All American Fence Online Marketing Results

Posted on 22. Jul, 2010

My name is Dale Wingo, owner and lead installer for All American Fence Co., Inc. of Delaware.  In the seven years my company has been in business, there are a few important lessons I have learned about running a profitable fence company.

First, like many contracting companies, my company’s profitability relies on a high volume of customer leads to generate a consistent flow of customer jobs.

Second, I learned that my customers require a fair amount of information regarding fence materials, lead times, material durability, and previous job referrals before they are willing to sign a contract.

After all, they are spending a significant amount of money, and they want to be sure they are going to get what they pay for.  Finally, I learned that being both president and lead installer limits time for soliciting potential customers.  Therefore, I needed to figure out how to generate a larger volume of leads and provide customers all the information they needed without giving up valuable installation time.

This is where Chris Darling came in.  We signed a contract with her to redesign and maintain our company website last summer.  This was a difficult decision, because we were in a recession, business was down, finances were tight, and we just were not sure if the timing was right.  We questioned whether the return on investment was going to be enough to justify the expense.

Chris provided us with a lot of information about what she could do to increase our customer base.  After hearing everything that her company could offer us, we decided to go ahead and make the investment.

A year later, I can tell you the investment has paid off.  After only a couple of months, online estimate requests more than doubled and we have seen a consistent rate of new requests since that time.  Customer leads generated solely from the Internet have grown from a very small 8% to over 50%.

Time spent responding to simple customer questions has been reduced significantly, because many customer questions about fence designs, materials, and other installation questions can be answered by viewing the website and the gallery of previous jobs.

Most exciting has been the increase in the average number of customer leads that have turned into signed contracts.  For six years, our turnaround ratio was fairly consistent, about 50%.  Over the last year, we have seen this percentage increase to 75%.

We believe the increased percentage is largely attributed to the fact that we are now able to respond to customer requests more efficiently and effectively, because of the redesigned website.

The recession last year threatened the survival of many small companies.  Like many other businesses, our company was taking a hit.  We are thrilled that we were able to report a profit last year when so many other small businesses took a loss or simply didn’t survive the economy.

This year, we are off to a great start, and we know that we can attribute a lot of our success to the increased number of customer leads and customer contracts generated as a result of people searching the website and finding us!  We are so thankful for everything Chris Darling does to help our business grow!

– Dale Wingo, Owner  All American Fence Company 302-530-8155