Merlin Frame Maker

Merlin Frame Maker was established in 1942 and has grown to become the largest custom frame maker in Singapore with outlets in Paragon Orchard, Waterloo Centre, and River Valley road. In an industry that still heavily relies on brick and mortar locations Merlin Frame Maker appreciated the need to enhance its online presence to continue its growth. They had an existing website but it was very limited in content and barely ranked on anything competitively in search.

I built a new website for Merlin, integrating my SEO research to provide the best possible opportunity for the website to rank on target keywords and drive incremental gains in visibility and leads. I implemented a ‘request quote’ feature to allow people to submit basic information to the outlets for pricing follow up. I switched on Intercom, a live chat solution and took the teams through some basic training on the tool and channel. Once the initial site was up and running we turned our attention to gradual evolution and improvements, convincing the business to photograph framed works I was able to build a repository of over 250 examples of the companies products, creating an ‘inspiration gallery’ that customers and outlet staff use every day to visually show different options and styles available. More recently we have developed a visual frame builder that enables customers to browse and play with different frame styles and mat border colours before requesting for a quote. This enables us to better showcase the range of framing options online, and also provides the sales staff with more context of what the customer might be interested in when they request a quote.

Visits steadily increased over time and have shown a 149% uplift in YOY comparisons. Prior to the new website going live the company didn’t have any form of method to track leads generated from the web, and the only real option was to visit the outlets or call up. With the introduction of the request quote function, I was able to drastically increase web-generated leads, starting with just 13 back in May 2017 it has increased by over 860%. The focus on rebuilding their Google Ads campaigns enabled me to reduce the cost per lead from a high of $98 to just $10, a drop of 90%. Most importantly is the feedback from the client directly in terms of the overall impact on the revenue and profitability of the business.