Squire Tarbox Inn • Lead Designer • 2021
Redefining the booking experience
A boutique inn, surrounded by 12 acres of pastoral farmland, heritage woods, and a tranquil salt marsh. Built in 1763 and restored in 2018, the historic property is a peaceful retreat. Fifteen minutes from Wiscasset and the Boothbay region, in midcoast Maine. Rest, unwind, and explore our favorite local spots in Maine.
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Problem
The customer experience cannot be handled efficiently by a small team while maintaining an individual, personalized experience. The brand has no guidelines for content or design, and the company lacks marketing automation and content. Additionally, there is no reporting on marketing, business performance, or customer metadata.
Proposal
Optimize the brand, business processes, and customer experience across all channels, as well as introduce a new brand, tech stack, and business logic to increase conversions and business efficiency.
Impact & outcomes
The redesigned website and marketing ecosystem led to a substantial increase in bookings, improved user engagement, and enhanced overall business performance.
Faster loading speed
10X
With a more efficient design, build, and optimized content, the page speed improved by more than 4 seconds on desktop and mobile.
Increased bookings
300%
The site brings in higher organic traffic with better SEO performance, delivers a seamless user experience, and has significantly faster load times.
Refining the brand
The Squire Tarbox brand had a promising start, but required clearer direction and guidelines for style and implementation. To initiate the project, I began by organizing all of their existing brand assets to gain an understanding of how they present themselves and identify areas that require improvement. The first order of business was to enhance their logo by increasing the stroke width, resulting in a higher contrast and more prominent presence (previously, the thin lettering was difficult to discern). The subsequent step involved establishing brand guidelines encompassing typography (fonts, headings, weights, styles, etc.), brand colors, design guidelines, mission statement, and style rules.
Components & architecture
Outlining the core component blocks is a critical part of setting up the information architecture. The three primary products of the Squire Tarbox are: inn reservations, weddings, and private events. Setting up the information architecture around these products allows for cross-referencing content across the website through reusable components, as well as defining specific sales funnels for each type. For example, one area of the website was the Local Guide ("things to do"). These posts are valuable SEO content, partner relationships, and a cross-functional way to add content to the inn reservation funnel. "Stay at the inn, and check out all these great things to do while you are here!"
With these modular components, the Squire Tarbox staff can add, update, or edit featured businesses from a single data source and have that automatically update in multiple areas across the website.
Marketing ecosystem
A successful customer experience is one that not only works seamlessly, but delights the customer in the process. With the Squire Tarbox's small operational team, the attention and nurturing that improves a customer's experience is difficult to attain at scale. A seamless experience for the company and team translates to a seamless experience for the customer, driving more sales and positive reviews.
I began by outlining the customer's journey and how data flows through the system. I automated different touch-points, to provide that personal touch at scale. Setting up separate funnels for each service allowed me to create unique customer experiences, as well as track the success of each process (allowing for data driven optimization and customer behavior insights).
The guest experience
The objective is to represent the products and services with a consistent high level of quality from the first point a customer interacts with the brand, all the way through to payment and checkout, and on into getting feedback and reviews. With the website as the framework for communicating and directing customers into different lead and sales funnels, I created a series of email marketing templates, social posts, sales materials, and other marketing assets, to focus on different ways to create customer engagement and showcase the brand, products, and company.
Improved performance
Rebuilding and redesigning the Squire Tarbox website was a critical part of their success. The primary goals I focused on achieving were to improve the usability and accessibility of the site on desktop and mobile, offer clearer navigation and richer content, significantly reduce page weight (the previous homepage was over 10MB!) to increase load speed and SEO performance, and improve the responsiveness of the design for all devices. The results were huge performance improvements, considerably improving page speed, SEO keywords and content, structured data and schema, and all around engagement and conversions.
Detailed metrics
Clean, reliable, and automatically updated data is enormously valuable to every business, from customer profile information to order information. All inquiry and order data is automatically synced with a custom database, to track ROI on advertising campaigns, analyze website performance, attribute brand ambassador revenue, and more. As customers evolve through the customer journey, we are able to update the customer profile status to ensure leads, new guests, and returning guests are all enrolled in the correct marketing funnels. With an ever growing data set, we are able to build reports to discover insights about the business, learn their customer behavior, identify average customer values, and more.
Skills & competencies
Key areas of expertise and methodologies applied during this project.