I’m delighted to have secured an interview with probably the most switched on internet marketer in our industry. Dave is a Director of Everseal Ltd, and the guy behind the hugely successful DIY conservatory website ConservatoryLand.com.
How did you get involved with conservatories and double glazing?
It all started back in 1986 when I was 18 years old. My dad had already been the Regional Sales Manager for a double glazing company called Systems 80 for a number of years. You may remember them, they occupied the premises that Coldseal eventually took over in Alfreton.
I also got a job with Systems 80 and worked in their showroom in Sutton in Ashfield for a couple of years.
Then in 1988, my dad decided he wanted to start his own company and employed me to sort out the administration side of things. I remember writing my own computer program, custom designed to handle customer order details and sales commissions. This is when Everseal was formed.
Tell me a bit about your company and what it does?
We manufacture all our own products, windows, doors, patios, bi-fold doors and conservatory roofs using the Eurocell system for both the frames and roofs.
We have premises that combine our frame fabrication factory with our main offices and separate premises across the road from there consisting of a row of five units which combines our roof fabrication factory with our ground floor and first floor showrooms.
We are a retail company although we do a small amount of trade that comes our way by chance. We do not market for trade work but we do appreciate it and are competitive. It is an additional bonus for us.
We have a domestic sales operation selling conservatories, windows, and fascias which covers Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. These are the areas in which we send out our sales people and provide a full installation service for our products.
We have a retail DIY conservatory sales operation covering the whole of the UK where we manufacture and deliver to our customers for self-assembly – mail order conservatories if you like.
Conservatories now form around 80% of our business and we currently manufacture over 800 of them per year for our retail customers.
We put a lot of time, effort and resources in to our customer care policies and achieve an exceptionally high rate of customer satisfaction which of course results in plenty of recommendations for us. I view the money that we spend on this as just another marketing cost.
What are Eurocell like as a supplier?
Eurocell are great.
Their service and technical support can only be described as first class. Their PVCu products, in my own personal opinion are one of the best in the industry, both for quality of material and visual appearance.
They also have an effective product development policy which helps us stay ahead of our competition.
As you are probably aware, I’m impressed with ConservatoryLand’s Google position for ‘conservatories’. How did you get to that number one spot and stay there?
Well Matthew that is the million dollar question and the answer to which I am sure everyone would just love to know.
If I had an exact formula for this, I would be selling my SEO services to all industries and become incredibly wealthy very quickly.
I guess I just picked the right people for the job. We have a great team of SEO guys and I spend a lot of my own personal time creating relevant content to help it along.
As you know Matthew, at the time of this interview, Conservatory Outlet are at number two which is also an incredible achievement so you must be doing all the right things.
What proportion of your business is generated from your website?
Around a third of our business is currently generated from our website and online campaigns as I consider it to be bad business practice to have all our eggs in one basket. What if we drop off the face of Google? There are no guarantees. And what if the internet goes down for a while for some reason? You never know, it could happen.
Further, although there are really no limits with organic search enquiries, considering the number of keywords and search phrases out there, short, medium, long-tail search terms etc, it is a slow and long term investment in both time and money but you need the business now.
As you will have seen, we top up our online campaigns with additional PPC as I know you do but there is a budget threshold with this where it can become no more effective than traditional media advertising, even less effective if you take it too far.
How do you intend to develop your online presence in the future?
That is a difficult question to answer as the internet and technology changes and develops at an astounding rate and you’ve got to be on the ball to keep up with it, else you get left behind.
I read articles about this sometimes, such as Google changing their search ranking policies and testing services such as local search results which can be a disadvantage to national suppliers, yet an advantage to local suppliers, whatever their industry sector.
Although Google is not the only search engine out there, it easily accounts for the majority of internet searches, which is why I always refer it, they are incredibly powerful.
My answer to your question is that I don’t really know because I don’t know what future developments and changes are going to happen.
I intend to adapt to changes in accordance with any future technological developments and changing internet trends that occur, no matter what they are.
Although I participate in social media, I’m still unsure how much potential this has for our retail market (one-off, one-time sales) and suspect that it works better for some industries than others.
I think about social media a lot but I am still struggling to see how my retail company can benefit much from Twitter and Facebook for some reason, although I do believe you should be on those sites just to be seen to be on those sites if nothing else.
It can be fun and I could pick up the odd sale but I wouldn’t expect it to increase our turnover by any meaningful percentage unless we can get a few million UK followers or friends on there.
How do you see the market for DIY conservatories developing over the coming years?
I think there will always be a market in the UK for DIY conservatories, just as there will for fully installed conservatories.
The DIY conservatory market is far from an easy one and I think it could become even more difficult when affected by changes in government legislation such as building regulation requirements for every conservatory, no matter what size or type? Obviously this would make the idea of a DIY conservatory less appealing to some consumers.
On the positive side, the more difficult it becomes, the less companies will succeed with it and therefore less competition for us, so I wouldn’t expect it to be any detriment to our business as there are always consumers that are prepared to do a bit themselves to save a lot of money. It could even be beneficial; it’s swings and roundabouts really.
For more information visit: http://www.conservatoryland.com/
