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Army Navy Case Study

Design and build a responsive website to aid the ticket sales for the Army v Navy match at Twickenham Stadium.

Client background:

The Army v Navy match is the annual rugby union match between the teams of the Army and the Royal Navy, it marks the conclusion of the inter-services rugby season and takes place at Twickenham Stadium, attracting a crowd of 82,000. Our client has provided event marketing services for the event since 2014 up until the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, ticket sales for the event rocketed, with the first year under their management being the first 'sell-out'. 

Working in collaboration with our client, we have supported the creation of event marketing strategy, and implementation. 

The requirement

Although sales have been fantastic since our client took over the event marketing, the website itself was in need of some improvement. They wanted to create a new website with a design that would increase engagement, drive ticket sales (to sell-out) and be easier to administer and maintain.

They also wanted to be more active on social media and to enable this, they needed a website with good integration between itself and social platforms. design of the site needed to improve usability and engagement and  complement the various brands that partner with Army Navy.

Serenity thought the site would also benefit from more design flexibility and suggested providing additional controls  via the CMS to give more design options. This would give the client more variety of layout on each page, all within the agreed branding.

 The key project aims were to ensure that the site:

• Administration is easy and provides maximum flexibility for ongoing management

• Is designed with a mobile first interface

• Is rich in visually stimulated content, video and photography

• Promotes ticket sales to ensure a sell-out event

• Is heavily optimised for search engines

• Is adaptable for higher volumes of access leading up to match day (including additional bandwidth for expected busy times)

• Integrates better with social networks

The solution

We were chosen to work on this project due to our long working relationship with the client on a variety of successful marketing projects.

We created a new design that offered far more flexibility and control of content on a page by page basis. Our team installed a new installation of our powerful content management system (Serenity Source), giving the client simpler administration of content with the added advantage of the technical improvements that come with the installation of a newer system.

On load animations were incorporated to guide the user down the page and integration with Twitter and Instagram feeds allow for easy sharing across social networks. Serenity also added links to external Army and Navy ticket sale websites, which resulted in a sell-out being achieved in just 24 hours!

Serenity set up over 300 redirects to ensure the new site retained the high Search Engine Ranking the previous site had. Part of the build also included  a ticket sale/event date countdown feature, which was manageable by the client and integrated the new website with the clients’ email marketing system of choice to gather recipients for future marketing.

The challenge

There was a very short turnaround on this project as it had to be completed in time for the ticket sale date, which was just eight weeks from instruction. 

The previous site was established which meant that a significant amount of effort was required to retain the same performance on search engines. Alongside this, much of the content from the previous site didn’t match the new sitemap, so additional effort was required to adapt and alter it for the new website.

“Although under tight deadlines, this was an incredibly rewarding project to work on. Not only was the launch successful, tickets sold out in record time, the website stayed online without any issues, feedback on social networks was positive and the client was happy with all the improvements made to the website.” 

The outcome:

The new website was a resounding success with a 100% speed score on desktop devices, a 70% speed score on mobile (balancing higher quality mixed media and load time), and the website remained online without any issues during the busy ticket sales period.

In addition to that:

  • All the available tickets sold out in 24 hours, facilitated by the new website.

  • The site achieved improved search engine ranking and Google previews.

  • There were 14,000 measured site loads within a six-hour period on ticket sale day.