About the Customer

Shoal Creek Nursery offers a wide selection of high-quality plants, imported pottery, water features, and gardening supplies. Located in Austin, Texas, the business was launched approximately six years ago by Mike and Veronica Sewell. They wanted to share the beauty of horticulture with others. Shoal Creek Nursery prides itself on Shoal Creek Nursery only selling plants of the highest quality. They only buy from the best growers and offer a selection of unique gardening supplies and plants that are proven winners in the local Austin climate.

Business Challenges

Shoal Creek Nursery is a relatively new business launched only six years ago. Yet, the functionality of the company’s website had grown stale. As a result, the website was very under-utilized, and there were little to no changes on a monthly and yearly basis. On top of this, the look of the site had become outdated.

“Creating a modern, up-to-date website that was more customer-centric and regularly updated was a clear priority for us,” said Scott. “We feature several seasonal products, new arrivals, and have a long list of products sold in the nursery, and so our outdated website just wasn’t meeting our needs.”

Solution

After consulting with Shoal Creek Nursery, it became clear that an enhanced website platform could address their needs. New Media retailer (NMR) and Shoal Creek Nursery worked together to build a more dynamic, customer-centric website that helped drive in-store traffic.

NMR constructed a responsive design, offering Shoal Creek customers a better user experience from their phones and desktops. Upon launch of the new platform, NMR helped promote the new website on social media and in their stores.

“The NMR design team impressed with the many creative methods and resources they employed to allow our customers to use the website to its fullest,” Scott said. “Their level of customer service and proactive nature to bring new ideas to the table made the difference!”

Outcome

It didn’t take long after launching the new website for Shoal Creek Nursery to see how much of a difference it made for the business. In the first month alone, Shoal Creek saw an increase of over 11,000 visits. They have consistently maintained traffic increases of two to five times what they had on their previous website.

Specifically, the business saw increased traffic to the site that clicked through to the products pages, which translated into helping educate visitors about the large array of products sold at the nursery. That also helped to drive those visitors to the physical location. The number of click-throughs to that site section increases substantially after the update and rollout. Accordingly, the product section was reorganized to create an enhanced customer experience and dramatically increase the number of featured products.

“The new website also helped us to be found more online in our local market, attracting current and new customers to check out our site and visit us in-store,” Scott said. This week alone, we had over 25,000 views in our local listing on Google, 125 phone calls, and 250 clicks for directions!”

Each month, NMR provides Shoal Creek Nursery with an analytics report showing the web traffic for that month, as well as a chart at the bottom that shows data for the previous 12 months.

“With this detailed level of data, we’re able to track consistent growth, as well as seasonal/monthly trends in traffic to our website. The analytic report shows us the website’s value every month, which pages customers are interacting with the most, and what products our customers are interested in, which helps with product and promotion planning,” Scott said.

In addition to their monthly analytic report, NMR provides a regularly updated graph to show the increase in traffic over 3 ½ years and when the website updates occur.

“It’s amazing to see the trend over time!”

Conclusion

Shoal Creek Nursery is a yard and garden supply retailer that had an outdated and lackluster online presence. After partnering with New Media Retailer to build a new online presence that would be more customer-friendly, the business saw immediate results in key business metrics. Shoal Creek Nursery saw a noticeable uptick in website click-throughs, foot traffic, calls to the store, and clicks for directions. The result is a more accessible, dynamic, and profitable business.