53% increase in member engagement

The Bentley Drivers Club new website features in Kentico’s Top 10 Websites of July 2019 after strong growth in user engagement and shop sales.

World’s largest Bentley car enthusiast and owners club

The Bentley Drivers Club (BDC) is over 80 years old having been founded in 1936 by Bentley owners. It now boasts a world-wide membership of over 4,000 with regional clubs in America, South Africa and Australia. The club hosts an array of local and worldwide events throughout the year run by dedicated Bentley enthusiasts.

Services

Digital Strategy
User Experience Design
Ecommerce & Digital Platforms
Copywriting
Membership
Kentico

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Online membership & ecommerce website

The BDC required a contemporary looking website that would incorporate their existing forum, online shop, member directory, event calendar, regions and publications with a solid platform that would open up exciting new revenue opportunities for the club moving forward.

The updated system needed an enhanced backend system to greatly lessen the burden on BDC’s membership, shop & finance teams in addition to acting as a central hub for all members and regions by:

Allowing prospective and existing members to join and renew memberships online for the first time
Providing members with management facilities for their details, vehicle information, events and regions
Provide a vital online communication channel for BDC to publish their on-going and existing archive of publications, ‘The Advertiser & Diary’ and ‘The Review’

The solution

The existing BDC back-office structure consisted of an array of online and offline processes, and involved a combination of on-going day-to-day management and entrenched knowledge.

The various data-streams that made up this system meant it was necessary to replicate many of the existing systems and processes, which included integrations with platforms such as Sage, Sage Pay, MailChimp, the Bentley dealer network and the DVLA.

Ensuring that they could all be transferred into the new system without data corruption was key to making the project successful.

Once the membership functionality had been incorporated into the build, creating a front-end platform that would push the club forward and make the site more accessible to prospective members, especially on mobile devices, became a priority.

This was achieved whilst acknowledging the requirements of the existing audience by improving UX, safe-guarding existing user-journeys and maintaining member features.

Real results in numbers

80%

increase in

session duration

30%

growth in

website traffic

20%

increase in

shop sales

Club Memberships

Introducing a streamlined way for members to manage and renew their memberships online saw two stages of work.

The first included cleaning vast amounts of members’ data and migrating this programmatically to ensure minimal manual effort.

A second stage required us to create intuitive user-interfaces where members would be able to manage their own membership information easily and quickly renew memberships online.

Alongside improving the UX for existing members, encouraging prospective users to join BDC involved designing a simplified user-journey with a staged signing up process which removed many potential barriers to new members joining.

Shop & eCommerce platform

The shop is currently one of the busiest sections of the site as more visibility has been given to it throughout the site making it easier for members to find.

Creating a highly visual Club Shop that was straightforward to navigate allowed a better buying experience as well as giving BDC the opportunity to cross-sell or promote products that may be of interest to their members.

The improved user-journeys and UX has seen shop sales increase by 20%.

Mobile first design

With a noticeable movement of users viewing the site on mobile devices rather than desktop, a mobile friendly experience was paramount to the new system being successful.

Achieving this meant creating user interfaces – back-end and front-end – that performed well on all devices with particular attention paid to the membership and shop areas to make the most of user engagement in these key areas.

Creating a clean, simple navigation with intuitive pathways means users can move around the website and access content quickly. This emphasis on UX design has resulted in a 35% improvement in bounce rate and user retention across the site.