Richmond American Homes | Website Redesign

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Measures of Success

  • Full CMS implementation speeds marketing responsiveness, streamlines site updates, and enables effective personalization efforts

  • A robust and intuitive faceted search schema enables consumers to rapidly identify

  • Integration of all lines of business (home buying, financing, insurance, etc.) under one roof

  • Best-in-class integration with Google Maps for a highly interactive and compelling user experience

  • Dynamic presentation of home designs, interactive floor plans, and virtual home tours

How We Did It

In the middle of a down economy, national homebuilder Richmond American made the savvy decision to leap frog competitors with a wholesale redesign of their flagship brand site. Focusing both a visual rebranding and on the goal of streamlining a highly complex customer experience, Enlighten partnered with a diverse set of Richmond stakeholders to develop a digital strategy and execution that would exceed both consumer and business requirements and expectations.

Search Me. Matchmaking for the homebuyer is a complicated business. Location, of course, is paramount. Beyond that, though, come a variety of persona-driven factors ranging from household income and family size, to home price, style, square-footage, floor plan, as well as the time frame for the move-in. A full CMS implementation, coupled with richly interactive, faceted search functionality, laid the foundation for a streamlined, highly engaging user experience. The CMS also enabled must-have exploratory features like interactive home comparisons and interactive floor plans, as well as a dynamic database integration with Google Maps terrain view, affording home buyers a bird’s eye view of home location and well as the neighboring topography.

The CMS platform also supported the integration of multiple corporate website properties under one roof. Now, from within their own personalized online portfolio, consumers can access a wide range of decision support tools, financial calculators, and related business opportunities from HomeAmerican Mortgage and American Home Insurance.

On the technical side, the site redesign also facilitated a variety of business-critical integration requirements including:

  • Lead routing to the CRM system via (ESB) Web services
  • Integration with backend (ERP) product and pricing (in near real time)
  • Geo-targeted promotions to increase lead generation in specific markets
  • Distributed content streams to third-party partners and listings aggregators (realtors)

The Richmond American brand site redesign: Making home buyers feel more at home online.

Insights for Success

  • Complex, highly considered purchase environments can benefit significantly from the introduction of a dynamic, faceted-search deployment

  • The more interactive the shopping experience, the more vested consumers become in the process and the products

  • Personalization based on relevant, self-identified user cues, combined with just-in-time, geo-targeted marketing offers and promotions, can help accelerate consumers’ progress through the sales funnel