The AWS Blog

I haven’t written too many of these Case Study type posts in the past, but we’ve had some incredible success stories over the last few months, so you may see more and more of them!

We completed the development of the ItIsPossible.info website for Lombardo Homes around two months ago, and we’ve collected enough data about it to finally put together a formal case study (available here as a PDF).

This is a pretty exceptional website, so I’ll give you some background information on it (beyond just the normal webdev process stuff). Anyone around Michigan knows that the housing market in Southeast Michigan is in a big slump. If you’ve got a house that you’re trying to sell right now, you’re pretty much stuck. The marketing team at Lombardo, led by Bob Moesta, saw this whole down-turn as a solvable problem, and an opportunity to do something unique.

They came to us with both a marketing concept, and an idea for a website, and asked us to help them execute it. The concept revolved around the idea of “people feeling stuck, and unable to move into a new home.” Time and time again, the Lombardo sales staff would encounter people that were absolutely positive that there was no way that they could afford a new home, and time after time, Lombardo was able to reach back into their team (consisting of Realtors from Real Estate One, and Mortgage Bankers from Countrywide) and find a solution to make the move possible.

The concept for the website was straightforward: People are feeling trapped. We need to let them know that we can help, and provide a comfortable place for them to go to get answers. They were approaching this problem in a very Web 2.0 way (community-centric as opposed to sales-centric), and I don’t think they even knew to call it that at the time!

The website, which was architected by Lombardo and Awecomm and designed and developed by the Awecomm dev team, accomplishes the goal. Visitors enter information about their current situation and are presented with a conversational story about their challenges. At that point, it’s all about what the next steps are and how they can move forward (visit the site and try it out for yourself!).

The site was also backed up by offline media such as radio and Comcast Video-on-Demand (the videos are available on YouTube here, and here).

At this point the results are in. The site has produced an online conversion rate of over 23% in June of 2007, and of those conversions, approximately 20% have successfully purchased new homes! The site also enjoys a homepage bounce rate of under 25%.

The site was architected using Awecomm’s Deep Discovery process (stay tuned for more to come on that - we’ll be unveiling formal details shortly).