Enabling the UK’s largest ecommerce provider to stay on top of the market
The Challenge
EKM, formerly ekmpowershop.com, was the first hosted ecommerce provider in the UK, founded in 2002. It was my principle role from 2015 to ensure that EKM stayed at the forefront of the UK ecommerce provider market, competing with heavily funded competitors from overseas such as Shopify. Through continual improvement, optimisation, and laying down full user journeys from advertising, to landing pages, website and beyond – this was made possible. EKM remains at the forefront of UK ecommerce. Visit https://www.ekm.com
The Solution
Attracting tens of thousands of visitors weekly it was important to have a full conversion rate optimisation strategy for ekm.com. Focusing on high impact pages and utilising a variety of methods from analytics, competitor analysis, user testing, split testing and visitor behavior analysis to make improvements myself and my team managed to keep the conversion rate, and business moving forward.
Continual analytical and visitor analysis
The EKM site was continually analysed, measured and monitored, changes were made sometimes in a sprint fashion with small changes which were tested, through to full section re-vamps. By utilising technology such as Google Analytics, Marketing attribution tool KissMetrics, Visitor analysis tool Hotjar, UserTesting.com, and real user groups we gained invaluable insight to help improve EKM.com and focus attention in the right places.
Continual a/b split tests
A regular feature from myself and team at EKM was using insight gathered from the methods mentioned previously, and turning that into hypotheses to form the basis of split and multivariate tests using Optimizely. We saw great success, and also some failures during this time – we didn’t like to go long without a test running.
A focus on mobile user experience due to a shift in marketing strategy
With an increased focus on social marketing, and an ever increased mobile browsing society it was important to keep EKM fully optimised across all devices, with the mobile experience making a big part of this.
Adding, optimising and re-fining customer journeys
Based off the back of internal feedback, usability testings and other insight – I formulated additional and improved existing customer journeys, one example was that a lot of customers were signing up and then becoming frustrated they couldn’t find the theme they had seen front of house – so a flow was created to allow users to signup with that theme pre-applied from the themes showcase.
front end development & optimisation
Part of my own and my teams role was to not only design and improve the overall user experience of the EKM.com website, but to create and maintain high coding standards on the website, utilsing CSS preprocessor LESS, and various other technologies, with a focus on improving Google page insights and Pingdom analysis scores to further heighten the user experience through fast-loading pages.
The full journey from advertisment to signup
Full customer journeys were created and improved from the first touch point of advertisement, through to landing pages, form submission, automated emails, further landing pages and more. This complemented EKM’s social and content marketing strategy and further improved the UX of the EKM.com website.
creating additional revenue streams via ux improvements
Inside EKM the opportunities to market to existing customers outside of the back-end were stagnating, so I created a new login screen that allowed for additional advertising, whilst also having some UX improvements to the actual form.
extending the user experience beyond signup-complete
While my primarly role at EKM was the front-end website UX, and the odd back-end project – I continuolously improved the customer journey beyond signup, in-line with business objectives – the sereis above is the automatic welcome emails customers receieve at fixed intervals after signup, giving them instructions, introducing features and benefits – as well as prompting them to get in touch with their account manager and up-selling an upgraded plan.
re-establishing the original hosted ecommerce provider ekmPowershop
A good portion of time at EKM was utilised to re-brand the company from ekmPowershop.com, and lead the direction in creating brand guidelines, brand standards, and provide direction to create new visuals and assets for use on the EKM.com website.
creating the brand
Coming from a brand and creative background I was tasked with creating the EKM brand to co-incide with the re-brand to EKM.com, this was launched in 2015 and it’s been my mission at EKM since to push the brands creative direction both online and offline.
continual creative direction for new brand visuals to aid marketing & UX
A large part of improving the overall user experience for EKM.com included portraying trust through high quality photography, as well as creating other assets such as iconography and mockups.
taking the online offline
While predominantly an online business EKM.com’s reach often spanned offline through trade fairs, careers fairs, business meetups and more – so continual print work was developed in-line with the overall brand style.
creating brand standards and guidelines
Often junior designers, marketers and 3rd partys would utilise the EKM brand, to ensure that brand standards were met at all times a full brand guideline microsite was created.
defining the ekm social advertising strategy
As well as holding front-end UX sprints, a regular occurrence at EKM was to hold social advertising sprints, in some cases this would be as simple as looking at personas and coming up with a series of adverts to test, and in others creating a full campaign, landing page, ads and more.
creating marketing personas
At EKM myself and my team continuously looked over our marketing and UX personas, to spot opportunities for website improvements as well as give marketing direction, this often led to more targetted advertisements with the right content in front of the right people. which coupled with similar content on-site led to a fluid experience.
continual testing & analysis of ads
As with A/B testing on the EKM.com website, we never let the adverts sit for long without looking into the data, interaction and performance and then creating new improved ads to run alongside the current ones – by utilising this method I was able to take the Facebook & Instagram signup numbers and increase them by over 250%.
The results
Add results