Initial Incentives partner with hundreds of brands to provide merchandising solutions. With one of the UK’s largest merchandise product catalogues, they attract top-level brands across a variety of sectors. Initial Incentives assist with product selection, design, manufacturing, storage, and delivery, providing their clients with the best merchandising solution available.
With decades in the industry, they don’t just understand the UK market; their global presence also allows Initial Incentives to cater to international clients. With offices and warehousing partners worldwide, they are fully equipped to serve brands on a global scale. They specialise in providing merchandise to the gaming, sport, healthcare, recruitment and hospitality sectors.
Their account managers help find the right solution by ensuring their clients have a personal contact to guide them through the whole branded merchandise process. They will match their clients with an industry specialist account manager within their team, to ensure you benefit from their knowledge and experience.
When Initial Incentives approached us, their existing website was not generating the results that they were aiming for. During a discovery meeting, we established their objectives and the issues that they were having with their website:
The product catalogue integration would form the key to maintaining thousands of products from hundreds of suppliers. The incorrect messaging, and lack of defined user journeys meant that the website was not converting the traffic into leads. The old website was not easy to maintain or update, which was vital to the success of their marketing efforts.
We were chosen as their web development partner because we were quick to understand the objectives of the project and because of our experience with similar product catalogue integrations.
To kick off the project we met with Initial Incentives to introduce the tools needed to share written content and assets, plan how we they will provide feedback and assign points of contact. We chose a single point of contact from each party throughout the project which has proven to be a more efficient and friction free approach on our previous projects.
Initial Incentive’s brand is strong, but the implementation of it on their existing website left a lot of room for improvement. Carefully considered additional colours were used to complement the existing visual identity of the business. Previously these were not used consistently across the website which created a disjointed look and feel. This is something that we set out to address.
Using their core branding as a foundation, combined with elements from existing visual assets, we began to develop an improved visual identity for the website. This resulted in a fresh and modern design that really help to capture the nature of the business.
To achieve this consistent look and feel, we:
The standardisation of formatting, uniform styling of visual assets and consistent use of brand colours led to a cohesive design that is appealing to their audience.
The existing website was product focused, with the intention of leading users to browse and enquire about specific products. The website structure and user journeys were reworked to shift the focus towards the merchandise solutions that they provide:
These areas allowed customers to understand the full offering, with the site being aimed specifically for Initial Incentives target audience and customer avatar.
Unlike many other merchandise websites that offer basic product customisation facilities Initial Incentives provide more in-depth services. To understand how the site needed to change, it’s important that we understand how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.
At Initial Incentives, new customers are assigned an account manager. This account manager helps them select suitable products, and guides them through the design, manufacturing, storage and delivery phases of their merchandise journey.
Rather than presenting simply as an online merchandise store, Initial Incentives wanted to highlight the full extent of their merchandising solution. To achieve this, the website focuses on driving traffic to key pages that explain their customer experience and the benefits of working with Initial Incentives.
A multi-supplier product catalogue integration formed an integral part of providing an online product catalogue. With tens of thousands of products available, a third-party integration which aggregates products from hundreds of suppliers would streamline the process. As the suppliers update their product databases, the data is passed through to the Initial Incentives website via an API. This data is used to populate the front end of the website’s custom designed product templates.
Browsing the product catalogue, the visitor is presented with a clean, distraction free design with categorisation, price filtering and search tools available to narrow down products that are of interest. Filtering takes advantage of the common attributes assigned to each supplier’s range of products. This allows multiple suppliers’ products to be displayed at the same time. Due to the enormous collection of products, it was imperative that users could find products of interest easily using these search and filter tools.
Visitors can then view more details about the products or add them to an enquiry list. The product page features additional data, specifications and bulk pricing details.
Product images are served from an external source to the website’s server, minimising the requests made to the web server and improving page load times and hosting costs.
We worked closely with Initial Incentives to ensure there were plenty of opportunities to monitor progress, test concepts and enrich our knowledge of their industry throughout the project. The collaborative approach allows us to give and receive feedback, present alternative ideas, add value to the project and make recommendations on missing content and opportunities.
We led the design process and recommended the creation of new content for specific areas of the website. In this project we utilised a local photography company to create a stop-motion animation video as well as product photography to enhance the visual impact of the website further.
Providing a tight brief to external parties can be challenging. With our expertise in web design, we were able to effectively brief partner suppliers to produce content which exactly fit the client’s brief. This allowed the content to effortlessly fit into the designated section of the website, remaining fully on brand.
Our team carried out extensive quality assurance (QA) to ensure that the solution was polished ahead of client presentation and launch. This included testing on all mainstream mobile and desktop devices for an optimised responsive experience.
User acceptance testing (UAT) was also carried out with Initial Incentives team members to test how the website would work from a website management perspective. We carried out a manual review of the impact to SEO on the new website.
An analysis of this review led to the development of an SEO migration strategy. This involved migrating the existing meta-titles and meta-descriptions, creating correct structured data types and redirecting old URLs to new content. This significantly reduced any negative impact of updating a website, and very quickly brought about a positive result.
After a final review process Initial Incentives were delighted with the design and functionality added to the website.
Weaving Webs Limited is a company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 03739247.
Registered office: Weaving Webs Ltd, The Den, Bridge Street, Buckingham, MK18 1EL. VAT reg no: 277 6535 60
