The Lathams brand has been established for over 60 years and it’s traditional retailing arm for fishing tackle is known the world over. After the owners of Lathams decided that the business should embrace e-retailing, Affinity New Media were appointed to design and develop the site working with Lathams’ existing IT Department and their third party partners Corby & Fellas who are responsible for the Company’s stock control and EPOS software systems.
The site’s backend is fed from the proprietary Progress stock data with Affinity responsible for data and design integration. With a strict development timetable in place, representative teams from all involved met weekly to ensure progress was in line with expectation.
Affinity i-Marketing were contracted to organically optimise the site and to work on marketing strategies for site promotion. During the site development process, data was collected from contributing domains ready to e-shot at site launch. The site itself is designed to collect data from several points and encourages users to register via a simple interface to gain certain privileges designed to encourage repeat business and win customer loyalty in a fiercely competitive market. Affinity i-Marketing also manage a substantial Pay-Per-Click budget on behalf of the client which is segmented by type of fishing as well as product and manufacture type – in excess of 1,000 relevant keyterms are managed as part of this service.
Other promotional activity includes a monthly E-shot highlighting special offers and key products which is distributed to all previous purchasers and customers as well as registered site users every 4 weeks. The site benefits from substantial visitor and purchase spikes following this activity with careful monitoring and tracking providing invaluable retail marketing feedback.
