How The Garden Room Guide Increased Engagement By 19.16%

+19.16%
advertiser referrals
The Problem
The Garden Room Guide visitors were struggling to find their perfect garden room or modular home office.
What Helped
RightMessage's CTA Funnels deliver a fully personalized quiz that routes new visitors to a fully custom opt-in form or resource.
The Payoff
Almost a 20% increase in advertiser referrals (their primary KPI), along with an 11% increase in time-on-site, and substantial decrease in support emails.

One of the most common uses for RightMessage is to welcome new visitors, find out a bit about who they are, and get them to where they need to be.

Today, we’d like to introduce you to The Garden Room Guide.

The Garden Room Guide website

For the last few months, they’ve been using RightMessage to guide their website visitors. In this case study, we’ll show you exactly how they’ve reduced email support overhead, significantly increased average time-on-site, and – most importantly to them – increased referral traffic to advertiser websites by 19.2% (this is the KPI they were hoping to influence most)!

The Challenge: Figuring out pricing

In need of a garden room? The Garden Room Guide is your go-to resource.

Finding the perfect product for you… well, that an be pretty challenging. There’s a lot of information to sift through.

Depending on where you live, how big your property is, and how big the building you’re looking for, it’s easy to find yourself down a rabbit hole of information.

The fix? Emailing the The Garden Room Guide, of course!

”In the four weeks prior to adding the [RightMessage] calculator, we had 146 emails asking about price. Even with pre-written text and a spreadsheet to refer to, we were spending at least 5 mins replying to each email.

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

This was not only taking a lot of time, but it also introduced a significant amount of friction.

Few have the patience to write out an inquiry email, and even fewer want to sit around waiting for a response to a seemingly straightforward question.

The Garden Room Guide was keen to fix this, and to retire the simple calculator they were using:

”For a couple of years, we had a slider calculator widget on The Garden Room Guide that gave a price range based on the size of the garden room. This gave a very crude price when, in reality, there are so many variables that affect the price.

I was listening to an episode of Smart Passive Income, where they were talking about quiz calculators as a lead magnet. After looking at this, I thought I could do this with my RightMessage account!”

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

The Solution: A fully personalized on-site quiz

Jo and the team at The Garden Room Guide decided to use RightMessage to create a fully personalized quiz that would ask a handful of questions to new visitors, and then route them to a specific lead magnet or resource.

While other quiz or chatbot software exists, RightMessage was the right choice because:

  1. While the quiz could be embedded on a specific page, it could also be unobtrusively shown around the website (i.e. in popups)
  2. It wouldn’t ask questions that were answered previously, like during a previous website session
  3. Answers would synchronize immediately to their email database (ConvertKit)
  4. Personalized opt-in forms and other calls-to-action (CTAs) could be shown based on how someone answered

Beyond being able to tailor CTAs to different visitors, the team also wanted to use the data they collected to better segment their email list, along with getting a better big picture understanding of exactly what their audience is looking for.

”Via the questions we are asking, we are gaining some valuable insight into the current needs of the market. For instance, we are surprised at the sizes of buildings people are after; they are all quite big! The answers also give valuable insight as to the educational content we need to create in the future.

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

The Result: more engagement, more advertiser referrals, less support

The team added RightMessage to their website during their slow season: autumn and winter.

While traffic doesn’t entirely go away during this period, historically their business does face a bit of a seasonal cliff. They weren’t really expecting miracles with RightMessage – at least not yet.

However, almost immediately they started to see results. Here’s Jo:

”Perhaps, for us, the key metric is an increase in readers leaving our site to go to one of our advertiser’s sites.

Historically October to the beginning of January is the fallow period for the garden room market. Over the last ten years, we have seen a consistent drop in click-through month by month Oct to Dec. This year, even in a buoyant market because of the boom in home working as a result of COVID-19, we saw the seasonal decline start in late September.

What is startling is that in November, with the RightMessage quiz calculator in place advertiser click-through actually increased compared to October, which is unheard of! Advertiser click-through in November was up 19.16% in October. Other than the cost calculator, there is no change to the site we can attribute this too.”

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

And because quiz results “stick” after answering (rather than just showing a result and that being it), visitors to the website end up with a better on-site experience after they’ve completed the quiz, which has overall increased time-on-site:

”Time on site in the period the calculator has been live has increased by 11.81%. We can’t see any other factor that accounts for this, only the calculator.”

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

And, finally, giving people a self-serve way to figure out their garden room pricing has led to less email, freeing up the team to work on the things that matter most (like forging deals with new advertisers and getting more visitors to the website):

”The reduction in emails hitting our inbox about guide prices is marked. In the four weeks prior to adding the calculator, we had 146 emails asking about price. Even with pre-written text and a spreadsheet to refer to, we were spending at least 5 mins replying to each email. In the last four weeks, we have had 13 such emails. So, this has saved us about 11 hours - WOW!

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

What’s next for The Garden Room Guide

At RightMessage, there’s nothing that makes us happier than seeing our product being used to deliver wins to our direct customers (less email support, more advertiser referral traffic) and wins to their customers.

We love seeing what The Garden Room Guide team was able to quickly put together – and we know this is just the start for them.

”I am so full of ideas to use RM to answer other types of questions, without having them hit our inbox. We need to use the time we are saving on pricing questions to implement them!”

– Jo Berrington, The Garden Room Guide

Beyond just using our CTA Funnels to build out even more quiz calculators, the team will also continue using our two-way integrations with their ConvertKit account to deliver additional questions and content to returning visitors.

Ultimately, their visitors want to be catered to: “Here’s what I’m looking for, what’s best for me?”

With RightMessage, much of this is being automated now. And through the data collected about who someone is and what they need, The Garden Room Guide’s website can (and increasingly is) be a little more relevant, and a bit more niche, for every single visitor.