Who We Worked With

2020 was a strange year for many and saw plenty of businesses move their focus online. North Star Models was one such business. Until the first lockdown, Matt — the owner of North Star — had run a thriving business, mainly through attending trade shows. But when trade shows were no longer an option, North Star needed an eCommerce website to showcase some of their unique models.

As a child, Matt’s grandfather took him to a model store. Since then, it had long been his dream to own a store of his own. A model aficionado himself, Matt could offer something that some of his larger competitors couldn’t — a genuine enthusiasm for model collecting and true expertise. This kind of unique selling point (USP) is a gift when creating an online presence, particularly when trying to compete with large stores with competitive prices.

However, Matt’s existing website just wasn’t converting, and he was continuing to do much of his trade via eBay. He approached Thinkplus to build him a lead generation website that gave his business a professional look but still had Matt’s friendly, approachable tone of voice. Most importantly, the site needed to convert website visitors into paying customers.

The Objective

• Better User Journey — As a small business owner looking to simplify his purchasing process, it was important to create a website for Matt that took on all the principles of a great user experience to drive conversions.
• Easy ways for customers to get in touch — Matt’s customer base would sometimes try to barter on price. Also, as he supplied specialist products, they occasionally asked Matt to source them a particular model. So while we were looking to make the buying process as easy as possible for potential customers, it was also essential to maintain Matt’s personal approach to selling models by keeping avenues of contact open.
• Easy for the client to update with new products — North Star Models has a constantly evolving stock as models sell out and new limited editions are released. Being an expert in the field, Matt’s product descriptions are second to none and are a big part of what makes North Star unique, so we needed to provide Matt with a website that he could easily update with his new offerings. Whichever template we picked needed to be slick and simple to use.

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How We Achieved It

The Strategy

The categories on the original North Star Models site made sense to real model experts — but we needed the website to be accessible to all. So one of our first ports of call was to create a clear and easy way to navigate the website’s structure based on tried and tested conversion rate optimisation principles. Using our questionnaire and a kick-off call, our Development Project Manager got to know the client and their product and made recommendations to make the website easy to understand for any model user — from the novice to the pro. We suggested streamlining categories into just five, from an original twelve, to ease user flow.

In terms of their price points, North Star had some fierce competition from huge model companies. Our copy needed to make it crystal clear that the added value of buying from North Star was Matt himself. So, we placed Matt’s incredible backstory front and centre of all of our storytelling. In the meantime, our ingenious SEO team helped ensure the site’s copy was fully optimised for Google by using the most relevant keywords.

Finally, we selected a clean and user-friendly WordPress template that we know to be conversion-friendly and would work well for Matt’s brand.

The Package

Matt signed up for a lead generation website based on a template. It was an eCommerce website, so users needed to be able to buy products through the website. Thinkplus’s templated websites use the conversion rate optimisation principles that we have developed by selecting the highest converting elements from our best performing websites over the years. Though elements of the website are templated, the site’s colours, images and search engine optimised content are all bespoke to the client.

The Results

North Star now has a website that can compete with Matt’s competitors in terms of appearance and user journey. Products are displayed beautifully, and each product page converts — with the “Buy” button above the fold and Matt’s wonderful descriptions in plain sight.

Playing to Matt’s strength of giving personal, expert advice certainly seemed to work. Matt’s old website was never his primary mode of attracting business, but following the launch of the new site, North Star Models had many more enquiries via the site-wide contact forms.

It’s still early days for this site, but over the past month, site traffic has been steadily climbing. We’re excited to see which new models appear next!