HELPING DESIGNERS GUILD TO MAXIMISE SALES AND REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES

Challenge 

Designers Guild was established in 1970, producing designs and wholesaling furnishing fabrics, wall coverings, upholstery and bed and bath collections worldwide and launched their website in 2008.

The Designers Guild brand is represented in 83 countries and the business want to grow sales revenue by positioning themselves as one of the top 3 suppliers within their global wholesale customer account base and develop the lifestyle product range through their own stores, concessions and website.

As the Designer Guild brand continues to expand both domestically and internationally Designers Guild commissioned IVIS Group to conduct a review of the UK Website, proposing recommendations to enhance the Website and maximise sales and revenue opportunities.

Solution

IVIS Group conducted a three day analysis of the Designers Guild website to provide insight across a number of key areas outlined below. The core focus of the analysis was to identify key areas of improvement for the website with the specific objective of increasing customer conversion and revenue streams online.

At the same time, with a large stockist network, it is important that selling online does not dominate the site at the expense of promoting the brand, the products and the traditional channels of sale.

Business Focus Analysis – investigating how well the site covers the business objectives and issues of concern to be addressed by the website (i.e. increase basket size, correct targeting on customer segment etc)

Branding and Design – ensuring there is a consistent feel throughout the site and also consistency with other media etc. This would include ensuring the brand message is being conveyed, tone of voice and the brand story and page layouts.

Navigation and Ease of Use – important that essential tasks are easy to execute for the customer whether intuitive or logical. For example, ensuring the navigation methods are established on the home page, are icons in the same position on every page, investigating if the site is too deep i.e. it takes too many clicks to find the desired information. Also how easy is it to find the website and find information once you reach the website?

Content – how content is structured and the positioning of important information, is content enriched enough and relevant, what are the content hierarchies and layout structures, how are images managed and the different sizes of images used across the site – is there a level of consistency

SEO & Meta-tagging – analysing how the content is structured and how pages and content are tagged for SEO optimisation. Is the structure search engine friendly and is there consistency with tagging both of structured content and objects such as images

Reputation – it is important that we verify how the site is being linked to from search engines and other relevant players in the industry (magazines, blogs etc.) as this will be critical in driving traffic to the site

Competitor Analysis – comparison of features and design of the site with other competitors. What are the relative strengths/weaknesses of the site versus key competitors, what can be learned from competitors or capitalised on as a competitive advantage in the market.

Conversion – identify barriers to conversion including looking at the number of steps to check out for the customer, the complexities of the checkout and how well the sale can be made. Also a review of up- and cross-selling.

Mobile ready – does the site work well and adapt for mobile devices – are the concepts of responsive design being followed. How does the user experience adapt itself to different screen sizes and interaction devices (touch-screen)? Alternatively, is a separate mobile site/app used?

Social presence analysis – conduct an analysis of social network connectivity – can users authenticate via a social network, how easy is it to add comments/favourites/likes, can reviews be created, and how is content re-distributed via social networks (if appropriate).

This will also include analysis of the brand presence within social networks – checking for consistency with the site and the reach (i.e. how many shared, likes, re-tweets)

Customisation / personalisation – How far can the user go in customising their interaction with the website, what level of personalisation is supported and how does this enhance the customer experience or better represent the brand values

Accessibility – How well does the site support accessibility. What is the adherence to W3C accessibility guidelines not purely as a legal issue but in relation to the customer segments within the market (for example targeting elderly people the UI should cater for text enlargement)

Performance / technical– Verify how UI assets and code have been optimized for speed of download and interaction – do the pages load quickly, is information structured/compressed, are images optimised for speed or is a 3rd party service used.

CATEGORY: Website improvement

SERVICES: IVIS Professional Services

DELIVERABLES: Complete Website overhaul