Natural Retreats

A beautiful website that maximises conversion

The Natural Retreats website required detailed user-experience strategy and planning to feed into the design and HTML build. KMP Digitata set out to improve the digital channels for a visitor while maximising conversions for Natural Retreats.

Natural Retreats Explore Dream Discover

 

Natural Retreats offer unique self catering holiday experiences: luxurious properties in stunning locations in the UK, Ireland, US and the Canary Islands. Natural Retreats provide luxury accommodation, truly exhilarating experiences and unrivalled local knowledge – everything you need for a holiday to remember.

What We Did

We looked at these journeys from the eyes of the users

Our plan included detailed personas and an in-depth review of where Natural Retreat’s website could be enhanced to increase conversion to a sale. So we gathered tons of data, combined this with the persona insights and developed a suite of recommendations to deliver conversion rate optimisation (CRO). We ran discovery workshops to identify key customer journeys, organizational objectives and get under the skin of Natural retreats as a brand and business.

The workshops worked as discovery and strategy sessions shaping the digital agenda, establish objectives and KPI’s.  We also  completed a thorough UX review of the old site. With the new site we wanted to make sure that the booking process was as seamless and easy as possible.

 

Natural Retreats Explore Dream Discover

 

Here are some of the magic ingredients

We conducted gorilla user testing alongside a google analytics review to look at how users were interacting with the current site and where the potential pain points were.  Following competitor and expert reviews and a suite of research into the typical customer journeys we outlined the key functionality for the each of the key segments and delivered a full strategy document to Natural Retreats all focused around increasing conversion, cross sell and up sell. KMP’s UX team then translated the suite of user stories into a set of detailed wireframes demonstrating multiple journeys, opportunities for personalisation and conversion points. As part of our redevelopment work we identified and discovered the following types of Natural Retreats site users;

  • Inspire me
  • Vacationer
  • Day Tripper
  • Existing Customer

 

 

Natural Retreats Explore Dream Discover

 

For this project we took a mobile first responsive approach, utilising progressive enhancement to deliver the optimum experience on every device. This approach enabled us to streamline the weight of the page, keeping it low in file-size which is a great benefit to mobile users, especially those users who don’t have access to a Wi-Fi connection – making it easy for users to find a retreat in the middle of nowhere. By ensuring that we considered context alongside content we were able to target users based on their location, their persona and their device – for example, ensuring that mobile users at a Natural Retreat with kids are presented content based around things to do and revenue generating extras.

 

Natural Retreats Explore Dream Discover

 

As the site was being built, progressive enhancement was always in mind so that it allows all users to access basic content and functionality, but if a user has a more advanced browser that allows for greater features, they are not penalised and are served an enhanced version of the site. We did this via the use of “media queries” which allows for sections of code to target specific device screen widths, dynamically and fluidly changing the layout to fit the user’s device screen. Another benefit of taking a “mobile first” responsive design approach is that some mobile devices may not support media queries, so the website is built with this in mind as the user will receive the mobile version regardless of media query support. From taking a responsive approach with the site, we have completely eliminated the need for a separate mobile site, saving costs and management time.

 

Natural Retreats Explore Dream Discover

 



The Results

Sales Conversation Optimisation

As the site has just launched it is a bit too early to tell how successful the changes have been however with a responsive, personalised site that includes a range of UX and CRO developments such as simplified search forms and price grids, refactored navigation to offer a more intuitive user experience and a fresh approach to search and selection we’re confident the results will be as expected.