EYEMAGINE’s mission is to create innovative, scalable and profitable eCommerce experience for our clients. We recently achieved this goal for two of our clients— Warm Your Floor and USSD— using various marketing and website development strategies. Our eCommerce marketing work on each of these sites was recognized by the Interactive Media Awards (IMA), earning the Best In Class award for the eCommerce and Education categories, respectively. These awards are given to websites that represent “the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism.” Here, we break down the techniques and features that we employed to take each of these sites to award-winning status.
Warm Your Floor
Warm Your Floor is the #1 nationwide distributor for radiant floor heating mats, cables and snow melting systems. To increase the online store conversion rate, EYEMAGINE delivered a sophisticated new design and custom eCommerce solution. Our Magento development experts:
- Invented a custom configurator, called Quote Builder
- Migrated their website from Magento Enterprise to Magento Community Edition
- Migrated Their Knowledge Center from ExpressionEngine to WordPress
- Customized an integration between WordPress and Magento
- Implemented Magento multi-store configuration with a Canadian (.ca) site
Each of these unique integrations and features increase functionality and ease-of-use in their store, helping the company effectively reach their buyer personas.
The two stand-out features are the Quote Builder and the custom WordPress-Magento integration.
Custom Quote Builder
The Quote Builder allows Warm Your Floor’s customers to get an exact quote for the floor area that they want to heat, thereby avoiding the complication and confusion that usually comes with buying floor-warming products.
In the early steps of the Quote Builder, customers are asked questions about their home and what they are looking for: floor type, subfloor, room shape, room dimensions, and more. Based on their answers, they are given the recommended heating products, which can be filtered based on price, ease of installation, and custom attributes. Compatible thermostats and accessories are presented with each product. At the end of the process, customers have the option to learn more or easily check out. Once an order is placed, all of the options selected are stored in the Magento administrative interface where customer support representatives can easily access the information and deliver products.
This step-by-step smart Quote Builder increases efficiency and accuracy during the check-out process. Customers can easily understand the products they’re buying, in what used to be a very complicated process. Customers are guided through a simple process that provides a properly configured floor-warming kit. Having this kind of easy-to-navigate, user-friendly check-out process is extremely important in the world of eCommerce marketing. According to Shopify, online retailers are losing a full 67.45% of their sales at checkout: 25% of these people cited “Website navigation too complicated” as their main reason for abandoning their cart, while 21% stated “the process was taking too long.” People don’t want the check-out process to be confusing, surprising, or time-consuming. Avoiding these pitfalls can and will increase conversions and overall site performance.
WordPress-Magento Integration
Next, EYEMAGINE migrated the company’s “Knowledge Center” from ExpressionEngine to WordPress, creating an advanced integration between WordPress and Magento. A standard Wordpress-Magento integration allows the site owner to display their featured or most recent WordPress blogs on their website’s homepage. This basic integration ensures that the content on the Magento homepage remains relevant and up-to-date with minimal effort. However, there is very little opportunity for customization or segmentation.
The integration that EYEMAGINE created for Warm Your Floor is much more advanced. Strong iconography for the Knowledge Center’s homepage and featured categories was used. It is important for customers to be able to click an icon for each category of blogs and products in the Magento store.
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The EYEMAGINE team modified WordPress, installed an extension, and customized the extension. Warm Your Floor can now add or update categories at any time simply by selected them as “Featured Categories” in the Magento store. Furthermore, they could have relevant content appear on any page of the site, simply by categorizing a piece of content as “Quote Builder,” “Homepage,” etc., and marking it as a featured article. Finally, our team added and customized another extension that gave the Knowledge Center’s homepage both “Featured Videos” and “Featured Articles” sections, neither of which are default WordPress capabilities.
This broadened the page’s reach by educating the user and providing a range of information that speaks to a wide audience. Those who know exactly what they are looking for can click on the Knowledge Center icon of their choice, while those who are simply browsing can refer to the featured videos and articles.
United Studios of Self Defense (USSD)
Since its founding in 1968, United Studios of Self Defense (USSD) has grown to become the largest Martial Arts and Self Defense organization in North America. USSD has over 80 locations nationwide and is growing every year teaching Kempo-style Martial Arts.
As the company grew, they had a big problem maintaining brand consistency and unity across their network of franchise sites. Since they didn’t have a multisite platform, each of their locations tried to create websites individually using its own platform, designers and developers. This led to improper integration with the corporate website and inconsistency in important elements like brand voice, content, color scheme, strategy and overall approach.
To solve these problems, EYEMAGINE created a multi-site eCommerce platform for USSD using ExpressionEngine CMS. Once the platform was up, the site was rebuilt using a template-based system. The basics like the design, individual sections or content placeholders, forms, structure, etc. were all set up, and a USSD studio just fills in the blanks to come online.
This change effectively addressed all of the company’s main problems with communication and consistency. The multisite platform and template-based system meant that the individual studios no longer had to worry about independently developing or designing their sites. This not only saved time, confusion and resources for each individual studio, but also allowed for more consistent branding and image for USSD as a company.
Additionally, the new template-based integrated content gave each studio the option to “push” important content like social media updates, blog posts, and important offers directly from the corporate site to either complement or replace their own studio-specific information. This allowed for a corporate presence, relevant content and brand consistency across all USSD websites. Overall, these structural changes in USSD’s websites helped create a consistent and trustworthy online presence for the company, which strengthened their brand identity, improved user experience (UX), and simplified the website creation process for all of the company’s franchise members.
