B&D Garage Doors & Openers – Umbraco website redesign

Making a once-in-a-lifetime purchase intuitive, secure, and enjoyable

Enhancing B&D Group’s online presence

B&D Garage Doors & Openers has been engineering garage doors for over 60 years. They are a true Australian icon. Up to 40% of a home’s street aesthetic is made up of garage doors, and they’ve captured their market with exceptional service, clever marketing, and a continuous drive for excellence through innovation.

The challenge

Competitive advantage & increased consumer engagement 

While B&D have always been customer-first, the reality is that most homeowners will only buy one or two new garage doors in their lifetime. Consumers turn to B&D for home renovations, security and safety concerns, and changes in living circumstances. B&D’s primary target audience are customers looking to complete a renovation or hoping to replace their old or broken garage door. With consumers purchasing so infrequently, it is a significant and expensive purchase that requires extensive research, planning, and good judgement. A combination of factors such as aesthetics and cost need to marry up to the suitability of each individual solution.

B&D recognised their website was a crucial first touchpoint for consumers. They embarked on a journey to completely transform the website into an informative and engaging experience, without leaving an opening for competitors to gain a commercial advantage. The website also needed to cater to B&D Aligned Dealers, architects, and builders who sell garage doors at many key decision points in a homeowner’s journey.

B&D Group wanted their digital experience to match the top-tier quality of their products. The old site structure was causing navigational difficulties, incomplete user journeys, and frustrations with form completions. A complete digital overhaul to drive a higher volume of leads to their network of third-party dealers and increased sales was essential to maintaining reputation and growth. There was a lot of opportunity left on the table that B&D wanted to capitalise on.

The evolution of data analytics

To meet the demands of an increasingly complex data analytics landscape, a new website would need to be developed.

Priding itself on its data-led marketing strategy, B&D wanted to gather complex information about users and leverage those insights to better understand their customers’ needs. It was crucial that onsite user behaviour was easily dissectible and able to be meaningfully reported on to ensure they maintained their competitive advantage as the market leader. The goal was to identify areas where they could improve their offering, from product to customer service to pricing.

B&D wanted a website that was intuitive and user friendly, and provided the tools necessary to inform their buyers and lead them to make the right decision for their homes and their families. With a huge disparity in buyer needs, expectations, and understanding of the products, providing a seamless user experience would depend on B&D’s ability to effectively nurture their customer through a complex user journey.

User behaviour and expectations clarified

Extensive research into user behaviour on the existing B&D website revealed some interesting data on customer expectations. The team discovered that only 50% of their website visitors were continuing their journey past the fold on the home page. This implied that the user did not feel overly confident that they would find the information they were looking for on this site, or were not prompted effectively enough to try. Users needed more informative content and prompts to guide their user path earlier on in their journey.

A whopping 41.9% of website visitors listed home security as the most important element in choosing a new garage door. This discovery highlighted significant content information gaps and opportunities to better communicate B&D’s commitment to safety and security. 

Visitors searching for products by door type and colour accounted for 38.4%, demonstrating the urgent need to focus attention on the ‘door visualiser’ tool. Better communicating B&D’s premium product benefits was key to converting this audience.

Key Operational Drivers 

• Use a research-led and evidence-based strategy to help website visitors gain confidence in the brand and product offering
• Create an intuitive and user-friendly website that improves conversions and engagement 
• Optimise the customer experience across devices
• Ensure impeccable site uptime
• Maximise the site for lead generation and tailor for the younger user

The solution

Sydney-based digital agency Sitback embarked on an end-to-end project for B&D Group. The objective was to design, develop, and provide continuous support for an innovative Umbraco website that would optimise user experience, increase customer engagement, and amplify lead generation.

Harnessing our expertise in psychology-led UX research, UI design, and development to reimagine the B&D Group’s website presence, we conducted workshops, stakeholder interviews, and usability testing. Employing a hybrid-agile approach, our team was able to create a user-friendly website, optimised for both mobile and desktop platforms.

The custom-built website uses a headless architecture with Umbraco CMS hosted on Microsoft Azure. This allows the B&D team to easily manage content while supplying necessary API endpoints to a separate .NET 6.0/VueJS front-end application. Advanced CSS features allow content managers to focus on what they do best, improving content, rather than fiddling with images and resizing logos. Content editors have the capability to insert code snippets directly within a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) component. The underlying system performs custom validations on the input data, meaning content creators can confidently update the website without relying on developers, and assures developers that their code and website performance are never compromised. 

Enhanced performance with faster application loading times through image optimisation, lazy-loading, and extensive caching, implemented via Microsoft Azure Front Door, bolster the user experience.

Integration with Salesforce CRM and third-party technologies such as enterprise search tool, Search.IO, further improve site functionality, and the use of schema markup helps enhance search engine crawling of the site’s content.

The site also features a custom “Dealer Finder” tool using Google Maps and Geodesic distance computation. This innovative feature allows users to easily find the nearest B&D showrooms or mobile showrooms, streamlining their path to purchase, improving conversion and minimising B&D’s consumption costs through the Google Maps API.

The results

The new website has produced impressive results for B&D Group. Following the launch, the number of average monthly visitors has increased by over 30%, mobile site visits rose by 28%, and some “Call To Action” conversions skyrocketed by 41%. B&D’s content team can now include interactive tools, infographics, blogs, video and other mixed content with ease. 

The original “Door Visualiser” tool was the most clicked on asset on the website, but improvements to its usability and educational value has increased user engagement and simplified the path to sale.

Furthermore, the introduction of powerful filtering options on product listings serves relevant products to users faster. In fact, customers that interact with these filters are over 70% more likely to convert.

An innovative strategy and an agile development approach have all contributed to reinforcing B&D’s status as a market leader. With personalisation on the horizon, the headless CMS architecture is fully expandable, and all components are reusable and can be migrated onto future projects. 

The success of the B&D Group website project demonstrates the power of a user-centric design approach, innovative technological integration, and the value of a strong partnership between a digital agency and its client. The effective collaboration between Sitback and B&D Group sets a benchmark for future projects, and paves the way for continual improvement and success in an increasingly digital marketplace.

Empower your marketing team, increase conversions, and improve customer experience

If you’re trying to increase the rate at which customers are converting on your website, you have complex mapping requirements, or you need a highly performant website that doesn’t hold your content team back, get in touch to find out how we can help you too. We’re also happy to chat about garage doors, if you like. 😉

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