LifeStyle Home Builders Wins Best Website at 2021 MAME Awards
As the builders and designers of the LifeStyle Home Builders website, we’re thrilled to announce that their website received the award for Best Website at this year’s MAME Awards. The Major Achievement in Marketing Excellence (MAME) Awards are hosted annually by the Sales and Marketing Council of the Home Building Association of Richmond (HBAR). The awards recognize all facets of professional and personal achievement in marketing, design, merchandising, and sales. Industry experts review and choose the winners, looking for those who best showcase the latest trends. In addition to Best Website, LifeStyle also won Best Design Studio, and you can learn more about that on their blog, which Meredith Communications also manages and maintains.
When choosing the best website, the judges look at the quality of design, ease of obtaining information, and organization of the message. The four primary judging criteria are equally weighted, focusing on design, layout, content, and execution. Companies can submit marketing statements that cover each part of the judging criteria, including results and costs.
Working closely with Lifestyle Home Builders, our expert website developer created a thoughtfully designed website to truly bring the brand to life in a visually compelling and immersive experience. This starts with an elegant homepage, complete with a panoramic slideshow highlighting their beautiful model home photos that are constantly refreshed as visitors explore the website. Plus, the search function and interactive map, located right on the homepage, make it easy for visitors to choose to search communities, floor plans, or available homes.
We understand the importance of keeping visitors on the website and clicking through page after page for as long as possible. The more they explore, the more they’re going to learn, and the more likely they are to find a home design and/or a community that appeals to them. Thus, interactive floor plans by Outhouse Interactive, a floor plan quiz, videos, and photo galleries were used to help immerse visitors within the site. That resulted in website visitors averaging 3:07 minutes per visit and looking at an unprecedented 5.5 pages per visit. Tracking for the interactive floor plan usage tells us that visitors spent as much as 43 minutes viewing a plan, with the majority spending between 5 to 15 minutes on any given floor plan. As a result, potential buyers are already invested when they show up to their model home appointment. They arrive with personalized floor plans already created and printed out from the website.
To further generate leads and make it even easier for potential buyers to find their perfect floor plan, the company created a new tool to help. The Floor Plan Quiz is a fun and informative tool that allows potential buyers and the sales team. This quiz continues to be a top 5 producing lead source, coming in behind Google and Facebook.
The site needs to be as helpful as possible to potential buyers, but it also needs to help the LifeStyle Home Builders team generate leads. To do that, we incorporate multiple calls to action that include the typical phone and email, but also live chat and text messaging. As a result, in 2020, the online leads managed by the Online Sales Counselor accounted for 53% of total sales volume.
Many people still prefer to call and speak to someone once they’ve found some properties they’re interested in, so the phone number is located at the top right corner of every page of the website. However, as people have become more comfortable on the web, we’ve also included a VIP mailing list request in the lower section of pages. This email sign-up call-to-action not only encourages visitors to stay informed about available homes but also allows LifeStyle Home Builders to build an important email marketing list.
These days, it’s just as important to have your website look good on phones and tablets as they do on regular computer screens. As a result, we designed the site with various mobile devices in mind. This has resulted in averages of 2.26 minutes and 4.76 pages per mobile visit, which is substantially higher than the industry average. In total, 65% of the website’s unique traffic was generated using a mobile platform. We optimize the site for Google organic search with 17 keyword phrases on page one of the Google organic search results.
Ensuring that navigation is simple, with essential pages clearly visible at the top of each page, visitors are more likely to stay on the site. Plus, we highlight the Find Your Home button with a red callout around the text, further drawing attention. With additional call-to-action graphics that draw the eye in and direct visitors to important pages, people spend more time on the site, resulting in more leads and ultimately sales. Visitors even comment on how user-friendly the website is.
We’re proud to have worked with LifeStyle Home Builders to create an award-winning website. Through a user-friendly design that encourages people to stick around, along with clever use of keywords for Google searches and the ability for the company to go in and make changes on their own to update for new promotions and more, we’re on to a winning format. If your website isn’t generating the leads or capturing the attention of potential buyers, contact us and let us show you how we can help develop a FANtastic website and marketing plan to get you the attention you want.
Categorised in: Home Builder Marketing & Sales, Home Builder Websites, Meredith Communications News, Website Design
