Premium engineered wood flooring company seeking to increase conversions.

Challenge

Forté flooring is a leading national manufacturer and supplier of engineered wood flooring. The company implemented several advanced marketing strategies with specialist agencies in recent years, with mixed results. One key challenge the team had identified was that while website traffic had grown, due to improved paid social and paid search, contacts and leads were not coming through the website at the volume one would expect.

Having recently invested in a new website that correctly positioned the brand as a premium flooring supplier there was a strong desire to feed the sales team with quality leads by gearing the website towards converting traffic into new contacts. While Forté had invested in creating a stunning seasonal brochure and several guides specialising on care and maintenance there was minimal insight as to who was engaging with this content, and the value it was providing prospects.

Forté has several core audiences ranging from homeowners researching flooring, cladding, and decking options for their dream home to architects seeking the latest trends and compliance changes. This split in target demographics proved a challenge when building a conversion strategy for the website that would capture the right leads for the sales team.

Approach

The Forté website focused on two conversion points, contacting the sales team and ordering free samples. This provided limited opportunities for architects and homeowners to engage with Forté if they weren't close to the point of purchase. As a result, the website had an average conversion rate of 0.62% at the start of our engagement. 

A key focus for us was gating the existing content on their website and building a lead magnet strategy to expand beyond their current content offering. While most of the existing downloadable content focused on aftercare and post-sale education we wanted to ensure there was content further up the buyer's journey to ensure conversions of people in the early research phase of the buying process.

We created landing pages within HubSpot for the existing content, with embedded forms to immediately pass those leads into the HubSpot CRM. We set the forms to hide form fields if those questions had already been answered, to create a more seamless experience when downloading multiple pieces of content. In addition to creating landing pages, workflows, and brochure delivery emails for the existing content we also set about creating a content strategy for new premium downloads, which took effect in May 2024.

The new content, created by the client in collaboration with the team at V86, launched via EDM, social posts, and via an innovative dynamic pop-up campaign throughout the website. We went back through popular blog articles and added CTAs within the body of the article to drive organic search visitors to the new conversion point.

Results

The impact of this top-of-the-funnel piece of premium content has been immediate. Launched in May of 2024 we saw the conversion rate of the website increase by 0.67% in the first month. The guide has been downloaded almost 500 times in the first 3 months and the split between a conventional landing page and dynamic pop-up CTA has been interesting. With double the number of downloads through the pop-up as the landing page the value in targeted CTAs has become evident.  

The pop-up is part of a wider, tailored, CTA strategy which seeks to place the most valuable content in front of the most relevant individual users. Utilising the power of the HubSpot CRM we can change which pop-up is shown to each website visitor based on pre-determined list criteria set within the pop-up itself. The fact Forté's website is hosted on an independent platform doesn't stop the power of these tools, as seen in the results. Once this form is submitted the pop-up will not be shown to that user again, and be replaced with a content offer that moves the visitor further down the buyer journey, and towards a conversation with the sales team.

So while the success of this piece of content can be taken in isolation it's the flow-through effect that holds the most value. Sample requests (the next step in the journey) increased 189% versus the May, June, July period in 2023 resulting in a 130 more sales-ready leads.