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Dock9 was responsible for many aspects of the project, from the user interface design and technical development right through to user testing and launch.

DoubleGlazingCompanies.com Home Page

Some key features of the site are listed below:

• Company comparison engine
  Customers enter their postcode and select the criteria that is important to them. They are then shown a range of local companies with ticks and crosses indicating which services and products they offer. Users can order the search results by user rating, distance from their location and other matching criteria.

• Customer reviews and company reply system
  Customers can leave reviews of the companies that they have used and leave star ratings. Companies are notified of the review and have the right to reply.

• Company portal
  Companies that sign up have access to a portal, enabling them to self manage their listing, read and respond to reviews and view live statistics relating to their listing.

• Automated paid upgrades and renewals
  Beyond the basic Bronze listings, companies can pay for for Silver and Gold company listings. Additional functionality available includes the ability to:
  • add industry accreditations
  • upload a company logo
  • add a dynamic image gallery, showing a company’s work
  • activate a link to the company’s website

• Abusive content reporting and automated take-down
  With a site like this, it is crucial to provide an automated way for users to report abusive content. Dock9 developed an ‘instant take-down’ system, where users can notify the site of such content and DoubleGlazingCompanies.com staff can then manually review and then reinstate content if they decide that it is appropriate.

• Web-based back office
  DoubleGlazingCompanies.com staff can manage companies, reviews and reported abuse in a secure web-based back office.

Alan Burgess, Managing Director of DoubleGlazingCompanies.com Ltd, comments,

“Mark and his team at Dock9 have been excellent. From the initial brief, through to launch and thereafter well into the projected developments, they have beavered away, diligently.

With an ever changing (improving) brief, the changes were common place but there was never an issue that could not be overcome                                                                                                  ”

If you are planning a web development project and would like to draw on our experience, please fill out a Project Planner and we will contact you with innovative, cost-effective ideas and advice on how best to implement them.

Earlier this year Tradex chose Dock9 for a major, multi-stage project to create new retail and broker websites. This includes a completely new ‘look and feel’, new insurance rating engines, improved back office processes and back-end system integration.

Phase 1 launch: Retail website

New retail website home page

The first phase of the project, the new retail website, was successfully launched last month. Dock9 designed and implemented a completely new user interface, custom content management system, document archive and search engine optimised pages for each of the products that Tradex offers.

View the retail website at: www.tradex.com

Future project highlights:

With the retail site successfully launched Dock9  is currently working on a number of major new features for the broker site. These include:

• A new broker website user interface, due to launch in early 2011, replacing the current design (below).

• A high volume of business is transacted on the website every day, so Dock9 is focusing on improving the usability of every function at the front-end and the process efficiency at the back-end.
• Completely new policy adjustments process, with automated vehicle lookups, integrated with the company’s back-end system.

We look forward to updating our blog with further launches on this project soon.

Contact Us

Is your company facing challenges with back office website integration or processing quotations online? Or do you simply need to refresh your online image?

If you would like to draw on our experience, please fill out a Project Planner and we will contact you with innovative, cost-effective ideas and advice on how best to implement them.

1) Understand your goals and document your strategy

It should go without saying that it is important to have clearly defined goals before undertaking any marketing campaign. But how many people actually spend time discussing and agreeing objectives and then put them into writing? You’ll be surpised how much this helps clarify your thinking and improves your implementation.

Make your goals measurable. With marketing budgets being squeezed, it is important that there is enough evidence that the campaign delivers an acceptable return on investment. If your company is spending £25 per lead with a lead broker, but your email marketing is generating leads at half the price you need to be able to demonstrate this with clear, reliable metrics.

Your email marketing software should give you a break down of open rates, bounces, unsubscribes and exactly which links within the email were clicked (if not, then look for an alternative). If used in conjuction with Google Analytics, you can track which of those ‘click-throughs’ resulted in conversions. If you are seeking completed mortgage enquiry forms, for instance, you should tag all links and setup goals in Analytics so you know exactly which emails, and which links within them, have resulted in leads, completed application forms, offers and completions. Ultimately, of course, the key metric to measure for all campaigns is cost of completion versus revenue earned to get the overall return on investment.

So you also need to make sure you have back office processes in place to accurately track which of the submitted enquiries have actually resulted in income. If you don’t, you’ll never know which campaigns actually give you the best return on your investment.

Largemortgageloans.com email campaign, created and managed by Dock9

2) Segment your mailing lists

Targeting your emails goes beyond personalising the email introduction to include the person’s name. Are you targeting introducers or consumers? Existing clients or potential clients? High volume ‘mass market’ or niche ‘high-net-worth’? If your marketing database contains more than one group you should segment your mailing lists based on your business’s relevant subsets. This will enable you to tailor particular messages to these target groups. Tailored content has been proven to boost response; it’s all about talking to the recipient of the email in their own language.

3) Design for your audience

Keeping with this theme, think about how your customer segments may respond to different content and visual designs. If you are making the effort to segment your mailing lists and tailor the content within each email, you need to also tailor the email design for the audience to get the best return. For example, we have found that if you are targeting high net worth clients looking for sophisticated financial products, the visual language needs to be different to that used to target first time buyers.

4) Remember compliance!

It is important that your timely email campaign isn’t held up in the compliance department, so make sure you consider compliance from the start.

If you have included health warnings, do they need to be the same font size as your body text? Depending on the regulator there may be strict rules on how these are formatted and where they are placed.

If you include products and rates, make sure that all the necessary information is displayed in a clear and consistent fashion from the start. Adding such information into an email later on in the design process can make the content and design look cluttered and confusing.

Can all the claims contained within the email (for example ‘best’, ‘exclusive’, etc.) be supported by evidence? If so, include links to that evidence for added credibility as well as compliance sign-off.

5) Measure, assess, and be honest

Once you’ve got your campaign up and running you’ll very quickly get statistics back that need to be measured and assessed. As mentioned earlier, the basic metrics for emails are: opened, clicked, bounced and unsubscribed. Beyond that you will also get data on what particular links have been clicked and how many goals have been achieved (assuming you have set them in the first place!).

It is important that you are honest when analysing this data. If the email design you implemented looks attractive but is not resulting in conversions, don’t be afraid to change it. If you haven’t met your goals, what can be improved?

Your email marketing strategy should be a living document, regurly updated with lessons that have been learned. Your email campaigns should evolve over time, informed by clear planning, implementation and measurement so that you are constantly improving the return on marketing budget invested in this vital part of the marketing ‘jigsaw puzzle’.

And don’t forget, even if you don’t change your email campaigns, your competitors will change theirs, affecting yours, and your customers will change in their level of understanding and willingness to open email.

As with most areas of marketing, if you are not consciously making progress with your email campaigns, it is unlikely that you are standing still; you are more likely to be going backwards.

Case Study: Largemortgageloans.com

Largemortgageloans.com was the first mortgage broker in the UK to specialise in arranging large mortgages, is regularly quoted in the Financial Times and Sunday Times as an authority on the subject and was voted Large Loans Broker of The Year at the 2009 and the 2010 British Mortgage Awards. Its team of brokers is placing a steady stream of large mortgages, even in the current lending environment, using their expertise and experience to create tailored solutions for advisers and their clients. Largemortgageloans.com caters for foreign nationals, British expats, UK residents earning in foreign currencies and ‘non-domiciled’ UK residents.

We created their original monthly email marketing campaign and have managed the technical implementation of it ever since. From the beginning we tightly integrated the email link tracking with the company’s online lead tracking functionality, so that the senior management knows exactly how many enquiries have been generated from click throughs.

The past few years have been particulary challenging for the mortgage market, so we have worked with Largemortgageloans.com to evolve the content and design of the campaign through numerous revisions to meet the changing requirements of the company.

Paul Welch, Managing Director of Largemortgageloans.com, comments:

Dock9 has managed our monthly email campaign for three years, during which time their design expertise, statistical analysis and continual improvements have been instrumental in making email marketing a fundamental part of our overall business strategy.

If your organisation has similar challenges we’d be happy to give advice and outline your options. Simply click here to complete a Project Planner.

For those companies that insure Motor Traders, this is especially important.

Despite the Motor Insurance Database notification period remaining at 14 days for commercial motor trade business (unlike for personal motor business, which was reduced to 7 days in January 2008) this is offset by the often high turnover of vehicles on these policies.

For clients of ours like Clegg Gifford, one of the largest Motor Trade insurance brokers in the UK, this raised a number of questions:

• How could they use the web to improve the data captured from the customer compared to telephone calls?
• Once captured, could the system automatically flag up risky amendments to underwriters?
• How could an online system work with their existing back office systems?

We worked with Clegg Gifford to build a solution that delivered to their customers the advantages of an automated process, while also working around the particular back office processes and systems that Clegg Gifford have in place.

The solution that we delivered both improved the customer experience when submitting updates and helped back-office staff deal with adjustments more efficiently.

The primary goal of the front-end site was to enable customers to quickly add multiple vehicle adjustments at once without re-starting the process. Our solution enables the customer to add up to 10 vehicles and remove up to 10 vehicles from the policy at one time, seamlessly, in one process.

As there may be multiple adjustments, and therefore a large amount of data to be input, we reduced the amount of data entered by using automated data retrieval services whenever possible. When registering for the service, automated postcode lookup saves the customer from having to enter their full address. More importantly, during the MID process itself, automated DVLA lookup mean the customer simply has to enter the vehicle registration number and the vehicle data is automatically populated. As this could be up to twenty vehicles the potential time saved for the customer is clear.

For the back office staff the system needed to complement the company’s existing policy adjustment processes. We built a sophisticated back-office management tool that enables staff to receive and process adjustments. If an adjustment request falls outside of the policy terms they are flagged up for underwriting to examine.

As the status of an adjustment changes, email alerts are automatically sent to the client. Whenever possible, messages with the customer are automated, ensuring a speedy, standardised form of communication.

Toby Clegg, Project Manager at Clegg Gifford, comments on how the system has enhanced Clegg Gifford’s MID processing:

“From our perspective we wanted to reduce the time our staff spend taking calls for adjustments, freeing them up for more productive tasks. The web seemed a natural place to move this process.

“Dock9 understands the requirements of insurance companies and has no problem working around our needs, including our particular back office challenges. Our objectives were achieved and we are delighted with the end result!”

A growing number of our clients are interested in this type of integration. If your organisation has similar challenges we’d be happy to give advice and outline your options. Simply click here to complete a Project Planner.

Visit the Clegg Gifford website to see the new MID process in action.

We launched a new website for the company in July 2010 featuring a clean, usable design built upon a tightly integrated front-end/back-office system. The front-end features twenty search-engine optimised product sections, each with a user-friendly quotation process and callback facilities.

The user is helped throughout the quote process by automated vehicle registration and postcode lookups (where appropriate) and use of modern AJAX techniques that reduce unnecessary page-loads.

The back-office enables CG staff to fully manage the client, from initial enquiry right through to document creation and archiving, and sales reporting.

Within one week of launching the site, with our accompanying marketing campaign yet to launch, it has delivered a dramatic increase in the volume of business generated on the site. We are working with Clegg Gifford on some exciting new features that will further enhance the user’s ability to self-service their policy, and will be updating this blog with details in the coming months. In the meantime, take a look at the new Clegg Gifford site by visiting: www.cglloyds.co.uk

In addition to a simple mortgage calculator, customers can check the current best buy rates for residential and buy to let loans. Each week, Largemortgageloans.com’s mortgage experts select the most competitive fixed and variable rates, including exclusive and bespoke rates available only through the broker.

Customers can also apply for a specific ‘best buys’ rate at a touch of a button: after entering their name and telephone number into the app they will be called back by a fully-qualified professional mortgage adviser. Customers can also call the main Largemortgageloans.com enquiry line or request a generic call back if they are not sure which rate is right for them.

To help busy borrowers on the move, there are also 12 guides to mortgages and to buying and selling property. These are stored within the app so if the customer has no internet connection they can still access the content.

Paul Welch, Managing Director of Largemortgageloans.com, comments “The Mortgage Toolkit iPhone app is more than just a mortgage calculator. We believe that it’s a big step forward and just what the busy borrower needs to do their mortgage research whilst on the move. They can even access the mortgage and property guides on the tube.”

Download the app for free from the App Store or find out more at Largemortgageloans.com.