Rocking the boat in the conventional yacht-charter market.
Who are Y.CO?
Y.CO are not your average yacht chartering company. Co-founded by CEO Charlie Birkett, it all started with a desire to transform the yachting experience, with a focus on innovation, client-centric service, and a holistic approach to yacht management.
Their website is a key touchpoint in the customer journey, and the brief insisted on a bold and expressive design, with a clear differentiation from safe and predictable competitors. Y.CO lead from the front, and this doesn’t stop with their web presence.
Why they came to us
Y.CO, alongside their branding studio Pixie , sought a partner in the digital space that can help deliver ‘digital excellence’, to enhance their customer's journey, inform them, make their life easier and bring them closer to the brand. In partnership, they wanted to be challenged and inspired by their agency.
The project needed to deliver on the following objectives:
1. Elevate the brand and reflect this in the entire user journey
2. Unleash the power of rich storytelling
3. Unlock the value of data
4. Assist the broker and charter teams to increase proposal conversion rates
Plain sailing. This is how we did it…
Ability to Create Rich and Dynamic Stories
With the new CMS there was a need to empower the Y.CO marketing team with enhanced storytelling capabilities. Through extensive creative freedom and addressing limitations with the previous CMS, we aimed to not only improve the itineraries to be more tailored to customers, they also would add contextual and relevant information to improve their effectiveness as a sales tool.
To address these issues, a modular approach has been adopted, offering "Lego blocks" for unlimited creativity. These blocks come with various layout options; for example, a two-column module alone offers over 400 different layouts. Each module can be duplicated, reused, and seamlessly integrated with the powerful Sanity CMS.
Unlocking The True Potential of Search
Search was specifically designed for time-poor users and features super-fast, in-depth and customisable search capabilities that not only enhance user experience but also serve as a potent marketing tool. We integrated with Algolia to leverage their extensive customisation options, and comprehensive analytics to surface relevant Yachts and experiences to the user. Also with Algolia, we were creating a foundation for future functionalities like AI-enhanced search, voice commands and personalised recommendations to tap into trends and customer demand in future.
This approach not only simplifies the user journey by reducing reliance on filtering but also captures user intent more effectively, accelerating the transition from search to enquiry and harnessing search data for improved proposal times and effectiveness. Similarly, we can monitor browsing habits to improve search result hierarchy and create SEO indexable collections from the most popular search terms.
Your team has gone above and beyond to create something that has streamlined our processes and given us the flexibility to truly express our brand.
We've got big plans for the future, and we can't wait to make them happen together. Partnering with Rotate° has been a fantastic experience, and we're all so excited for what is to come.
Empowering the sales team with Salesforce sync
In parallel with this project, Y.CO were looking to upgrade their CRM tooling with a move to Salesforce, adopting it as their new CRM system, and replacing LYNK, the previous all-in-one CMS solution. This strategic move positions Salesforce as the definitive source of truth for essential marketing & sales data, including product pricing and client information.
The integration process involves a seamless flow of data from Yachtfolio to Salesforce, and subsequently to Sanity for content decoration all via APIs. This ensures that all platforms are updated with the most current and relevant data, enhancing the accuracy and effectiveness of our sales team’s outreach.
Additionally, all enquiries received through contact forms, along with proposal data, are directly pushed back to Salesforce. This integration empowers the sales team by providing them with immediate access to a prospect’s website interactions and proposal details, enabling them to respond effectively to client needs.
Best-in-Class Proposal-builder
Once an enquiry is generated it is then down to the sales team to secure the business. To assist with this, we wanted to reduce the time to generate a proposal down from 2 days to a matter of minutes. By reducing the time and complexity in creating a proposal on a robust and stable service along with reducing the cost of running the system, we’d have bold and beautiful proposals that not only look great, but lock-in charters & yacht sales at scale.
Our solution allows brokers to use any of the blocks in the site page builder to create stylish, in-depth and indulgent proposals all behind a login for data capture. Data was adapted from both Sanity CMS and Salesforce to craft bespoke yacht charters and itineraries in line with the core marketing pages of the site.
As a result it is now possible to create a proposal in 30mins.
Tech Stack
CMS – Sanity 
CRM – Salesforce 
Search – Algolia 
DAM – Cloudinary 
Host – Netlify 