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Introducing Project Darwin
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uly 2017 marks the fifth anniversary of our current Barratt Homes and David Wilson Homes websites. These along with our more recent Barratt London website - are key to driving our sales success. With over 90% of our advertising taking place digitally through means such as email, and on property websites including Rightmove, our websites receive more than 8.5 million visits and generate over 225,000 sales leads a year. More and more people consuming information ‘on the move’ through mobile devices, and customers’ expectations have vastly increased over the last few years. People expect to find what they want, where they want it and when they want it. In order to keep up with continuous changes to technology, Group Sales and Marketing are developing our customer facing websites, with a keen eye on increasing conversions, improving lead quality and creating an online end-to-end Customer Journey. This will both support customers throughout the buying process and give them easy access to relevant and helpful information once they have moved in. The project will be managed by James Wallace, Group Head of Digital, Media and Analysis and run by Shane Lightowler and Leonie Baxter from Group Marketing, with specialist IT support from Andrew Sparrow and Adrian Forbes. In order to take us to the next level and to continue to be digital leaders in our industry, we need to invest in the technology to support us. It is this notion of our digital evolution that inspired the project name, Darwin, after the Victorian scientist who developed the theory of evolution. Over
the next twelve months, the team will be developing and rolling out a new content management system (CMS) which will allow our Group and Divisional Marketing teams to provide more personalised, targeted and engaging content to our website visitors. This will allow us to generate better quality leads, which in turn, will support our sales targets. As a key system used by marketing teams across the Group, it is fundamental that we build and deploy a system that meets the needs of our Marketing teams. We’ve already started to work with a number of divisional marketing teams and have set up a User Forum who will support the project team throughout the system’s development. But more than that, this is a business-wide project, changing how our data is used to target prospective customers, from plot positioning, room dimensions and specific plot details, through to pricing, affordability and enablers to support purchases. It is important that the whole business is on board to support our advancements into a new digital space. Keep up to date with Project Darwin through OurPlace and Foundations.
Project Darwin at a glance: • Introduction of personalised custom er web journeys • Content tailored to a customer’s locatio n • Website experienc es tailored by device • A new system for Divisional Marketing teams
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