Thatchers is one of the nation’s favourite brands of cider. Still a family-run business, they’ve been making cider on Myrtle Farm in Somerset for over 115 years. A staple in pubs and shops across the land, their range covers long-standing favourites and innovative new flavours.
As lockdown started in 2020, Thatchers found everyone flocking to their website to buy their favourite cider online. But the online shopping experience wasn’t optimised, and didn’t deliver the visual and user experience the brand deserved.
The team also lacked an efficient way to manage the content on their website. So they reached out for help.
Uncovering insight
Working as a combined team with branding and creative experts Firehaus, we set about uncovering insights into how visitors engaged with the existing website: qualitatively through surveys, and quantitatively through analytics data.
This let us identify the key user journeys that mattered to both the brand and its visitors, which became the high-level definition of needs for the new website.
A platform recommendation
In parallel, after analysing their current content management system and the alternatives, I delivered a recommendation that would give the team a much better way to manage their customers’ online experience, and tighter data integration with their back-end systems.
User stories and information architecture
While Firehaus designed the look and feel of the new website, I expanded the user journeys into a set of detailed user stories, which the web development team would use as a full and complete definition of what the website needed to deliver.
I also defined the new site’s information architecture, including all of its internal SEO, so the copywriters could make sure the site was highly optimised.
The right build partner
Armed with the detailed user stories, I ran a partner selection process that brought Squarebird into the team to turn those stories into a fully working, new and improved website.
A near-real-time dashboard
Finally, I created a multi-channel, near-real-time, interactive dashboard that gives the Thatchers team visibility of how visitors and shoppers engage with the website across the key user journeys we first identified.
- A new website that meets the needs of both customers and the brand
- Clear visibility of website customer behaviour delivered in an automated, always-up-to-date online dashboard
- Well-defined business KPIs and a simple way to measure them
- Improved SEO performance
- Improved content management capabilities for the internal team
- Tighter integration with back-end systems
“Matt’s characteristic of outstanding thoroughness combined with his ability to simplify any challenges led to a perfect scoping and delivery of the project.”Philip McTeerHead of Marketing, Thatchers Cider