Melcourt
case study
Melcourt
446%Increase in view pages & time users stayed on those pages
Project Summary
Melcourt Industries is the UK’s leading supplier of peat-free products.
As one of the few horticultural businesses which has products endorsed by the Royal Horticultural Society, Melcourt was in great need of reaching a much wider audience with its top-quality mulches, soil improvers, natural play surfaces and biofiltration media.
Internal Links
Source Nibbler 5th July 2022
Content
Source Nibbler 5th July 2022
Freshness
Source Nibbler 5th July 2022
Objectives
Melcourt was reaching out to a dual audience: garden centre buyers and the gardening enthusiast.
The challenge was to capture both audiences that would result in maximum conversion rates for their products. Their existing website was trade focused however the design was outdated and it was several years old. The User Experience was clunky and required time-sucking effort for the buyers and was not an aesthetically pleasing one for the garden-owning customer.
The former website was trade focused and yet this didn’t appeal to the lucrative green-fingered purchasers. Another important objective was for customers (both trade and retail) to be informed succinctly and precisely about the range of products.
strategy
Digital Zest had initial meetings with the founder-owners in order to gauge to overall size of the task.
With thousands of products to consider, the Digital Zest team had to create a digital interface and website that was contemporary and on trend, particularly as a whole slew of new customers had to be considered.
The Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 to 2021 introduced millions of potential clients to Melcourt as gardening became even more popular.
The first task of Digital Zest was to confirm who the main audience is for Melcourt.
We asked the following questions:
Who was using the old website?
How were they interacting?
What were customers wanting to know?
We used state-of-the-art technology to record customer journeys on the old website so this could inform the new development and design.
audience & branding
When Digital Zest undertook the project, the Melcourt brand had no guidelines and the existing colour palette was non-descript.
This however was an opportunity for the Digital Zest team to create superb brand guidelines and introduced a colour palette that split the trade and retail audiences.
An accent colour was also introduced to steer both audience types to where Melcourt products could be purchased.
As a result of the site’s development, it is was possible to see who viewed what.