Lead capture for superyacht marinas

Operating luxury marinas worldwide, Camper & Nicholsons needed a website that would speak to their target market of luxury yacht owners, generate leads, attract investors, and raise their profile in the industry.

Delivering results for Camper & Nicholsons

While I can’t talk about why we made the choices we did, I can talk about what we did.

As the build partner with FIFO Digital Media I was hands-on from the wireframing onwards, giving input to the design and ensuring the site would be developed on-schedule.

Lead capture with Microsoft Dynamics

The website’s primary purpose is to generate leads. Previously Camper & Nicholsons (C&N) received web enquiries via email, and manually entered the details into their CRM. This was slow and error prone.

I built a custom bridge linking the website and their Marina Management System (based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM). Now all new enquiries and bookings appear automatically in the CRM, letting staff focus on the sales funnel and close more deals.

You say tomato, and I say طماطم, ντομάτα, pomodoro and 番茄

With a worldwide customer base, communicating in their language was important

Creating a multilingual website with seven languages (including Right to Left (RTL) languages) brings its own unique challenges, but ones I’m experienced with, having handled 13 languages for ING Direct. In addition to translating the main site, a stand-alone Chinese microsite was created specifically for the mainland China market.

Multilingual versions of MODX and WordPress were seamlessly integrated, providing the best CMS and Blogging experiences possible. All content and design elements were shared between them via an API, so design updates only had to be made once.

Delegated Responsibility

Websites for individual marinas were subsumed into the new main site, which provided massive benefits for C&N in keeping branding consistent and ensuring their portfolio was displayed in one place.

Each marina’s staff were able to maintain control of their section of the site, adding multilingual content, news and photography. This removed the need for a central administrator to make all updates. The autonomy was welcomed on-the-ground by marinas.

Strengthening Investor Relations

With investors being a crucial secondary audience, near-realtime stock prices and required regulatory information was provided through an investor portal.

Keeping it running 24/7

As such an important part of C&N’s business, reliable hosting infrastructure was critical to the project. I walked their IT department through the web hosting options, and helped them to provision business-critical hosting from Rackspace.

Results

Lead handling was significantly streamlined; leads weren’t lost; errors were cut down. Staff happiness increased as they could do their jobs.

Not only did the new site create a splash, it streamlined operations at head office and every marina around the world. The specific results remain client confidential.

A good website is never finished

Like all good websites, C&N continued to be developed and refined over 4 years as the business needs changed and we learned about the site’s target audience. Marina information was rejigged to let people find what they wanted easily, and the design refreshed twice.

A change of leadership led to the site being replaced. The replacement didn’t perform well, and was then replaced with a new website modelled on the original one I built. Throughout, each website used our integration with Microsoft Dynamics.

Significant increase in leads more enquiries, more conversions
Streamlined admin time saved for xyz
7 languages welcoming customers world-wide