Hanley Wood uses SundaySky for its ePlans.com site to bring blueprints and drawings to life through video, differentiating itself in the market.
Since 1976, Hanley Wood has focused exclusively on North America's residential and commercial construction industry. Through its four divisions, Hanley Wood develops magazines, websites, e-newsletters, exhibitions and conferences, as well as custom marketing and data services that support builders' critical information needs. In its consumer division, Hanley Wood sells architectural blueprints for houses via its ePlans.com website.
Floor plans and home designs are just the beginning of planning a new home. All the data points and one-dimensional drawings are architecturally important, but for a future homeowner trying to envision a finished house, they represent only part of the process. Hanley Wood wanted the means to bring these drawings to life through ePlans and use the website to differentiate itself in the market.
“The idea of a consumer being able to do a video walk-through of a finished home or simulated home was really appealing,” said Dan Goodman, director of e-commerce at Hanley Wood. “But we thought it would be cost-prohibitive to create video for anything more than a small fraction of our inventory.”
Despite these initial concerns, Hanley Wood continued pursuing a cost-effective video solution, driven in part by compelling market research. Survey information consistently showed site visitors wanted video that could translate something abstract, like a drawing, into a clear representation of the final product.
“As a company, we were intrigued by the concept of automated content generation and engaging video with which customers could interact,” said Goodman. “Home building is a process that starts with a drawing and concludes with a finished home. We wanted to showcase decorated, lived-in homes, so consumers could picture their lives in these plans.”
In April 2010, Hanley Wood began working with SundaySky – the only company who could fulfill its video vision. ePlans launched its video offering in August of that year and now has videos for most of its 27,000 blueprints available online.
Following a short ramp-up period during which SundaySky learned Hanley Wood’s brand guidelines and implemented the tailor-made video template, Hanley Wood automatically generated videos for its entire catalog of home plans. Today the company automatically updated existing plans and generates videos for new plans.
“It was a great experience working with the SundaySky launch team. We didn’t want to rush our scriptwriting or image selection, but once we felt comfortable with all the choices, SundaySky worked quickly to bring them to life. And when we told them we wanted to see several image and script changes across the catalog, SundaySky made it happen within two or three weeks,” said Goodman.
Today, ePlans has more than 25,000 videos indexed by Google, and common searches such as “master suite house plan,” “house plan classic Georgian” and “house plans with great room” lead visitors to Hanley Wood videos. The market has a long purchase cycle, but ePlans’ A/B testing shows evidence that videos increase customer engagement. Test results further indicate that visitors who see video available on the page are more likely to take one or two important actions toward conversion.
The video option sets Hanley Wood apart in its market, and that has made a difference. After deploying SundaySky’s video solution, ePlans saw a 21 percent lift in saved plans and an 11 percent increase in site registrations.
In order to improve the user experience even further, ePlans has recently expanded the presence of videos, and now SundaySky automatically generated videos appear not only in every product page, but also in the internal search results pages.
ePlans is one of 12 Hanley Wood house plans websites, and the company is evaluating the option of adding video to several more of those Web properties. The success of the initial SundaySky launch is fueling other video-based plans as well. Among the possibilities under consideration are making video available via additional channels, such as e-mail and mobile devices.
“Video is increasing the ease with which consumers find ePlans and the rate at which they convert,” said Goodman. “Our initial assumptions about the power of video have proven true, and SundaySky’s automatic generation of dynamic video makes it a viable, long-term e-commerce option for us.”
