Doughdough is an innovative marketing company that produces edible treats for gifts and marketing campaigns. Based in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, it has been in operation for nearly five years and employs five people.
Like many young businesses that grew up in the internet age, doughdough already had an ecommerce website; the problem was it no longer supported the company’s needs. “We liked it, but some of the processes behind the scenes didn’t work and we wanted to overhaul some of the images and content on the site,” explains Vhari Russell, sales director at doughdough.
In addition, the company wanted advice on other areas of its IT equipment: “We needed some training on how to use the software packages for labels that we’ve just bought to work with a new printer, for example,” says Vhari.
Talking to the experts
Vhari and her business partner, Rachel Prothero, discussed their plans with the company’s Business Link adviser. She recommended they apply for funding through the takeITon programme to help finance their IT upgrade.
Vhari was really impressed with the takeITon adviser, Keith Padbury, who met with them to discuss their proposal at length. “He was really well prepared and it was so useful to have an expert in this area review our website and offer recommendations for how we could improve it,” she says.
Driving online sales
Once the funding had been approved, doughdough put into practice all the recommendations Keith had suggested for improving the company’s web presence. New product shots were 
commissioned to give customers a clearer image of what they were buying and the corporate pages on the site were updated with more content, such as case studies of marketing campaigns doughdough had run in the past and testimonials from happy customers.
The extra content is not only useful for prospective customers in finding out more about the business’ capabilities, but also boosts doughdough’s rankings in the natural search results of any relevant keyword searches on Google and other search engines.
Meanwhile, changes behind the scenes of the website have streamlined the order process to help ensure that customers receive the right order at the right time. “We can run extra reports now to extract any data we need,” explains Vhari. “For example, we’ve set up a FedEx report so that when we run an order, all the data we need to arrange a delivery with FedEx has been captured, thereby reducing customer grievances.”
The improvements made to doughdough’s website are already starting to filter through to the business. “We’ve received more corporate enquiries, which is one of the key areas in our business that we want to develop,” reveals Vhari. Undoubtedly, this has been helped by the new enquiry form on the site, which makes it easier for prospective customers to get in touch.
“We’ve also seen a reduction in customer complaints as a result of the FedEx report we now produce because the recipient’s telephone number is always included with deliveries,” says Vhari. “It reduces our workload as well, which means we can focus on the important job of selling and marketing our products to customers.”
“I’d definitely recommend the takeITon programme to other small businesses, as the advice and funding we received enabled us to make improvements to our site that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to put in place for a very long time,” she adds.
