The Russell Arms: finding customers for the quieter days
How search, email marketing and a rebuilt website helped a village pub in Butlers Cross reach the customers it wanted for the quieter parts of the week.
- Client
- The Russell Arms
- Sector
- Hospitality
- Where
- Butlers Cross, near Wendover
- What we did
- Search (SEO), Email marketing, Website rebuild
- Live
Where they started
The Russell Arms is a proper country pub in Butlers Cross, minutes from Wendover and Aylesbury. It was doing fine: the weekends were busy. The gaps were in the week, and the job was filling them with the right people.
What we did
Search first. The site was built to show up when someone nearby looks for a dog-friendly pub, Sunday lunch or good pub food. There are pages for Sunday roast, Thursday steak night, venue hire and booking a table, each written for the searches that bring people through the door.
Then email. Email marketing keeps customers aware of promotions and the regular fixtures of the week, like Steak Night and Sunday lunch.
Then the rebuild. The website had gone from WordPress to Squarespace. We moved it to a custom build, off Squarespace. Two generations of the old site were still in Google’s index, the retired WordPress build as well as the Squarespace one, so the redirects cover both.
What changed
In Roly’s words, visitor numbers picked up through what’s normally a quiet stretch, and the customers coming through the door are exactly the ones the pub had been trying to attract.
Search and email figures to follow.
The infrastructure
The menus used to be a PDF on the retired WordPress install. It couldn’t rank, didn’t read on a phone and couldn’t be changed without a developer. Now each menu is a real page, and the printable PDFs are generated from the same data file, so the prices on the website and on the table can never disagree.
The brand was recovered from the pub’s own menu artwork (navy, gold and cream) rather than invented. And the content lives in simple data files, so the site is easy to manage and easy to hand over.
"Marie rebuilt our website and looks after the search side for us at The Russell Arms. It made a real difference - visitor numbers picked up through what's normally a quiet stretch, and just as importantly the type of customer coming through the door is exactly who we'd been trying to attract. She gets on with it without needing chasing. Would recommend."