy Souders, CTO EZShield

The user experience/user interface assessment included both qualitative testing using standard best practices and actual user testing, where users were given an enrollment scenario and their activity and commentary was tracked and recorded.

The messaging assessment included a review and evaluation of EZShield’s core messaging for the company’s consumer audience, as well as their partner audience.  Beyond pure value proposition and public-facing messaging, Right Source Marketing also summarized the consumer confusion surrounding identity theft protection and restoration services that no other vendor had managed to solve.

The interactive marketing tactical assessment looked at every interactive marketing area—web presence, search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, social media, display advertising, web analytics—and issued recommendations for improvements in each.

Each of these three areas included benchmarking against as many as five competitors, allowing the EZShield team to comparatively evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

The final deliverable for this Interactive Shift included three components:

• Right Source Marketing delivered the Interactive Shift Evaluation and Recommendations document to the entire company.
• The two Right Source principals delivered an executive summary of the findings during an August meeting which included the entire EZShield management team.
• Right Source participated in follow-up meetings and discussions with the EZShield marketing, technology and design teams in order to answer any questions on the recommendations.

The Results

After the presentation and follow-up discussions, EZShield decided to let the assessment guide the strategy and planning of the release of EZShield 2.0, which went live in January of 2011. Early results include:

• 700% increase in conversions on a month-over-month basis
• A conversion rate that reaches as high as 20%, up from 2% prior to the changes
• A 26% decrease in time on site and a 14% decrease in pages per visit, indicating that prospective consumers were enrolling more quickly and with less difficulty