Case Study: Earnest achieves 15% higher mobile conversions and 70% higher funnel conversions with Optimizely

Earnest Experiments with Onboarding Funnel to Grow Short-Term Conversions and Build Long-Term Relationships

Earnest is a three‑year‑old fintech offering student loan refinancing and personal loans that competes with large banks by prioritizing a clear, relationship‑focused customer experience. Their challenge was optimizing the web onboarding funnel—balancing transparency and regulatory requirements with lower friction on mobile—to increase short‑term conversions while building long‑term client relationships.

Working with CROmetrics and using continuous A/B testing informed by customer feedback, Earnest added concise privacy copy, introduced an email gate on mobile to enable remarketing, and simplified the results page by removing an interactive slider. Those changes drove measurable lifts: a ~5% bump to the next page from privacy messaging, a 15% increase in mobile conversion, a 70% jump to the next funnel page after simplifying the results, and a further 50% gain on the subsequent step.

Earnest

Craig Battin

Head of Growth Marketing