With Grace is a funeral provider that places people at the heart of their service.
They challenged us to transition them from a traditional funeral care model to offering an online service. They needed a new website to improve their user experience and provide the infrastructure for their digital offering. We overhauled their marketing and digital strategy to increase the effectiveness of their marketing, grow their visibility and enable them to be found online.
- Lead Time:
- 6 Months
- Sector:
- Funeral Care
- Target Type:
- B2C
- Website Goal:
- Reposition the website, Increase visibility, Streamline their digital ecosystem
- Services:
- UX Design, Web Development, WordPress, Digital Marketing
The challenge
With Grace came to us with 2 different websites and brands. They recognised that they needed a single website that was easy for their customers to navigate, find information and make funeral arrangements. Their team challenged us to create a unified website that managed multiple user experiences and could be found by their customers in search engines.
As a financially regulated industry, we worked closely with the legal team at With Grace to ensure that the website was compliant with regulation.
- Scope
- Figma UX Wireframe Prototypes
- Design Consultation
- WordPress Development
- Payment Calculator
- Package Builder Tool
- Marketing Consultation
- SEO Strategy
- PPC & Facebook Tracking
- Domain Migration
- Resource
- 1 x UX Designer
- 1 x WordPress Developer
- 1 x Quality Assurance Tester
- 1 x Project Manager
- 1 x Marketing Director
- 1 x SEO Strategist
Our approach
Our work would open up a new online service and provide the ability for customers to build funeral packages online. However, it was important that the website remained informative, approachable and empathetic, and didn’t become a pushy sales tool. The digital offering was there to provide ease, transparency, support and space to their customers.
We delivered the website in collaboration with Ascend Studio, who rebranded With Grace and created the final website design. The Plug & Play team delivered the digital strategy, UX wireframe designs, website development and SEO optimisation.
The website
The new website combined the content and user journeys from 2 of With Grace’s websites to create a single high quality website where customers can explore pre-need and at-need funeral packages.
The user journey from the homepage is immediately branched, directing visitors through pre-need or at-need user journeys. Each flow guides the user through key information and packages. Pre-need packages are financially regulated so these user journeys needed extra consideration from a legal perspective to ensure that the user experience was compliant.
The website was delivered using WordPress to provide a flexible and scalable CMS for the With Grace team.
Transparency
Information on the website is transparent, providing clear pricing and inclusions.
Regulation
Some of With Grace’s services are regulated by the FCA and others are not. We worked closely with their legal team to ensure that regulations were met and visitors were notified of regulation where necessary.
Customer demographic
With Grace has a broad customer demographic and it was important that the website was accessible to all ages. We implemented clear user journeys and call to actions to ensure that the website remained simple and easy to use.
The design
Ascend Studio utilised our UX designs to apply the new With Grace brand and create the final visuals for the website.
Interaction aesthetic
The website utilises interactive design elements, load animations and transitions to create depth.
Plan builder
We introduced a new plan builder within the pre-need user journey that enables individuals to create a custom funeral plan that is tailored to their needs.
It was critical that the process remained straightforward and we achieved this with a 3 step user journey. The customer can see the inclusions and costs as they create their plan and when they’re happy with their selections, they can send an enquiry to the With Grace team.
It’s an emotional time for many of With Grace’s customers and it can be overwhelming to enter deep discussions about their funeral arrangements. The goal of the plan builder is to provide autonomy to customers and enable them to explore their options privately before reaching out for help.
Marketing strategy
We provided a part time Marketing Director to With Grace during this period of change, giving them a representative that would advocate for their business and manage their agency relationships.
Together, we created a strategy for their digital ecosystem, including the technology used for various business functions, the website infrastructure, and their digital marketing channels which included SEO, PPC and paid social.
SEO strategy
We delivered an SEO strategy that selected keywords that were used by prospective customers to find With Grace’s services. The website was optimised for the keywords that With Grace had a statistical opportunity to rank for and increase their visibility online.
The strategy was used to guide the website user experience, enabling us to optimise the site to encourage visitors to land on deep and highly relevant content pages. We wanted to make it as straightforward as possible for With Grace’s customers to get the support and information that they needed.
Domain migration
Our team assessed With Grace’s digital ecosystem and recommended that their websites were combined into a single website. We reviewed the domains available and advised the best domain for the new website to launch on. The domain selected was new, therefore 2 websites needed to be seamlessly transitioned to the new domain and the domain equity transferred.
Our team managed the domain migration process to mitigate the risks usually associated with domain changes. We ensured that best practice was followed and that the reputation metrics from the old domains transferred seamlessly to the new website, enabling the new website to perform and benefit from the great reputation of the business.
