Case Study: Web site makeover for Pet24

Enhancing your web site’s visual appeal and structure through evidence led design can have a significant impact on customer engagement and ultimately conversion to sales and/or leads.

As the UK’s leading visual identification service for cats and dogs, Pet24 has built-up corporate relationships with major animal re-homing charities – including The Dogs Trust and Wood Green – which includes a first year subscription to the Pet24 service with every animal they re-home. While this strategy continues to deliver strong year 1 business, renewal rates via the web site have proved extremely low compared to other less cost-effective channels.

Additionally the company is aiming to expand their corporate relationships and recently came to feel that the site did little to support their pitches. We were therefore engaged to review the branding of the site as well as the home page structure to encourage more renewals.

Pet24 before Pipstone/CRDesign redesign

Dull and lifeless, Pet24?s old site did little to inspire visitors – reflecting in poor customer retention rates.

As well as being visually unappealing, our immediate observation was that the homepage failed to adequately describe the Pet24 service and featured confusing navigation making usability a key issue.

Equally Pet24?s brand presence was weak and amateurish which for corporates and consumers – for whom the point of renewal would be their first encounter with the Pet24 brand – did little to inspire confidence, enthusiasm and a sense of value.

Our Response

As a first step to overcoming this we set to work on a visual overhaul of Pet24?s home page and primary navigation addressing each of the issues identified in our initial design audit.

Pet24 after the Pipstone/CRDesign treatment

Bright and vibrant, our new visual design delivers greater visual impact and brand presence with a clear value statement taking centre stage.

Shifting the dominant colour from red to blue not only provides a friendlier, fresher user experience but also allows the brand’s red to be used as an ‘accent’ colour – directing the user’s attention as required to improve usability and click-thru rates.

Greater visual prominence is given to Pet24?s ‘calls to action’ – ie: ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Renew Membership’ etc. – while being set into a new visual footer which further supports the selling process with customer testimonials and a simple ticker displaying the number of pets the service has safely returned to customers – vital proof of service
value which was simply missing from the old site.

Return on Investment

After just two weeks Pet24′s analytics already demonstrate a measurable return on investment with a clear shift in user click-thrus away from random browsing to Pet24′s key calls to action and a 218% increase in the average time users spend on the site.

Crucially however, click-share for the home page’s ‘Renew Membership’ action has instantly increased from 5.1% to 25% demonstrating that the site’s users are now able to immediately identify the path they need to take to renew their account and are more confident to take that step.

Thereafter a substantial increase in visitor numbers has been measured on the first renewals information page with a 185% increase in users clicking through to the buying process itself.

We are now working with Pet24 to deliver a revised renewal process which we expect to double conversion rates thereby achieving the client’s medium term objectives within the first 90 days of our engagement and delivering sustainable growth through improved customer retention.

These metrics were compiled on 07 July 2011.