With so many mattress options on the market, choosing the right one requires careful consideration, Sealy of Australia worked intimately with web development agency, G-Squared, to understand users’ personas, and designed their site to suit consumer needs accordingly.
The average person spends more than 30 years of their life in bed, which makes choosing a mattress perhaps one of the most important decisions you can make.
Finding a comfortable mattress that conforms to your unique preferences isn’t always easy and buying one often requires a detailed decision-making process, one that only became more difficult during the pandemic and limitations on in-person shopping.
Taking these factors into account, Sealy of Australia – one of the nation’s favourite luxury bedding and mattress brands – launched an initiative in 2021 to amplify its brand and provide customers with a more streamlined, data-driven approach to the online mattress-shopping experience.
For more than 140 years Sealy has been a leader in the luxury bedding market, known for its pioneering Posturepedic technology – backed by orthopaedic research – world-class innovation and customer care expertise. With the pandemic forcing the closure of brick-and-mortar retail stores, the company had to move quickly and innovate to ensure a migration to online service was seamless.
Sealy of Australia set out to redesign its website to improve the online shopping experience, making it easier for consumers to navigate its catalogue of premium sleeping solutions and find tailored recommendations for their personal sleeping habits. While the project had a heavy design and user experience (UX) component, performance was also a requirement to service its 1 million+ annual site visitors.
“Our goal was to build brand conviction through digital channels in a way that would inform visitors of all the options available while simplifying the selection process and making it easier to find the most suitable mattress,” said Wade Ganzer, National Marketing Manager, Sealy of Australia.
Sealy partnered with Sydney-based G Squared, a WP Engine Agency Partner that specialises in UX/UI design and web development. G Squared took a deep dive into Sealy’s existing website and user data to investigate how customers were navigating and using the site to gain a better understanding of their online behaviours and preferences. The team used these specific insights to design the new site to suit consumer needs.
“We worked closely with the Sealy team to intimately understand their user personas and accordingly designed various journey flows to suit their diverse needs,” said George Pappas, Director at G Squared. “Central to this was creating a staggered-selection menu, which reduced choice paralysis at each stage of product consideration.”
The G Squared team also worked on revitalising the Mattress Selector, an immersive tool unique to Sealy that asks a series of questions to help customers easily find the right mattress to suit their needs. There are many things to consider when choosing the right mattress – such as the age, weight, physical ailments and allergies of the sleeper(s), not to mention preferred sleeping positions and how much space they need.
All this data is so important for a good night’s sleep and is entirely personal. With a deeper understanding of Sealy of Australia’s customer types, G Squared was able to simplify and streamline the tool, reducing the number of user steps from 12 to five, improving the overall experience and including additional interactive elements to prompt engagement.
The existing site was also migrated from Adobe Business Catalyst to WordPress for greater flexibility and customisation.
“Ultimately, it was about balancing the needs of marketing enablement with the tailorability of WordPress,” Pappas said. “Our system, and the back-end, has been completely customised to suit the needs of the Sealy team.”
With scalable, high-availability infrastructure via WP Engine’s enterprise hosting platform, the new Sealy site was equipped with Global Edge Security to ensure all of its data remained tightly secure.
Once the new site had launched, it was quickly noticed by Sealy of Australia’s customers, partners, and retailers – all of whom lauded the new UX and navigation, as well as faster site speeds.
“G Squared was exactly the right fit for this type of project,” Ganzer said. “From site navigation to the nitty-gritty of redesigning our mattress selector tool, their attention to detail was second to none.
“And from a performance and security perspective, knowing the site would live on WP Engine allayed any concerns we might have had around security and site performance – the combination of agency and infrastructure was just right.”
In addition to the site exit rate, which has improved by 22%, the Sealy of Australia team has noticed a 5% increase in time on page/site, which continues to tick upwards.
Additionally, the new mattress selector tool is experiencing an 85% completion rate, driving home the type of heightened engagement this project was focused on.
“We were thrilled with the end result, as is the Sealy of Australia team,” Pappas said. “These types of digital experiences are a win-win for our clients and their end-users, and with WP Engine providing the platform to build it on, we can get more out of WordPress and create a truly industry-leading final product.”
Today, it’s more important than ever to cater to your visitors’ needs with personalised content and user experience. In many ways, online personalisation mimics the experience of in-person customer service, by anticipating users’ needs and helping them find what they’re looking for quickly. In an increasingly digital world, as consumers’ confidence in e-commerce grows, they expect a more ‘human-like’ level of service. Personalising your website can boost your visitor return rate, improve user engagement and encourage good word of mouth.
“Despite the obvious value of website personalisation, many businesses don’t know where to start when updating their website and making the most of customer data for strategic growth,” said Mark Randall, WP Engine’s Country Manager, ANZ. “Employing the expertise of a trusted WordPress host, such as WP Engine, can help provide this support.”