Service and project type

Technology | Digital transformation

Relationship

Following a competitive pitch against a number of other agencies, Waverton engaged us to replace their existing website, bringing together two business imperatives. This endeavor served two crucial objectives: aligning the firm’s online activity with a refreshed visual identity that was being implemented across the organisation, and establishing a new strategic vision for their digital experience to cater to existing and prospective clients.

Problem

Waverton is a highly respected and growing investment management house, focused on serving four distinct investor profiles; private investors, charities, institutional investors, and financial advisers.

While their traditional approach relied on personal interactions and professional networks within the investment community, Waverton recognised the need to reimagine their digital presence. Their goal was to deliver a more personalised and cohesive experience throughout the customer journey, particularly to engage with younger investors and entrepreneurs who extensively research and select investments through online channels.

Delivering a new web presence for Waverton is an exciting step as we ramp up our investment in all things digital. We know that it is the optimum blend of our human, personal service with state-of-the-art digital engagement that will help us drive growth across our four business channels.”

Solution

The initial website project involved UX, UI design, development and baseline SEO, with a focus on improving website conversion rates and optimising page speed.

The site is built with Prismic – a top-tier headless CMS, as the foundation for the new site. This decision ensured a separate front end and seamless integration with other systems, thus future-proofing Waverton’s digital experience.

During the UX phase, we conducted persona building exercises to understand the specific needs, pain points, and goals of their target users. This valuable insight guided the development of an information architecture that facilitated user journeys and a content model enabling the marketing team to create structured and reusable content. A full UI audit was undertaken to inform the creation of a new design system that would enable all aspects of the digital experience to share a common design language, both now and in the future.

One of the key achievements of the new site was the ability to deliver tailored content based on user preferences and site behavior. The introduction of an Insights section allows Waverton to target content at specific investor profiles. First-party cookies were deployed to capture and leverage customer journey data, enabling more effective content delivery. The website’s enhanced analytics capabilities using GA4 ensured accurate tracking of site performance, enabling Waverton to monitor user behavior, optimise conversion rates, and react to changing client needs.

Results

In January 2023, we successfully launched the initial phase of the website, marking the first step in Waverton’s extensive digital transformation journey, in collaboration with our team. The impact was remarkable, with significant enhancements across various aspects of the new website.

Aside from a hugely improved look and feel to the site, and improved user experience, we have also seen big improvements in the site’s overall performance and Core Web Vitals scores.

Key improvements include:

• A 129% increase in overall performance score – from pre-migration (35) to post-migration (81).
• An 80% reduction in ‘First Contentful Paint’ (FCP) time – this is the speed at which the first piece of content loads for the user.
• A 66% reduction in the ‘Time To Interactive’ (TTI) metric – this is the speed at which the page becomes usable.
• 33,000 new users – a testament to our team in ensuring the website’s continuous visibility upon launch.
• 8,700 dedicated returning visitors – Our enhancements (and ongoing changes) have rekindled the interest and loyalty of their existing customers.

Sasha Dabliz, Waverton’s Head of Marketing and the primary client stakeholder, has reported that the new site has had a tremendous impact on the ability of the marketing team to be agile, execute marketing activity, and respond to demands of the business including:

• Rapidly spin up new sections of the site and implement or update data capture forms without involvement from IT/development.
• Update tags so that content shows up accurately in the site search.
• Update PDFs (a critical resource for clients) en masse quickly and easily (previously a very manual time-consuming job).

The client has seen sign-ups to their newsletter, a key pillar in their marketing activity to capture and nurture leads, increase by 150% since the site has launched. This is thanks to the improved user experience and the ability of the client team to create and disseminate valuable content via the site.