Experience sits at the centre of the relationship between brand and customer – whether it’s the experience offered face-to-face, online or through brand interactions. With ever-increasing online engagement from consumers, more businesses are relying on a digital platform to improve their commercial performance. As such, more sophisticated digital marketing platforms are being deployed with a focus on directly impacting long-term business goals and strategy.

As the UK’s largest and Europe’s second largest provider of self-storage solutions, Safestore recognised they needed to redefine their digital offer, to deliver a customer experience which complements their market-leading reputation in the field of self-storage.

Challenge

Working closely with the marketing team, Delete identified the business challenges facing Safestore, and devised a strategy to drive increased return from their digital and marketing investment. The aims of the new digital solution were to:

  • Increase inbound prospect enquiries
  • Increase on-site conversion rate for prospect enquiries
  • Improve organic search ranking
  • Deliver a market-leading user experience

Delete recommended the following to re-invent Safestore’s online presence:

  • A fully responsive site experience with a mobile-first focus
  • A focused user experience built around a primary conversion funnel
  • The introduction of a new technology platform, Kentico, with marketing and personalisation ability
  • The creation of a new digital brand and visual identity standard for ongoing digital communications

Despite self-storage being a demand-led product, Safestore still wanted to establish a positive brand experience for its customers which put its brand front-of-mind and positions it as a leader in digital communication.

Solution

It was essential Safestore had a digital environment that allowed visitors to find information about self-storage quickly and easily – leading them to request a quote as easily as possible.

Delete built a platform that was designed to allow for user access into the quote process from any area on the site. Alongside this, the quote process was re-engineered to offer a personalised experience based on individual storage requirements, including the exploration of units through video, imagery and a route for those who simply wanted a direct quote. Throughout the design stage, multiple interactive prototypes were developed and tested by both Delete and Safestore to ensure that when the product launched, it was effective and optimised as much as possible.

To compliment the new platform, the visual identity of the site and new digital brand guidelines were created to inform future communications and ensure greater marketing consistency. A cleaner and simpler aesthetic was used to ensure search results, store pages and quote processes were easily digestible.

The latest enhancement saw a social and editorial content hub introduced to enhance organic search traffic around key terms, which allowed the brand to deliver helpful tips, customer stories and video content.

Kentico EMS was the chosen technical platform used, due to its many inbuilt features including flexible A/B testing allowing Safestore to discover which designs and messages lead to the most conversions.

Finally, following the launch of the site, the website has been continually optimised, and supported with a sustained SEO campaign, which continues to drive traffic to dynamic landing pages, based on specific search terms.

Results

Take a look at the figures below to see the positive impact Delete’s work had for Safestore:

  • Total average monthly enquiries increased by 6%
  • Total average monthly conversion rate (year on year) increased by 6%

The mobile-first approach had a fantastic impact on monthly results when comparing to 2014/15:

  • Average monthly users: increased by 43%
  • Average monthly enquiries: increased by 62%
  • Average monthly conversion rate: increased by 13%