Butlin’s

A complete digital overhaul for one of the nation’s most beloved holiday resorts.

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Industry

Sport and Leisure

Services

Consumer Website Product Development Software and Hardware integration Licensed Software Responsive Website

Technologies

Magnolia DXP

Improved customer experience with DXP

Butlin’s recognised the need for a digital overhaul due to an outdated CMS, which made content management cumbersome and slowed down the customer experience. A partnership between One Beyond and Magnolia helped Butlin’s achieve a new website that content authors could manage independently, a streamlined booking process, and improved customer experience.

The Challenge

Founded in 1936 by Billy Butlin, Butlin’s is a well-known group of holiday resorts in the United Kingdom. The company’s aim is to provide affordable and enjoyable holidays for British families (the Butlin’s family brand) and groups of adults (Butlin’s Big Weekenders) – making the UK short break accessible to all. During its long-term digital transformation journey, Butlin’s decided to upgrade its tech stack to a modern Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to increase the speed of digital experience delivery and achieve economies of scale.

Butlin’s had been using an outdated content management system (CMS) that required extensive customisation to modernise the customer experience. However, managing content became cumbersome, making it difficult and slow for editors to make changes. The customer experience also suffered from slow page speed and lacked personalisation and optimisation capabilities.
This was when Butlin’s recognised the need to overhaul its digital presence through a complete transformation of its technology stack. The Butlin’s team’s objectives were clear: a new website that content authors could manage without constant support from developers, a modernised booking journey, and overall enhancements to the customer experience.

Our Solution

While embarking on their digital transformation journey, Butlin’s sought the expertise of One Beyond. Together, they chose Magnolia as the Digital Experience Platform to support their digital aspirations with a very detailed proposition. Magnolia offered a host of capabilities that aligned perfectly with Butlin’s real marketing needs:

  • Ease of use for marketers: Its user-friendly, unified authoring interface made Magnolia the ideal solution for non-technical content authors who need a seamless editorial experience for their day-to-day work.
  • Content delivery: With Magnolia, Butlin’s teams can create content once and publish it everywhere, making the Magnolia DXP the single source of truth for all omnichannel content in the future.
  • Collaboration between developers and content authors: Content authors can work in Magnolia’s authoring interface without having to consider how content is delivered to the front end, and Butlin’s developers can write front end code independent of how content is managed. This separation enables marketing to manage digital experiences without having to rely on IT and significantly simplifies the collaboration between developers and content authors.

Outcome

Magnolia has been a real game-changer for Butlins’ complex digital experiences, including its holiday booking process. By streamlining its digital experience delivery, Butlin’s teams are able to move faster, leading to the company seeing a return on investment in its first year working with One Beyond and Magnolia.
Butlin’s has witnessed significant improvements by streamlining how content is managed: within months, the bounce rate decreased by 5%, and the conversion to search saw an impressive 8% increase. Most notably, overall conversion increased by 12%. Having seen these results early, the team is expecting an even larger return on investment from updating its booking journey.

Butlin’s successful partnership with One Beyond and Magnolia DXP exemplifies the power of choosing the right digital experience platform to achieve business goals and exceed customer expectations. With a modern and flexible DXP, Butlin’s is now perfectly equipped to create great digital experiences that resonate with its audience and drive real outcomes.
It's been game-changing in terms of managing our content. Already we can see the returns; the bounce rate has gone down 5%, and the conversion to search, which is a big metric for us that we track, has gone up 8%, and the biggie is that conversions have gone up by about 12%.
JOANNA MONTGOMERY, HEAD OF DIGITAL, BUTLIN’S
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