a diagram over trust, traffic, capture and nurture as a plan for inbound leads
A gameplan for inbound leads

Inbound leads

Milkywire, 2024

Role

Lead Designer

Time

Spring 2024

TL;DR

  • Problem. We had almost zero inbound leads after pivoting to B2B.
  • What we built. A redesigned website, SEO optimizations, a newsletter, a webinar pipeline and gated resources.
  • Result. Qualified inbound leads went from ~0 → 7 per month within the first quarter, and newsletter sign-ups grew 80 %.

Context

In 2023 Milkywire pivoted from a consumer donations app to a climate-solutions partner for enterprises. That meant a new buyer (sustainability managers) at larger/enterprise companies, longer sales cycles and new expectation on credibility and expertise. We needed a growth engine that could prove credibility before a single sales call.

North-star goal

Generate ≥ 20 qualified inbound leads per month by Q4 2024.

Touchpoints

Traffic

SEO, webinars, articles

Trust

Website

Capture

Gated resources

Nurture

Newsletter, demo

1. Website redesign

Why. The old site still spoke to individual donors and not enterprise buyers. We also needed to align with our new pitch deck and sales led growth strategy.

What I did. Led the end-to-end redesign, working with one other designer and two devs. New design system and page templates.

Process

  1. Audited old pages → mapped out new user flow
  2. White-boarded new IA around the buyer journey
  3. Low-fi prototype in Figma, tested with 5 sustainability managers
    Assumption validated: Enterprise buyers need instant proof to convert.
  4. Design system tokens + components to let 2 devs build fast

Key decisions

  1. Highlight the impact and our in-house experts
  2. Trusted-by logo strip immediately after fund intro
  3. Sign up flow with hubspot/zoom to quickly capture leads

Outcome

CTA CTR

+45%

Bounce

-5%
Snapshots from the process
Before
Old Design
After
New Design
Before and after the redesign

2. Newsletter launch

Why. We needed a low-friction nurture channel.

What I did. Set up Growth - Design pairing sessions. Mapped out all emails and crafted the new brand & email templates.

Process

  1. Put together a newsletter working group
  2. Together we planed out the new layout and content stucture
  3. Mapped out all emails
  4. Crafted the new brand & email templates
  5. Setup the new newsletter in Hubspot

Assumption

Leads will stay warm if we send high-value content every month

Subscribers

+60% in the first three months

Open rate

Avg. 36%
Snapshots of the process

3. Webinars & gated resources

Why. Collect warm leads through thought leadership and valuable assets.

What I did. Designed the landing pages, various assets such as reports, videos, whitepapers (layout, brand, data‐viz) and download/sign up flow with hubspot/zoom.

Process

  1. User flow for sign up and download
  2. Tested flow internally
  3. New webinar page design
  4. Asset creation (videos, reports, whitepapers)

Key decisions

  1. Sign up/download flow with hubspot/zoom to be able to build it without devs
  2. Reuse most of the design system
  3. For the asset we focused on highlighting expertise and impact while providing real value for the reader/viewer

Outcome

Webinars

2 in the first three months

Sign-ups and downloads

1900+ (~600 sign-ups, 1300 downloads)

Meeting requests

30+
Snapshots of the process

Collaboration & delivery

Team.
Me + 1 more designer, 2-4 engineers, Growth, PM, and fund-managers.

How we worked.
Daily stand-ups and async weekly Slack threads to keep everyone aligned. Close collaboration with engineers, who sat in Figma from day one. To be able to work smoothly with our CMS we also worked closely with the content manager. When it comes to the newsletter, webinars I worked with fund managers and growth manager to set it up. For the asset creation I spent most of the time in collaboration with fund managers to make sure we presented the impact data honestly and to keep the impact perspective.

QA.
I ran all-hands sweeps in staging; bugs fixed same day, zero rollbacks.

Efficiency.
Scoped tight and moved fast by re-using components wherever possible.

Impact

Before

  • Qualified inbound leads / mo: 0 * Newsletter subs: ~1200 * Organic traffic / mo: 1 k

After three months

  • Qualified inbound leads / mo: 7 * Newsletter subs: 1900 * Organic traffic / mo: 2.5 k

The site finally mirrors our deck, much easier to pitch. Head of Growth

Lessons

  • Knowing the customer is key, and enterprise customers have way different needs than end-customers and even smaller businesses.

  • Flexibility vs consistency – allowing for content managers to update all bells and whistles is not a quick win. Pushing for brand consistency and allowing the content managers to change what's needed is key to not end up with a Frankenstein-web.

  • Sales-led growth is tricky to balance for a product designer. Drilling down in third-hand information and pushing for validated feedback is a balancing act.

  • Scalability wins – on a small team, optimizing for speed is a clear win. Designing things to have multiple uses allows for much faster results.

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