Site refresh achieves conversion KPI in 1 week

Educating customers and increasing conversions

ChannelPorts is a multi-faceted company that delivers cross-border solutions for the freight industry.

Their flagship product, CustomsPro, draws on their extensive experience and utilises cutting-edge technology in order to streamline the customs clearance process for their clients.

What the client wanted

The ChannelPorts team came to us with an existing WordPress website that had integrations for email marketing, automations, and a CRM, while in the process of a rebrand.

They wanted to evolve their website to reflect the new brand, but also to improve the customer education and the journey through the website to increase conversions.

Diving into the client’s world

To kick off, we carried out a discovery workshop with the team at ChannelPorts to uncover their goals and aspirations, as well as their challenges with the current website.

Close collaboration throughout the workshop, paired with the use of a Miro board to capture ideas together in real time, helped us paint a clearer picture of ChannelPorts’ vision.

We combined contributions and insights from both our team and their team to build a plan and roadmap for delivery.

Eliminating missed conversion opportunities

A major challenge for the ChannelPorts team was that they had no visibility of what leads the website was driving. However, they recognised the potential for their website to become a key lead generation tool.

Following the workshop and further research, we were able to build clarity around how well the website was generating leads, map out user journeys, and identify missed conversion opportunities or relevant points in the sales funnel that needed attention.

This was put into action in various ways such as introducing stronger calls-to-action, providing social proof, scale and potential with more case studies, and swiftly moving different audience groups into relevant journeys from the homepage.

Refreshing the look and feel and better catering to audience

In addition to relevant user journeys creating a more personalised approach, ChannelPorts faced other challenges related to catering appropriately to their audience groups. For instance, supporting non-English speaking customers to use the website easily.

The look and feel also contributed to these challenges, as UI design and choice of imagery needed to be refreshed to look more modern and professional for synergy with the new brand and expectations from their target audience.

Editing freedom and flexibility for the ChannelPorts team

Previously the site was very difficult for the ChannelPorts team to edit and adapt to their changing needs. We worked on improving the website editing experience for them, speeding up their internal website management processes.

The website is now fully editable for the client, utilising WordPress’ block-based Gutenburg editor and our own custom framework, Snap. This gives ChannelPorts the freedom to make changes to their website quickly and easily, instead of having to wait for support from developers to make every change.

Reducing site bloat and increasing site speed

Some areas of the site, such as the blog page, were bloated and causing the site to load at a slower speed than desired due to various factors such as lack of image optimisation. We identified where the site could be optimised to improve speed and performance.

Website journey centred around key product

Outcomes from our discovery workshop with the client gave us clarity around key aspirations for the business, and how the website should reflect and support those.

Centering the website journey around the key product, CustomsPro, was an important element that remained at the forefront of decisions throughout the planning and web design process.

We also developed an explainer for the homepage and introduced other features such as a map solution to display the location of ports that are compatible with CustomsPro.

Taking a more personalised approach, we also added new routes to key pages that were tailored to audience groups to improve user buying journeys and so that the ChannelPorts team align appropriate content with relevant customer segments.

Most importantly, we worked to improve conversions through a combination of digital strategy, web design and development, and web performance expertise.

This included planning out where stronger and more relevant web content could be introduced across the site and increasing calls-to-action, feeding more leads into the sales pipeline.

Visual refresh

We prepared new UI designs to thread ChannelPorts’ new branding throughout its website, with an improved user experience and more prominence on key elements of the sales funnel such as explainers, case studies and testimonials.

All of this was carefully considered so that we could present both an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing experience for web visitors, while catering to the diverse needs of ChannelPorts’ audience groups.

Faster, leaner site with improved SEO rankings

We achieved faster page speed through a combination of improvements, such as optimising images and logos, caching and deferring loading of appropriate features, and working to reduce code bloat for a leaner website overall.

As well as improving user experience, having a faster site also contributed positively to the client’s SEO strategy, and together with other improvements it increased SEO rankings for priority keywords.

Getting closer to customers

Our work on ChannelPorts’ website also involved supporting them to gain deeper insights into customer needs and behaviour.

We set up GA4 tracking for key conversion points to better understand customers and purchase decisions, and ChannelPorts signed up a new customer through the new ‘book a demo’ function of the website within the first week of going live.

Setting up analytics tracking enabled us to design and deliver an intuitive website experience that helps customers take the action they intend to. But it also equips ChannelPorts to gather insights over time so they can continue to adapt to changing customer needs and expectations.

We worked closely with ChannelPorts to increase “trust” through improved visibility of testimonials and case studies. This provides social proof to help future customers make their purchasing decisions, but that’s not all. It also helps ChannelPorts reach more customers through SEO, because search engines like Google use trust scores as a central component for assessing content quality for search results.

Finally, we prepared the site for multi-language capability over time, including using a multi-language plugin integration to allow for non-English speakers to interact with the website in their own language.