Brand Name: Rubio's Restaurants
Agency/Site Creator: Red Door Interactive
URL: www.rubios.com/
What is unusual and effective about this website?
Restaurants are always challenging simply because to consume the product, you have to typically arrive on premises. For many, it seems that a restaurant and the web wouldn't mix. However, Rubio's has discovered just how important the web can be to its business.
Creating internet-based revenue opportunities for a restaurant can be limiting until the infrastructure to support online ordering is in place. In this case, we were able to sell gift cards, do office and group ordering and, very soon, we'll launch with online ordering. One feature that is quite unique is the way we handle group ordering. An organizer can release a meeting to a group via email and individuals can contribute their specific order. The order is assembled and the organizer can pick up the group order with each person's box uniquely prepared and labeled. This feature has been a huge success and has created tremendous loyalty in offices around the Southwest.
From offline research, we recognized how important location is to the brand. Customers become loyal to one or two locations within a small radius of either their home or work. Therefore, we built the site to facilitate defining a personal location through several logical input locations. Then, once a user has defined their location, the site is customized to their specific community restaurant.
How does the website fit into and complement the overall brand strategy for the company?
The site was designed to mirror the restaurant's Baja brand. It is fun, casual and features light, ambient beach sounds (great for relaxing background sound even in an office).
In-store experiences are intended to embody the spirit under which the first Baja fish taco was created, the spirit of discovery. On the site, we fulfilled on that desire while at the same time offering practical tools to fulfill on the needs of the typical consumer. For example, we offer a nutritional calculator (through analytics on the previous site, we learned the high engagement value of that area of the site, so we invested a lot there) and other features to help users accomplish tasks. But through any process, without obstruction, they will likely learn something new about the brand, the history, and the variety beyond the World Famous Fish Tacos for which they're known.
How would you improve this website?
We're eager to get online ordering, and the next step will be to move a lot of the functionality to mobile. So building this site with mobile in mind was a priority for the long-term. We're also looking forward to taking advantage of the My Location feature and really personalizing the experience both to the community level and to the individual. These few things, having only been live for about a month, are certainly underused at the moment. Lastly, I would like to offer more interactive social tools and feedback mechanisms to encourage a dialog with the brand.
Brand Name: Martin + Osa
Agency Name: AKQA
URL: www.martinandosa.com
What is unusual and effective about this website?
For an e-tail site, I love it. It is engaging with intermingled lifestyle and product photos, as well as the fact that it uses video to better illustrate various styles. Clothes are so challenging to sell online since people can't try things on, feel fabric and absorb the ambience of a retail location. However, this site really does a great job of providing users with every possible reason to buy the product if they like the look.
Through the Layer It option, users can put outfits together. In the Shop by Outfit area, users can see video of people with whole outfits on in full video; users can get an idea of how the fabric moves and how they can put together an outfit. Also, you can collect your items via email, mobile or printed page. The size chart is more thorough than you typically see.
How does the website fit into and complement the overall brand strategy for the company?
Martin and Osa is targeting an older demographic (ages 28-40) than its parent, American Eagle. This site does a good job of staying consistent with the models and imagery and makes the tools readily accessible for making size and style decisions. The content is descriptive, but not overbearing, and the structure of the site reflects the company's stores.
How would you improve this website?
As with any e-tail site, there are many ways to improve the experience, but I also know that the benefit may not outperform the cost for many recommendations. For example, I would like to see more use of models and lifestyle photos for specific products, but I know that it is challenging enough just getting the flat product photos on the site.
Martin and Osa's traffic is minimal compared to that of BananaRepublic.com, JCrew.com and others. However, I do believe the site's features are superior, in general, to industry standards. I believe that one of the areas they need to improve is in driving traffic. Clearly the brand is new, but there are some things that can be done on-site beyond simply making it a good user experience.
Martin and Osa should consider creating more ways to distribute content from the site to friends and get the site talked about. Granted, this may be a challenging demographic to embrace the typical social media tools, there are still some opportunities to get users engaged. Perhaps appeal to the educational side and offer content that helps users understand the fabric differences or call-outs to highlight the influences behind styles. Then, with respect to search, I firmly believe in the use of natural language URLs to both improve search rankings but also make the user feel better oriented on a site.
While I think the experience is there and would be interested to see how it's doing on the conversion rate, I would concentrate efforts now on increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to make the most out of the wonderful tools in place.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive.