The challenge

The telecommunications market in New Zealand is highly competitive, and digital channels offer a significant opportunity to attract new customers and support existing ones.  

As traffic from mobile visitors grew, 2degrees knew its new site would need to be responsive as well as future proofed for growth and new technology. Carys Forward, Digital Marketing Manager, 2degrees explains “We began life as a start-up. Our investment went heavily into building network infrastructure. We created an online presence using a patchwork of web and social tools, but it was time to invest in delivering a seamless experience that equally serves mobile and desktop visitors”.

The benefits

2degrees launched its new website in July 2015, at the same time as announcing its new consumer broadband offering. Aesthetically clean and concise, the visual impact of 2degrees’ website lends itself to a digitally effective user experience, due to the agility of the SilverStripe Platform.

Better mobile experiences with responsive design

The main catalyst for redeveloping 2degrees’ site was moving to a responsive design to address a rapidly growing mobile audience. Using SilverStripe’s templating engine and open source framework, Catch created a custom design that strongly conveyed the 2degrees brand and allowed each page to scale to the visitor’s device.

After launch, mobile traffic grew three-fold and the bounce rate for these visitors was halved. Overall the bounce rate on the site dropped 9% and time spent onsite by desktop visitors increased. The improved design was also awarded a Best Award for Interactive Design.

With the site better serving mobile visitors who had support queries, 2degrees also saw 1,000% increase in Help and Support page views. This led to a reduction in the cost to support existing customers, as more chose to access support information online rather than through Customer Care.

Faster communications

With the move to SilverStripe CMS, the 2degrees marketing team has control over new web content and can launch campaigns with precision and efficiency. For a recent smartphone launch this meant 2degrees could get product information online which offered a competitive advantage.

Flexible web platform and cloud hosting

Moving away from microsites is a positive move for our brand and eliminates disruption to the user journey.” Carys Forward, Digital Marketing Manager, 2degrees.

With its previous web platform, 2degrees had utilised microsites to get tactical campaigns to market quickly. SilverStripe enables 2degrees to implement all marketing campaigns within its platform; ensuring both visual consistency and a consolidated user journey within their website at all times.

“Moving away from microsites is a positive move for our brand and eliminates disruption to the user journey.” Carys Forward, Digital Marketing Manager, 2degrees.

Pre-Christmas, 2degrees launched an online quiz promotion to engage and reward customers. The campaign took 3.5 weeks from initial concept to release. While the quiz had its own section, it was not a microsite. It was instead built as part of the 2degreesmobile.co.nz site with the same SilverStripe Platform cloud hosting to protect the site from traffic spikes.

Throughout the Quiz marketing campaign, digital advertising increased the volume of site traffic to the page; consequently it was common for up to 1,500 people to be playing at one time. SilverStripe Platform scales with web traffic so that sites perform during periods of high traffic. This allowed 2degrees and Catch to focus on building innovative web experiences, while the site was fully supported by SilverStripe experts.

“Our partnership with Catch is crucial. They’re the best web developers we’ve worked with.” Carys Forward, Digital Marketing Manager, 2degrees

Team collaboration and ownership of web content

SilverStripe CMS has an intuitive interface and user groups can be created to allow editors access to specific pages and areas. This provided extra benefits for 2degrees as they have been able to provide teams outside marketing access to keep web content relevant and up-to-date. Increased collaboration through the SilverStripe CMS enables information to be communicated to customers efficiently.