Luxury Patio Furniture Retailer Accelerates Growth With ELIV8

As a growing business in the casual living industry, Outdoor Elegance needed a refreshed marketing strategy to help their brand continue to grow within the marketplace as well as the ability to measure effectiveness of current and future marketing initiatives. The company looked to ELIV8’s consulting services in order to attract, create and close new sales opportunities. A key part of their success was due to ELIV8’s help creating engaging content offers that converted 1,900+ leads in 12 months.

1150%

.

12.5 to 1 RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

15%

.

INCREASED REVENUE OVER 12 MONTHS

1.9K

.

NEW LEADS IN 12 MONTHS

11.8%

.

LEAD TO CUSTOMER CONVERSION RATE

Helping Californians Create Beautiful Outdoor Spaces

In 1999 Doug Sanicola sold his insurance company to set out and launch Outdoor Elegance. The company was created to help people create beautiful outdoor spaces for their homes. Since launching, they have received 10 industry awards and have been a trend setter in their industry.

Outdoor Elegance started out using the marketing techniques that most other furniture retailers resort to. Radio, TV spots, magazine/newspaper ads as well as email list purchasing. They quickly realized the only way to compete in those channels was to outspend their competition, that wasn’t a very enticing option.

They started to generate website traffic mainly thanks to the brand recognition in their community, the traffic was mostly direct and organic. However, they were unable to measure the effectiveness or the ROI of their marketing campaigns, let alone do anything with the website visitors they were generating.

Knowing their competitive advantage is outsmarting, not outspending the competition, they were open to hearing ELIV8’s ideas on inbound marketing and what they could do to increase website traffic while converting that traffic into leads. As well as our introduction to tracking marketing initiatives using analytics and then making adjustments to maximize effectiveness.

Implementing an New Marketing Strategy

Doug and his general manager, Tom Kay, decided to use ELIV8’s services after learning about the value of inbound marketing from an ebook ELIV8 shared with them on lead generation. They learned about the importance of cultivating sales opportunities by automating certain marketing processes and how creating engaging content can generate both website traffic and sales ready leads.

Outdoor Elegance already had a website up and running, but it was mostly to provide information and had not been optimized to convert leads. ELIV8 designed and set up a new version of their site as well as created a comprehensive marketing strategy to be implemented along side the website’s launch.

This decision to work with ELIV8 has not only turned their website into a inbound marketing machine but has dramatically shifted the company’s culture and approach to both sales and marketing.

Creating Content to Build Trust and Convert Leads

ELIV8’s primary goal for Outdoor Elegance was to create a content editorial to map out all future content offers that could possibly be created. Because content offers are mapped to the buying process, ELIV8 started at the top of their metaphoric marketing “funnel.”

ELIV8 created an offer that would have wide appeal, 30 short days later we had our first offer, “101 Example of Outdoor Elegance” which has generated over 1,050 leads since it’s launch. Soon followed by a patio furniture buying guide, BBQ grill buying guide, designer tips for outdoor spaces and more.

These content offers helped to convert over 1,900 leads in the past 12 months that resulted in an 11% lead to customer conversion rate.

Seeing how much can be achieved through content initiatives, at a much lower cost than traditional channels, Outdoor Elegance quickly bought into the concept of inbound marketing and it now drives all of their current efforts while they are quickly moving away from radio and print advertising.

Results and Future Plans

After working with ELIV8 for a little more than 18 months, Outdoor Elegance had more than 72,000 organic visits, a database of almost 2,000 contacts and an 11.8% lead-to-customer conversion rate. Internally, the efficiency of the marketing and sales teams improved dramatically. Today, the marketing team is generating qualified prospects who are personally served by the sales team.

Thanks to their growing database, the large number of visits and the constant lead generation from content, Outdoor Elegance has managed to increase their revenue by more than 15% during 2014. By 2015, Outdoor Elegance’s ROI was 12.5 to 1 (1150%).  

In the future, the company aims to increase the number of content offers they have while better segmenting their audience to provide more relevant offers. To reach these goals, Outdoor Elegance aims to continue strengthening their content editorial and achieve the efficient integration of Hubspot’s new CRM to this process with ELIV8’s continued guidance.