The Brief
Herschel appointed Radiator to help them take advantage of a growing demand in infrared heating products for the home and commercial spaces. This trend is combined with an increasing number of customers who prefer to browse and purchase online; reducing the need for physical showrooms and sales teams.
An understanding of Herschel’s brand values, expertise and culture together with a grasp of their customer segmentation across homeowners, architects and designers was essential in setting the bigger picture and drivers for this website overhaul.
Our Digital Partnership centred on usability, design and frontend build; dovetailing with a pre-existing WordPress platform delivered internally by Herschel.
Furthermore, Herschel spend a significant amount of their marketing budget on paid search ads and were keen to reduce bounce rates and improve return on ad spend.
Our Solution
With high traffic levels meeting high bounce rates, an audit of the existing site from a technical SEO and Usability perspective was essential in carrying key learnings forward into the planning and implementation stages. This early evaluation embraced the overall objectives of generating more user-engagement and sales conversions through this new site.
Before we audited the site, we ran our Brand Workshop sessions, enabling our Team to grasp the essence of the Herschel brand, what it stands for, its differentiation, personality, archetype and customer segments. This stage allows us to pin down Herschel’s online value propositions, key selling messages and calls to action as well as understanding how online success will be gauged going forward.
These Brand Workshop sessions also firmly position Radiator as an extension of Herschel’s Team – enabling us to progress with our client’s backing and trust.
Website Usability Audit
This is an effective method of identifying problem areas with a website that are causing headaches for users and blocking conversions. Our UX audit approach combines empirical methods through Google Analytics data insights with anecdotal evidence, through interviewing Herschel staff / select customers.
This equips our UX team with what they need to pull a set of user-centric enhancement recommendations together on how conversions can be boosted by making the site easier for users to achieve their goals.
Technical SEO Audit
In conjunction with the usability audit, we bolstered our recommendations for Herschel by running a technical SEO audit on the site. This exercise identifies on-site weakness that are likely to be restricting website pages from ranking naturally.
This is combined with search keyword analysis to ensure the site’s structure and content going forward is further optimised for targeted, natural search.
Insights & Implementation
We discussed the findings and recommendations from both Audits with Herschel and agreed that the following would be rolled out to boost their site’s chances of ranking organically, whilst engaging and converting more visitors -
- Brand positioning - encourage more customers to think infra-red immediately when heating their business / home – as with electric cars - and with Herschel as generic/synonymous as 'Hoover'
- A ‘mobile-first’ approach - reflecting brand values of being open and accessible and improving mobile usability in general – a navigation and search function supporting an intuitive user journey which excites and delights
- Address concerns and ignorance around infra-red heating by making more of successful client installations / case studies with a focus on visual content and commercial installs which are typically followed by Homes customers as a market trend - incorporate links to the products featured - providing clear journey continuation
- Introduction of a rationalised and more simpler navigation structure, for more effective signposting and segmenting across target user-groups: residential, commercial, architects, designers
- Communication themes - distil key messages around Sustainability, Efficiency, Design, Affordability so that these can be better peppered throughout the user journey rather than housed in text-heavy standalone sub pages
- Establish a slicker, cleaner, more immediate product listing format and use consistently throughout the site
- Make the Cart toggle sticky so that it's available and clickable at all times
- Overall a more premium, progressive presentation to better reflect the products is required and which makes better use of photography: full-width, immersive shots for hero banner spaces
