Global web replatforming for group insurer Thomas Miller

Project challenge

Thomas Miller Group (TMG) has impressive credentials. Their UKP&I brand insures over 240 million tonnes of owned and chartered ships across 50+ countries and TT Club underwrites 80% of the world’s maritime containers. The digital transformation challenge was to do justice to these credentials, leverage the Group’s ongoing commitment to content and provide cohesion across the digital estate. There was also an ambition to move to a personalisation-led digital marketing programme.

Our approach

An early decision was made to commit to Umbraco given TMG's strong focus on content strategy and long-term digital marketing ambitions.

The directional phase of the project entailed a range of ‘Learn’ activities. Together these shaped the business requirements and information architecture.

Early collaboration with stakeholders in design thinking workshops defined audience and business goals. Initial versions of personas were developed by a cross-section of internal stakeholders, including frontline support roles who had valuable customer insight.

We undertook heuristic reviews of TMG’s current digital estate and benchmarked competitor strengths and online digital marketing effectiveness. 

From here we clustered and mapped user stories, and wireframes were then developed for key journeys. Importantly, this was a multi-site replatforming solution. The requirement was to standardise user journeys, hierarchies, and navigation across all brands and sites. 

Design outcomes

Phase 1 of the site roll-out featured Thomas Miller Group, UKP&I, and TT Club sites. The visuals show the coordinated design approach across their digital estate. TMG's other 15 businesses are to be migrated to the new platform over future months. 

Example homepage for the Group site shown below. Features include an accordion module to surface the Group brands by service line and a range of modules to headline key propositions and news and insights.

AI and content marketing

A key innovation of the Umbraco build was combining Microsoft Azure's Cognitive Service called Text Analytics. This replaced the need for manual tagging of content. The AI intelligence does the tagging automatically on-the-fly serving up related articles based on the page currently being browsed. TMG had large amounts of content to migrate from the old sites to the new platform. The AI innovation not only removed significant manual work but also provided a powerful ongoing related content feature. In tests run by Pancentric, AI repeatedly proved far more effective than humans at assessing the most pertinent related content to serve.

The launch of the sites was preceded by extensive technical SEO work and 25,000 redirects at launch. Early results:

• 85% increase in all traffic month on month with 22% year on year;
• 72% increase in organic traffic month on month;
• 17 tracked terms now on page 1 of Google;
• 111% increase in direct traffic month on month;
• 52% increase in direct traffic year on year;
• The most visible Club on Google.

Looking to combine your group digital estate?

Pancentric specialises in multi-site, multi-brand digital estates, proven to transform and replatform the online platforms of numerous insurance firms and big brands worldwide.

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