Out of all the content on your website, your homepage may very well be your most important asset. How your products or services are represented on this page can have a drastic impact on your visitors’ impression of your brand. Which is why for consumer product focused companies, bringing lifestyle content into the homepage is an important means of creating an emotional connection between audience and product early in their journey.
But how do you introduce lifestyle content without sacrificing traffic to essential product pages or conversion paths? For the luxury RV brand Airstream, that is the problem we set out to solve.
The Challenge
Airstream, a leading luxury travel trailer and touring coach manufacturer, wanted to revamp their website’s homepage to better reflect the lifestyle nature of the brand while maintaining lead generation and consumer education. They charged Element Three with finding a solution to promote social and awareness-minded lifestyle content on the homepage without negatively impacting product conversion paths.
The Solution
Knowing that product-related pages (including product line landing pages, feature tools, and model-specific pages) were the most frequently viewed and best converting pages on the website, the E3 team had to find a solution that provides users with more means to enjoy blogs, social media content, and community-related content without hurting lead and traffic performance for products. In essence, the team faced two primary goals:
- Provide more lifestyle and channel-based content on the homepage, and
- Maintain or improve product-related traffic paths that lead to sales qualified lead conversions.
The solution the team provided featured a design that maximizes available space to promote product line landing pages and user selection tools (including Choose Your Own travel trailer and Build Your Own touring coach tools), while also creating new places to showcase lifestyle content.
The primary product feature section was reduced in size but also featured multiple calls to action, allowing users to jump directly to a product line landing page or the user selection tools, which site performance indicated were helpful in generating SQLs and product sales.
Gone were the “three panel CTAs” from the previous design, now replaced with a simpler section that allowed Airstream two opportunities to promote new products or content for users, like the Nest product announcement and a road trips ebook.
Finally, the team developed a new dynamic content grid that allowed Airstream to pull in content from several different channels, including Facebook and Instagram, while featuring the latest video and blogs from the website. The grid offered a fresh look to returning visitors by cycling in the latest content from these mediums while also allowing Airstream to curate the experience and feature top performing content from those channels.
The Results
The expectations for the first goal, to include more lifestyle and channel-specific content on the homepage, were met head-on. Airstream has been overwhelmingly positive about the updates to the homepage, going so far as to loop in their social channel management and dealership content management partners to incorporate the dynamic content grid to their efforts. Efforts to utilize, test, and improve the grid on the homepage continue, and its use has spread to other projects in the agency.
The secondary goal, to maintain or improve product page traffic and conversions from the homepage, was met with similar success. In the first six weeks of performance since the new homepage launched, product-related traffic was up across the board:
- Traffic to Product Line Landing Pages: +11.96%
- Traffic to Product-Specific User Tools: +21.93%
These pages, essential to consumer education, are crucial paths to conversion on the website, and correspondingly, we’ve seen overall sales qualified leads increased. Following the homepage update, conversions improved:
- Overall Sales Qualified Leads: +36.03%
- Tool-Assisted Leads: +12.71%
Overall traffic to these crucial landing pages has been increased since the homepage update, demonstrating to team and client both that the homepage can serve dual purposes of promoting brand awareness (through lifestyle content) and providing product education and conversion means.
Don’t Sacrifice When You Should Have It All
With the right strategy and the right approach to design, brands can provide consumers with a lifestyle experience while still offering the proper means to drive consumer education and sales prospecting. Though the Airstream homepage is but one example of this balance, it demonstrates that in product marketing, lifestyle brands don’t need to sacrifice lifestyle content for sales success.
