Mars Air: turning website into a pre-sales tool

Mars Air: turning website into a pre-sales tool

As a leading manufacturer of air curtains, Mars Air has provided industries with air doors for over 55 years. Their previous website was catered towards post sale action, but the company was looking to capture a wider net of potential leads through pre-sales content.

Challenge

A previous Drupal website of Mars Air had been hacked, so regaining control of the website was the first order of business. The next step should be enhancement of Mars Air current business strategy: with over 55 years in the HVAC industry, the Mars Air team was ready to take next steps in the digital space to grow their business. Mars Air decided to approach nopCommerce Solution partner GoldenComm to find solutions for their business needs.

The first thing that was needed to be done was the website stabilization: it allowed GoldenComm to evaluate the current position of the business. New business strategy required a full website redesign. Mars Air was interested in collecting insights on what was working and what wasn’t, as well as gaining clarity on visitor personas. With the goal of delivering helpful content, Mars Air aimed at turning their website into a lead generation tool for their sales representatives.

nopCommerce was selected as an eCommerce platform for this project because of its versatile functionality and robust work. The platform can easily handle the number of SKUs that Mars Air had. Also, the ability to customization made nopCommerce the perfect framework to continue building in the future.

Solution

Before making improvements, GoldenComm did a full audit to see the current state of the website and inspect all the utilized tools.

The audit included an analytics review, which helped to understand what areas of Mars Air website fell short of their business goals. Another important thing was to check the potential issues with the flow of user experience. With the help of UX/UI review GoldenComm became able to identify if there are items that impede conversions and if users have the ability to find what they are looking for. They also revealed weak places of the code that could be optimized to improve page speed and load time, and as a result, increase visitor’s behavior.

Full competitors' analysis completed the creation of a new business strategy for Mars Air.

UX/UI Design

To make the website very intuitive to navigate with all content easily accessible, the new design was made as “mobile first”. Now customers could browse through the content regardless of the device the website is viewed on.

Website Development and nopCommerce Integration

The website front-end and back-end were successfully integrated with nopCommerce platform.

To maintain consistency throughout the website and give the client the ability to create basic pages on their own once the website was launched, GoldenComm created custom page templates. The part of the team that was working with the website front-end made a custom endpoint for the product configurator that then uses JavaScript on the front end to get data from the endpoint to see what options should be available.

The product's configurator was customized to meet clients' industry specific requirements. In addition, Solr, a standalone enterprise search server, was integrated with a REST-like API, while utilizing Solr's powerful full-text search and near real-time indexing to enhance the catalog search. Solr is functioning as a custom reductive navigation; catalog reductive navigation was customized with the Solr's hit highlighting and powerful faceted search capabilities.

Before the Product Configurator was created, you could only find Mars Air Curtains by series. For example, a user could only search for a LPV2 (Lo Pro 2) Series or a STD2 (Standard 2) Series. The air curtain configurator was created to allow the user to find products that matched their specific need. For example, now a user can enter common specs like mounting height, opening width, voltage rating and heating mode to view what series best fits their needs.

A document library that was once referred to as the "junk drawer" is now a clean and organized area of the website. GoldenComm redesigned the UX/UI, restructured the entire functionality of the document library, cleaned up/optimized over 200 PDFs included in the document library, and added new functionality on the back end.

Other important objective was to increase the number of leads who leave their requests on Mars Air website. The request for quote process consisted of a series of questions and multiple pages. To streamline the user experience, it was updated to a one-page step, the amount of fields required was also reduced. All these changes led to an increase in the amount of RFQs filled out after the simplification process.

The Air Curtain ROI Calculator was created to give specifiers an idea of the energy savings they could realize when purchasing an air curtain. Specifically, what the air curtain will cost to run per year, how long it will take to pay for itself, and how much money they will save.

Online Marketing

The website build was executed in a way to set GoldenComm online marketing team up for success post-launch. It included website search engine optimization, analytics monitoring and custom Google Ads campaigns.

Result

GoldenComm assisted Mars Air with cleaning up a malicious hack/defacement of its public website in early January 2017. Right after that, a brand-new website build on the nopCommerce framework was launched to support their business needs.

According to Steve Rosol, President & CEO of Mars Air Systems, the new website was more robust, informative and easier to navigate.

With the new website, and marketing services provided by GoldenComm, Mars Air achieved the following:

• Phone call leads increased by 120% year over year
• Requests for quote increased by 19% year over year
• Increased website traffic by 18% year over year
• Increased average session by 17% year over year

GoldenComm was founded in 1996. In “web years” - that was a long time ago. They’re a 20+ year veteran to the eCommerce space. Today they’re based out of Orange County, CA - but have offices all over the world and employ 80+ people. They have a deep bench and specialize in customizing eCommerce platforms and integrating with different ERP systems.