Earlier this year, we launched a new category in B2B SaaS, Revenue Acceleration. We’ve long believed that the customer is in control, digital is everywhere, and the best experience wins. But this digital transformation has only accelerated in 2020. Our “new normal” requires a new way of doing business and a new set of tools and tactics to thrive. Your website needs to be ready – and ours does too.
This significant shift presented us with the perfect opportunity to reimagine how our site could better serve our visitors while also highlighting our newly defined category.
The catch? We had roughly six months to complete the entire website redesign process. That means we had to redesign, rewrite, and update approximately 1,200 pages. And, just for good measure, we also decided to revamp the way we feature and serve you content completely.
We broke our website redesign process down into three steps:
Reimagine
The launch of Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform gave us a great framework to flesh out our strengths and tell a more focused story.
To do that, we pulled in team members from across marketing, product, sales, customer experience, and creative to help craft our new messaging and positioning. And we validated it by talking to customers and prospects in our market.
We took a hard look at how the visual language could present this new approach and landed on the idea of a more concise, measured visual language – not only for the site but across all channels (social, digital ads, direct mail, etc.) – something sleek, simple, and scalable.
Reassess
It all started with the classic Who, What, When, Where, and Why? framework.
- Who is coming to our site – whom do we hope to reach with our site?
- What are they doing when they come – what can we help them do?
- Why are they coming? Are they looking for something specific or just browsing?
- Where are they coming from, are we leading them to our site from other channels, and if so, how do we personalize their experience?
Over time the old site grew like a Mille Feuille as we added and updated features, products, offers, content, and events. As a result, it was challenging to navigate from one area to another and truly understand Drift’s full story. To help, we made a significant update to our primary site navigation in order to guide visitors to the information they need most. This also improved the overall site hierarchy.
First, we wanted to clearly define Revenue Acceleration and the components that comprise the category: Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales. We also wanted to take the opportunity to make it clear that Drift is a platform for both marketing and sales.
The next nav item, Platform, gives an overview of all the components of the Drift platform – from Chat and Automation to Email and Video. It also outlines what makes the Drift platform unique – from real-time personalization and visitor intelligence capabilities, to our industry-leading AI bots and our unmatched Expert Services team.
The remainder of the nav items focuses on Content: Customer Stories, Insider – our engaging brand-new media hub – our simplified Pricing page and the ubiquitous About Us.
With a top nav that more closely follows a typical buyer journey, visitors can choose whether they’d like to browse or do a deep dive. But the natural left to right framing pulls the reader through Drift’s entire story – the tech, our amazing customers, the content, the company, and our culture.
Updating Our Visual Language
Equipped with this new messaging and flow, we then wanted to update our visual language to emphasize our new approach.
As our business has grown, our approach to it has as well. We wanted a simple site that helped our visitors access information quickly and easily. We loved the energy of our previous visual language, but it was loud! While that approach made sense for us as a category creator and disruptor, our new visual language emphasizes consistency. With it, we are reinforcing the message that Drift will be your dependable partner, and our team will have your back throughout the customer journey. The scrappy skater kid is still part of our DNA, but we’re not going to Ollie onto the reception desk.
[2018, 2019, Spring 2020, Current]
During our website redesign process, we stripped the whole site back to basics. We started with a very tight grid and focused on creating clear typographic hierarchies. We retained our original typeface because it has an excellent graphic presence, but rethought our accent type to capture a more substantial “hand.” We decided to drop our serif (goodbye classic contrast!) and use Proxima Nova for everything to help streamline load times and legibility overall.
Much energy was put into updating, revising, and rewriting headlines and subheads, and special attention was paid to updating product, service, and solution copy. So now those more robust hierarchies have messaging to match.
We also discarded most of our “embellishments.” We replaced our gritty texture and graffiti with a cleaner, more simple card system, pictograms are used to anchor the user’s attention and we incorporated our icon as a repetitive graphic element to create a more consistent rhythm and connection across pages.
Our new infographic and chart styles create a cleaner flow within pages, and updated product animations help walk the visitor through each features’ functionality.
Next, we updated our color palette. The old version was very striking but took no prisoners. We decided that using our two intense blues, Navy and Delicious Blue, as our primary colors, we could pair them with our secondary palette in dramatic fashion.
As for imagery, we kept the “faces” of Drift, which have been our hallmark since the beginning. Drifters and customers’ faces appear on almost every page. These are the people with whom you chat, talk to on the phone, and who spend all day every day helping you achieve success with Drift. We did shift away from the purely candid “shot on iPhone” quality of our photography and, as we have with the product, taken a sharper, cleaner, more dynamic approach.
In the end, our new site and refreshed brand portray a clean, pared-back system of components – one that gives us plenty of white space and room to incorporate motion to inform and delight. It’s spare and straightforward. By eliminating the visual complexity, we get the user to the content they need more efficiently.
But no rest for the wicked, now the real fun starts! Testing, iteration, tweaks, and all the work that everyone puts into a site to get it to be “just so.”
We love our old loud, in-your-face design language; it was fun, irreverent, and disruptive. But we are even more excited about the new one – a fresh start for a new era at Drift.
Thanks to our partner, Famous Folks, for joining us on this journey. The team there helped us find a fresh, clean look that will scale with us for months and years to come.
Find out what a Revenue Acceleration platform could mean for your bottomline.
Click around on our brand new website to learn how Drift harnesses the power of Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales to deliver value to your business and buyers – faster. When you do, you’ll be entered for a chance to win:
- $5,000 for home office renovations (1 winner)
- $1,000 towards a virtual marketing and / or sales team building event (2 winners)
- Membership into the Drift Book Club for a year – one book / month (5 winners)
