I Designed a Landing page for Thinkful and created an email sequence

You sit in a classroom for 3–4 years, learn what you’re taught, while constantly pay the tuition fees. In the end, hope that you get a good job.

Chances are, you are familiar with this. There seems to be a fundamental flaw in this logic, but we are well familiar with this.

What if I told you it didn’t have to be this way? You don’t have to pay for four years before getting a job, which isn’t really guaranteed. You can put your career first, and pay tuition only when you get a job.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, Thinkful has already been doing that since 2012.

Thinkful has been helping passionate individuals learn tech skills, get mentorship from professionals, and land high paying jobs. And it does all that with a promise that you WILL get a job. And if they fail to deliver on that promise, you won’t have to pay a dime for all the information you learnt and the mentorship you received. You will always be at a benefit!

Thinkful also conducts weekly webinars. It’s a combination of workshops, info sessions and happy hours with some of the industry leaders! And it does it for free!

The Webinars are in all different tech categories -

• Software engineering
• Data Science
• Data Analytics
• UX/UI Design
• Digital Marketing
• Technical Project Management

Why are webinars important, anyway?

Earlier when there was no such thing as “webinars”, you’d have to travel to the venue and were limited by geographic restrictions. You won’t really fly to the other side of the world within 2 days just to attend a conference. And hosting conferences isn’t cheap either.

So I’m not at all surprised why webinars are becoming more famous day by day.

And the pandemic gave a boost to webinars. You don’t have to close opportunities because of geographical limitations. You don’t have to travel an hour and a half to get to the venue. And the hosting companies don’t have to book a large stage now, so the cost of tickets is low as well.

More and more companies are hosting webinars and more and more people are watching them.

People want to get involved. They want to know the companies they’re engaging with on a personal level. And this created a huge value for the companies, as they have the opportunity to make the customer feel more inclusive, provide them value and help solve their problems, engage with them and deepen the relationship.

Imagine there’s Ron and Harry.

Ron knows about a company through Facebook ads.

Harry knows about the company because he attended a free, hour-long session where one of the managers of the company, along with an industry expert, were talking about how to start building a career and providing value for people starting out.

Think of the two friends. Who would go dig deeper about the company and try to find more about them? Who’d have the feeling that he knows about the company, has already engaged with a manager and is happy with the company?

I’m not saying Facebook ads are ineffective. But webinars have the unique advantage of deepening trust and relationships between the customer and the company.

I found about the webinars while scrolling through design workshops on Eventbrite.

I went on the website of Thinkful to find more, but there wasn’t a landing page in view. It was hidden in the ocean of links at the bottom of the page.

The webpage was functional, but I thought I could make it better.

So I re-designed the landing page and thought of a better way of operating the sessions!

As of now, the Call-To-Action on the webinar re-directs you to Eventbrite. (Not so effective)

What if there was a system where people could enter their email addresses and they would get the invites to webinars directly into their inboxes!
We could even go a step further and allow people to choose their own preferences. Some might want to attend only the Data Science and Data Analytics sessions, while others might want to attend only UX/UI Design sessions.

People would feel more connected and taken care of and would want to be a part of the webinar.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing here. My project is to re-design the landing page and set up an email sequence for the subscribers.

You can watch the project video here —

Or, continue reading!

My landing page design

Brands must have consistency. All their products should be in harmony and all the web pages on the website should be consistent. So my design needed a consistent look and must have the same look as Thinkful’s Designs.

• I paid special attention to Brand colours, fonts, spacing and layout.

• Thinkful hosts webinars in many different categories. The current landing page is just all webinars together, but this isn’t that effective. So I categorised the webinars and added an additional “Upcoming Webinars” category.

• I used thumbnails for webinars as they have more space and give the users more clarity to make their decisions. Having more than required choices would do nothing but confuse users. (That’s Hick’s law!)

• Now, having thumbnails makes the design cleaner and gives the elements breathing room. But it removes the “Description” that gives info about the webinars. How did I solve that? By displaying that information when the user needs them. The idea is to have a hover effect — when the user hovers his mouse over a webinar thumbnail, a card would appear on top of the thumbnail, displaying the needed information about the webinar!

• I changed the Call to Action (CTA) button.
  Earlier, the CTA button would re-direct the user to Thinkful’s Eventbrite page.
  Here, Thinkful is losing an opportunity to make the visitors get more interested in the brand and develop a relationship, and deepen the trust and relationships between the customers and the company.
  So I created an email box where the user would enter their email and register for webinars.

Now here starts the second part of my project.

Creating an email sequence

Get in the user’s shoes. You just entered your email and registered for some webinars.

Lots of things are running in your head. When will you receive the emails? Will you even receive an email or would you have to go to Eventbrite to watch the event? How many emails would you receive? What if you don’t want to receive all emails, how do you make them stop?

The goal is to make user’s lives easier, not more complex. And that’s what it is without proper emails. So I created a welcome email!

Welcome email

People would feel welcomed, taken care of, and more connected with the brand. Thinkful has an amazing opportunity to set the right expectations, along with giving them the choice to attend only specific categories of webinars.

And at the time of actual events, they’d get this email —

Event email

This would make sure the leads get updated, and this would increase the brand awareness, and deepen the trust between the customer and the user.

Takeaway

Webinars open doors to opportunities and bring conferences to the most remote areas of the planet.

Companies like Eventbrite allow us to host our own webinars. But even with such companies present, brands should take charge and take care of how their customers are feeling at every point of contact — be it the landing page or the email they’re receiving upon signing up.

Focusing on deepening the connections with customers will surely set companies up for success.

By working on this project, I -

• Got a better understanding of webinars.
• Practised my User Experience Design skills.
• Got better at writing emails.
• Learnt using Mailchimp.
• Got better at designing in Figma.
• Leant communicating ideas and values through design.