Lincoln Automotive Financial Services (LAFS) Website Redesign

As the copywriter for Lincoln Automotive Financial Services (LAFS), I was responsible for creating all copy on the newly redesigned version of the Lincoln Automotive Financial Services website. This includes the content on the Retail, Lease, Commercial Financing, Account Manager, FAQs, Support, Vehicle Protection pages, and many more pages.

When setting out to redesign the previous Lincoln Automotive Financial Services website, our goal was to create a website that was much easier to navigate and much more user-friendly, centered more on the consumer behind the screen rather than the financial and technical mechanics of leasing and purchasing a Lincoln. We also looked the most recent revision of the Ford Credit website (from 2016) and identified four main problems: customers had trouble figuring out how to pay their bill online, it was difficult to find answers in the FAQ, there were far too many pages (over 150), and the site was resulting in too many calls to the LAFS call center.

Rather than simply adding Lincoln branding to the recently revised Ford Credit website, we set out to create an entirely new website that would help fix the problems Ford Credit’s website was having. We took the 150 pages, distilled the important information, consolidated ideas and created an 8-page site and made it much easier for the user to find content.

As the sole copywriter for this project, I made it my goal to consolidate the ideas and information dispersed across those 150 pages and rework the copy and pages to get customers the knowledge they actually needed. For example, Account Manager, which once contained over 30 pages, was now integrated into a single page that makes it easy to figure out what Account Manager can do and how it can be used. We also moved up the login form on both the homepage and the account manager page to make it much more prominent and easier for users to find when they first visit the website. Our final designs reduced the number of pages from 150 to merely 8, with all essential information left intact.

The FAQ, in particular, was excessive in its number of uncategorized questions, making it very difficult to find specific information a customer was looking for. We separated the FAQ questions into categories to make them easier to navigate. As the writer, I distilled the content of the many dozens of FAQ questions into those questions that were truly frequently asked, and made the answers clear, concise, and in terms that the average Lincoln Automotive Financial Services customer can understand.

The results for the Lincoln Automotive Financial Services website redesign have proved it to be a success, with a significant decrease in phone calls to support, a three-fold increase in online credit applications, an increase in account manager sign-ups, and a decrease in the “bounce rate” of users that navigate away after viewing just one page.