As one of the largest credit unions in Hawaii, HawaiiUSA Federal Credit Union has more than $1 billion in assets and more than 131,000 members. In 2011, HawaiiUSA partnered with ZAG Interactive on a website initiative to offer enhanced usability for visitors to match the personal service HawaiiUSA delivers. In 2015, we partnered again with the credit union to refresh its online presence with a responsive website that remains local and warm, while continuing to reflect its core values of service, unity, achievement and integrity.
Designed with Hawaii’s natural beauty in mind
The 2015 website redesign retained the site’s highly local feel achieved by using large images focusing on life on the islands and capturing the spirit of the people who live there. As part of the project, we developed a new site architecture in order to consolidate hundreds of pages of information in various areas of the website while enhancing the visibility of specific areas, such as online security, fraud alerts and financial and life-stage education to benefit HawaiiUSA’s members.
ZAG’s development team built the responsive website on the Kentico Content Management System and developed a custom rates database to make it easier for credit union officials to change and manage rates in a centralized portal. We integrated multiple financial calculators that members use to guide their decision-making while also integrating a mortgage rate feed and the powerful SilverCloud search functionality. Additionally, ZAG built the website to conform to WCAG 2.0 Level A compliance, while working with HawaiiUSA officials to edit documents to meet compliance standards.
New content strategy
As the site’s content volume grew since 2011, the tone and page length began to deviate from the original. We addressed these inconsistencies by rewriting all content and focusing on our updated, targeted keyword research in order to craft SEO-rich verbiage that spoke to the benefits of HawaiiUSA’s products and services. The rewrite portrays important attributes of HawaiiUSA’s brand, such as compassion, trustworthiness and family-friendliness, and helps visitors utilize self-service channels rather than relying on the credit union’s call center with an emphasis on strong calls to action.
Loan applications driven by high intent search
Following the site launch, HawaiiUSA came back to ZAG to run a pay per click advertising campaign. To attract applications to HawaiiUSA’s unique holiday personal loans, ZAG’s marketing team developed a paid search campaign to run on Google AdWords during the holiday season. By focusing on relevant keywords, descriptive ad copy, and Google’s own best practices, we were able to deliver conversion rates significantly higher than industry standards. Additionally, a remarketing campaign was implemented to specifically target visitors who had previously accessed the HawaiiUSA FCU site without applying for a loan. The campaign proved to be wildly successful, accounting for nearly half of all personal loan submissions during that time period.
A digital branch poised for future growth
HawaiiUSA’s online presence is now more relevant and valuable to members and prospects and responsive across all devices, while positioning the credit union to be more competitive with local banks.