Having identified that NS&I’s website needed a complete overhaul, Lloyd Northover’s first task was to identify key audiences for the website redesign.
‘For our re-branding work, we segmented NS&I’s audience into five groups,’ says Hudspeth. ‘We shaped the new web strategy around two of these.
- Affluent investors: 45 to 50-year-olds likely to manage their own investments and looking to invest in a diversified portfolio
- Confident careerists: 25 to 45-year-olds, often with young families.’
Hudspeth adds that prioritising audiences is essential for any successful web strategy. ‘Try to be all things to all people and the result is passive brand engagement. So we built a hierarchy of information for the new website based on these two groups’ requirements. We knew that if we met their needs, we would more than meet the needs of other consumers, too.’
Lloyd Northover researched these two consumer groups to get a deeper understanding of their wants and needs, and what they perceived were the obstacles to buying online. It also undertook research among NS&I stakeholders to better understand their objectives, challenges and targets. Web traffic to the old site was analysed to understand how consumers entered the site, where they went, and from which pages they usually exited.
A new information architecture was developed along with revised purchase journeys to keep consumers engaged with the new site’s content and ensure a high completion rate of transactions.
The information readily available to a consumer making an online transaction, for example, would be kept relevant to that transaction. This would mean online buyers would be less easily diverted to other pages during a transaction, and it would give buyers every detail required to make an informed purchasing decision.
