Overview
For more than 12 years, Reena Rai has been operating Studio Maato in Sikkim, where she has been personally crafting an exclusive product line that incorporates traditional pottery and ceramic painting techniques with contemporary and practical designs, resulting in one-of-a-kind pieces of art, souvenirs, and household essentials.
In late 2019, she established her new pottery studio and planned to conduct pottery workshops for individuals of all ages. Despite previously using social media to interact with her customers, she had always wanted to have a website. She recognized the opportunity to enhance her online presence and decided to take the initiative to create a more notable digital footprint.
Project Goals
- Studio Maato wanted an online web presence that would allow visitors to signup and register for pottery workshop
- To build a more prominent online presence for more visibility that would allow the target audience to learn more about the pottery workshop, their product range, services offered and promotions.
- To eventually build a responsive ecommerce and event booking website that meets the needs of the local customers and the business.
STAGE 1
Strategic Thinking and Planning
Around 10 days prior to opening their door to there new pottery studio like most small business owners who wants a website for their business, Studio Maato got in touch with me wanting a simple website that had a standard pages like aboutus, gallery, contact us and a page for their products and services. They wanted to initially focus on the pottery workshop and provide the target audience more information about the workshop and allow users to register for the pottery workshop.
Instead of spending time, money and energy focusing on a website that would not add value in the timeframe given. I came up with a strategic plan to use a simple landing page that would allow the customers to sign up for the pottery workshop.
Outcomes
Landing page launched within 24 hours
Within a span of 24 hours, a landing page was created using WordPress and made live. Additionally, Mailchimp was integrated to manage the leads and Google Analytics was set up to collects valuable user data for insights moving forward.
Booked out Workshop
There was a positive response from the target audience and all the workshop was booked out and customers registered for future workshop.
Identify Customer & Clients Needs
Carried out post workshop reflections with Reena and the participants to learn more about the structure and content of the workshop. What worked and didn't work. And also about the facilitation skills and what Reena learnt and found challenging and how will she do things differently in the next round of the workshop.
Each workshop experience was different and a learning process and these findings and insights guided the next step on their online journey.
STAGE 2
Design + Development + Launch
Ready to focus on both the clients and target audience immediate need, I started designing a website experience that effectively communicated all the information needed to register for the workshop
The primary goal of the website remained to focus on the pottery workshop events to take care of the clients and user'simmediate needs.
4 months after the studio door had opened the Covid pandemic took over the world and everything came to a firm halt.
Outcomes
Better User Experience
The website allowed to streamline the registration process for the workshop and made it easier for the client to book and find the information they needed
When the workshop was not operational due to covid restrication, it was time to re-evaluate.
STAGE 3
Coming Together Finally
As more information was gathered using online surveys from customer, I learnt that users visiting Studio Maato website had three main goals.
- To learn more about the workshop and register for it
- To discover other products and prices
- To engage with Studio Maato as a brand
To improve the overall effectiveness of the website and to integrate all the services and products that they provided, the website evolved once again to cater to the goals above. This has resulted in overall user engagement and enquiries.
Outcomes
Improved customer & client experience and efficiency
With the new integrations on the site, clients are able to book appointments and make payments without calling in, saving time for the business while also creating a better user experience.
Leads and inquiries increased immediately after launch.
Studio Maato started getting 5-10 inquiries per week from the website, with 70-80% of them being quality leads.
Brand Awareness and Exposure
Ensuring an easy-to-use and intuitive experience the project evolved and the resulting work increased engagement with Studio Maato's online presence.
Last Words
I believe the most successful websites are those that continue to evolve. Working together closely with the Studio Maato team since 2019, I operate as an extension of the Studio Maato team keeping their best interest in mind to enhance the website user experience to increase online engagement in the long term.
Marketing efforts are objectively and proactively accessed and solution are implemented to overcome challenges, increase user engagement, and ultimately drive results and sales.
Client's Review
The conceptualization, the structure and content of the website has been tastefully brought out by Tripty. Most importantly the layout and the right tone of the colours that she uses for the pages are just amazing. We are very happy with our website. Even with very limited material provided to her she was very resourceful and was able to roll out wholesome pages giving viewers a pleasing experience. And her eye for detail and her creativity is commendable.
- Reena Rai
