192% Increase in Sales from New Digital Marketing UX
For Belden, a Fortune 1000 Company.
User Experience Designer, Interface Designer, and Project Manager on the Digital Marketing team. Audited and redesigned collateral including websites, emails/newsletters, and reusable forms. Regions: AMS, EMEA, and APAC. Scope included styles, elements, interactive components, layouts, and templates, as well as documentation for implementation. Responsible for initial creation and maintenance of a central design system that enabled all team members to utilize my designs across collateral. Also served as the main builder/launcher of new marketing websites. Part of a small group of email/newsletter builders and marketing campaign launchers. Used analytics to gain insight on user engagement. Made recommendations to stakeholders.
Worked on a team of Product Experts, regional Marketing Managers, regional Translators, and System Analysts. Reported to the Director of Digital Marketing.
Belden's marketing was about to shift to a digital-first strategy. Their webpages, emails/newsletters, and forms were about to have to deliver for a larger audience, and negative user experiences would be a much larger issue for their business.
Between what digital marketing collateral was like at that point, and what it needed to be–nice to use and scalable–were some deficiencies:
Some features were difficult to read, use, or understand. Based on recent user feedback.
The team wasn’t suited for creating engaging, customized interfaces at scale with their drag-and-drop website builder, and lack of coding experience.
All styles also had to be updated, part of a company-wide rebrand.
I audited collateral, including non-marketing designs. I drew inspiration from what was easiest to use, what fit well with the updated branding, and which components could be both engaging and effectively scaled. I tested existing interfaces across platforms to identify technical constraints.
Found that website layouts were basic, often only text and several large images. It was often difficult to scan for key information.
For the Digital Marketing team, there were no different, engaging ways to present information to customers
Inconsistent styles created usability and accessibility issues.
Layouts were not mobile-first, causing them to break and be unusable on some platforms.
Create, implement, and utilize an evolving library of custom responsive components, using consistent standards for styling and implementation. Components would need to be customized by team members with little-to-no coding experience, and implemented in a drag-and-drop website builder.
New components mainly helped present information without being overwhelming, and clearly identified the key parts for anyone scanning.
We anticipated that implementing this system would significantly decrease build times and increase creative capacity.
For the brand update, we introduced a new set of styles: typefaces, a color palette, motion, etc.
There were no guidelines for digital collateral, so I drew from Belden.com and its subpages, and from guidelines in other sections of the business. The shared document for code implementation also includes a style guide, and the website builder has been updated with all of these elements as presets.
Each code snippet was written to be customized with as little technical knowledge as possible.
The snippets were put into an evolving shared document, and could be copied-and-pasted into the website builder.
To help team members, this document included step-by-step instructions, troubleshooting tips, and reference images. I also accompanied the document with a walkthrough video, where I went step-by-step through the updated creation process. Almost immediately, the team was creating unique pages and emails without having to run anything by me. Therefore, we started launching new digital marketing campaigns!
Post-approval, started working on new digital marketing campaigns. Designs were created based on business objectives: providing product/service information, event signup, post-event resources, etc. Some new components were built as we learned exactly what stakeholders needed, which I now believe should have been more important during my audit.
Tracked and evaluated performance and made small improvements (not large, consistency-challenging changes) based on where users clicked, how long they spent reading content, and if they completed the Call to Action(s).
The Digital Marketing team sustained its highest number of concurrent projects, enabled by the efficient new design system. Average turnaround time for webpages went from 1 week to 3 days.
Digital-first marketing strategies attracted a record numbers of visitors, but conversion and sale rates went up proportionately higher.
Webpage Performance, prior to redesign (2025), versus after redesign (Q1-Q3 2026):
Average page's conversion rate increased by 75.2%
Total users converted increased by 106.57%
Total conversions that led to sales increased from 430 to 1,256
"…have really loved seeing the evolution of the designs compared to where we started. It’s brilliant. We’ve been loving how the campaign pages are turning out and have heard a lot of great feedback from stakeholders on the new modules you’ve built… I’ve been very impressed with the landing pages you’re producing and how well you collaborate with such a wide variety of stakeholders."
– Graeme Haase, manager, campaign orchestration at Belden