“How is this going to sell more flooring?”
That’s the first question the Engineered Floors® marketing team asks themselves whenever they’re considering a new tool or partnership. As a large-scale manufacturer that serves multiple markets — from residential, to home builders, to multifamily housing, to commercial — that question, naturally, is one of the main drivers for a lot of their business decisions.
And in 2018, when they were expanding their selection of products to include hard surfaces, it ultimately led them to Roomvo.
More confident purchasing decisions
Buying flooring isn’t a decision shoppers take lightly.
Nor should they.
“A lot of times, that’s a forever decision,” said Baylee Johnson, graphic designer at Engineered Floors. “A forever decision that costs a lot of money.”
Walking into a showroom, therefore, can be intimidating for a lot of shoppers. Not to mention: the process of choosing and installing flooring can be a rather tedious one, especially when you consider the traditional method of bringing home physical samples to select a specific product. As a result, the purchasing experience hasn’t always been an easy one for customers or retailers.
Engineered Floors wanted to find a way to give end consumers more confidence in their purchasing decisions and, at the same time, give retailers more confidence to make a sale.
Roomvo helped them achieve both goals.
Using Roomvo’s proprietary visualization technology, Engineered Floors introduced the EF-EYE Visualizer® for their EF Hard Surfaces brand launch, allowing consumers to simply upload a photo from their mobile device or computer and preview a product in their own space with the click of a button – almost as if they were viewing it in real life. And they could do it all from the comfort of their own home.
Before the new samples had even been delivered to retail locations, a process that can take up to three months, consumers had already started interacting with products in the room visualizer and coming into stores asking where they could buy them.
“We’ve always felt as though Roomvo’s visualizer is the best in the industry,” said Lauryn Little, digital marketing manager at Engineered Floors. “Obviously, we want to push our end consumers to put our products into their space. That leads to more confidence in their purchase. And it also provides confidence to our retailers as it’s a proven tool to help them sell products in the showroom.”
Innovation reinvented
The tagline at Engineered Floors is: “Innovation Reinvented.”
It means a lot of different things to the company — starting with the manufacturing process, where they use the latest technology, machinery, and a proprietary brand of solution-dyed fiber called PureColor® to create their synthetic fiber carpets. Ultimately, their goal is to push boundaries and find innovative ways to create and distribute the highest quality products.
So, finding a visualization solution that aligned with that goal was paramount.
Engineered Floors partnered with Roomvo in 2018, shortly after the visualization platform was formed. And part of the reason they felt comfortable in doing so, according to Little, was Roomvo’s ability and willingness to continuously expand on its own technology.
“Roomvo is constantly trying to better its technology and refine it for the betterment of showing our products,” Little said. “We’re beta testing a comparison feature right now on our visualizer, and we also have the favourites feature. They are persistently adding features that only improve the experience for the end consumer. We love to be partnered with that level of drive because we never want to get to a point where we feel like we’re stuck and not growing.”
“Whenever we’ve been talking about adding in different features, Roomvo is the first to say, ‘Hey, let’s test it out, let’s try this, let’s try that,’” Johnson added. “I think we’re kind of breaking new waters in the industry because we’re not targeting one sex, we’re not targeting one age group, we’re targeting everyone. We’re targeting home-makers, mom and pop shops, commercial buyers, we’re targeting the full spectrum. I feel like Roomvo brings the full spectrum to the table where maybe other programs don’t.”
In Roomvo, Engineered Floors saw a room visualizer that could grow with their business.
And that has proved to be the case.
Building brand awareness
In the first six months following the EF Hard Surfaces brand launch, Engineered Floors found that their new products had been viewed 200,000 times in the room visualizer, or 3x more than the previous viewing rate. To leverage these results, they subsequently launched the visualizer across their various brands to get all of their products in front of a larger audience.
Since then, they’ve doubled down even further.
In 2019, Engineered Floors joined the Roomvo Partner Program, which gave all their retail partners the ability to add the Roomvo visualization widget (Roomvo Assistant) directly to their websites, free of charge. For Engineered Floors, this meant far more visibility for their products — a 42% increase in user sessions and 35% increase in product views, to be precise.
For Engineered Floors, and their retail partners, it also meant more sales.
That’s the case in Cumming, GA, where Three Little Dogs Interiors now benefit from quicker shopper decisions and a much-improved closing rate. “With the visualizer, we don’t waste time trying to find installation pictures or searching for pictures online,” said owner Leslie Eversole. “We go right to the flooring the customer likes and see a full view of the product in whichever kind of room they are wanting.”
Meanwhile, Engineered Floors has been able to increase its brand awareness without drawing shoppers away from the retailer’s site.
“For us, it’s very important to be able to push that brand awareness,” Little said. “And for retailers, it’s really great to show them that they can show our products on their website without leading consumers away from it … because you never want to open a link that takes you away from your website. They’ve really honed in on using that widget to close their sales and, again, build confidence with their end consumers that come into the showroom.”
Nowadays, almost 2,000 Engineered Floors retailers have Roomvo Assistant set up on their websites. And for stores that need the complete solution, Engineered Floors and Roomvo can provide subsidized, custom-designed websites with the visualizer built-in (Roomvo Sites) as an added benefit of the partner program.
“For retailers especially, who are our main customers, it really changed the game,” Little said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic only underscored the need to offer such tools that limit physical contact.
At the end of the day, retailers have most of the day-to-day interactions with end consumers. Not manufacturers. So, by arming them with an industry-leading room visualizer, Engineered Floors knows they’ve done their part to help shoppers make that forever decision a little less daunting.
“Even if someone isn’t there to hold their hand,” Johnson said, “this program is us holding their hand in that process.”
Read the full case study to learn more about Roomvo and the benefits of room visualization for manufacturers and retailers alike.
