How do you elevate the customer experience of a local tourist attraction?
Experience Design, Concepts, Copywriting, Email Marketing
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Trentham Gardens is an award-winning, unique destination situated on the edge of Stoke-on-Trent. Home to award-winning gardens, glorious ancient woodland, a unique shopping village and more, it attracts families, nature lovers and event goers from across the country.
To succeed in today’s competitive tourism landscape, Trentham needs a well-rounded marketing approach that integrates both physical and digital touchpoints. By aligning these touchpoints and ensuring consistent messaging and design across all platforms, the attraction can connect with visitors at every stage of their customer journey – before, during and after their visit.
With new commercial priorities and emerging products, the marketing team at Trentham Gardens had an opportunity to transform the estate-wide signage. There’s a need for a consistent and modern style that can be applied across the four interpretation zones – gardens, lakeside, adventure playground and wider estate – to improve the customer experience, increase brand awareness and enhance interaction on-site.
Following our successful tender application, we joined the Trentham team for an initial site visit to walk the grounds and understand the customer journey firsthand. To improve the on-site experience and help visitors navigate the surroundings more intuitively, we developed a cohesive visual and content strategy for the interpretation boards.
We created three key content themes – History, Gardens and Wildlife – to distinguish between the site’s different zones and encourage visitors to discover connections between the boards. By introducing subtle colour cues and directional copy, we crafted a seamless customer journey. And with a target audience ranging from young children to grandparents, accessibility was key – visually and physically. So, we advised on font size, layout and board height to ensure maximum readability.
Our layered design approach delivered value for everyone, from young children to passionate historians, wildlife watchers and garden enthusiasts. We combined in-depth information with bite-sized fun facts to cater to different levels of interest and attention spans. We introduced QR codes that allowed visitors to access further information digitally. This gives curious visitors a chance to delve deeper into content and continue their journey long after their trip to Trentham.
With little visibility or signage, we gave this space a distinct identity centred around wildlife discovery. We incorporated fun facts and interactive prompts to engage young visitors, while highlighting the best viewing spots and encouraging quiet behaviour for the more serious wildlife watchers.
Positioned as an education hub, this area needed clearer messaging and a stronger identity. We focused on storytelling – both written and visual – and themes that would resonate with school groups and family visitors.
Although a unique and playful experience, this area was underused due to a lack of signage. We created fun, friendly messaging such as “Leap like a frog!” to invite visitors in, and provided clear wayfinding around where to remove shoes, wash feet and engage the senses – helping the experience feel safe and structured.
Since the launch of the new ticketing system in April 2024, there’s been an increase and reliance on timely email marketing at each point of the user journey including awareness, loyalty and advocacy stages. Tailored email marketing connects Trentham Gardens with the consumers by increasing interest levels and engagement in a cost-effective way.
Following close analysis of the marketing capabilities of their CRM system, the team at Trentham Gardens appointed us to overhaul the design, copy and ultimately, performance, of the attraction’s current email marketing. The updated emails needed to be relevant and modern, with simplicity in design and clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons to encourage the uptake of day tickets, memberships and renewals.
The current email content needed a refresh to accurately reflect Trentham’s tone of voice identified in the brand guidelines, as approachable, upbeat and authentic. It was pivotal that we identified unique objectives for each piece of comms to ensure a seamless user journey and engage the audience with the right message, at the right time.
Whether the objective was to achieve membership renewals, upsell activities or download day tickets, the CTAs were written with succinct language and encouraged the audience to act. We transformed transactional consumer emails into engaging, upbeat and authentic comms that are designed to deliver an enjoyable user experience and, ultimately, elevate the perceptions of Trentham Gardens.
We approached visual concepting with a strong focus on utilising the full extent of Trentham Gardens brand guidelines. To create engaging and upbeat emails, we expanded the colour palette used in previous comms, introduced graphical elements and chose imagery that represented the family-friendly audience.
To enhance the user experience we designed clear, digestible sections for easier reading. We also carefully considered how to visually differentiate the emails per category e.g. booking confirmations, newsletters and event promotions, while maintaining brand consistency. To do this, we chose specific layout options, colours and imagery that were best suited to the objective of each email.
