CASE STUDY - CONSCIOUS COMMERCE

Published on the Duda Blog: https://www.dudamobile.com/case-study/conscious-commerce

• Brought down website costs from $3,000 to $300 per site and reduced development time by 75 percent, allowing Conscious Commerce to focus clients’ budgets on advertising and other services to improve ROI.
• Using website personalization as a key differentiator to set themselves apart from other agencies and close more clients.
• Easily integrating client websites with multiple other services, including Constant Contact, via Duda’s custom HTML widget and Developer Mode.

After years of providing a broad range of clients across the United States and Canada with a variety of integrated marketing service, CEO of Conscious Commerce Brandon Klayman had had it with WordPress. “I really like using open source platforms, but there is just too much baggage that comes with WordPress,” he says. “Performance is an issue, getting the hosting right is a pain, and there are way too many security problems.”

Coupled with WordPress’ requirement for in-depth development work, and a desire to spend less time working on his clients’ websites and more time managing their online presences, Klayman decided it was time to make a change.

When Conscious Commerce began using the Duda platform, web design was not their main focus — the agency’s lead service offerings were actually Constant Contact and email marketing. However, this presented a key issue, as his clients still required a website to effectively run marketing campaigns.

“We were spending all of our time, and our clients’ budgets, on fixing WordPress websites,” says Klayman. “This meant that even though we presented ourselves to people as chiefly an outbound marketing agency, we ended up dedicating way too much of our time just trying to make sure everything was good with a client’s site.”

Klayman decided to use the Duda platform to build sites for his clients because of a variety of unique conversion-driving site features, its reliable hosting, and a strong record of site security.

A huge reduction in development and design time was also a key factor in choosing to make the switch. Klayman says his average web page build time has been cut from one hour using WordPress to 15 minutes with Duda.

“Even though we now pretty much exclusively build sites on Duda, we occasionally still get a client who specifically asks for WordPress,” he says. “I always tell them we can do it, but add an extra zero to the price and number of days it will take to build.”

These changes in Klayman’s service offering triggered an entire reimagining of how he marketed Conscious Commerce to potential clients.

Duda enabled Klayman to easily turn web design into the backbone of his agency, while still offering other marketing service. This is because the platform’s flexible site editor contains tons of business-driving features (e.g. the ability to send a Contact Form submission to a third-party service like Constant Contact), and still allows for HTML embeds directly on a site.

Klayman was even able to provide his clients with a Conscious Commerce-branded version of the editor so they could take care of some site management themselves.

For his clients, this was the perfect mix of affordability and powerful tools, and this made for a much more effective sales pitch.

“We’d tell our clients, ‘You’re going to get a beautiful secure website, it’ll go live very quickly and be easy for you to edit, and we’re going to spend the rest of our time and your budget on outbound marketing,’” he says.

For Klayman, there was one last big benefit that came with switching to Duda — website personalization. This highly effective marketing tool enables an agency to create a higher conversion rate on their clients’ websites, without having to increase the amount of traffic it receives. It has only recently been made available within the budgets of most SMBs, requires little-to-no knowledge of code, and was something Klayman had never offered his clients before.

“We make it very clear to our clients that one of the things that sets our service apart is the ability to offer an individualized visitor experience according to time of day, user location, number of previous visits to the site and more that increase the chance of getting a potential customer to take some kind of desired action,” he says.

Klayman also points to the statistic that say only 30 percent of all websites use some form of website personalization, but most of those websites don’t belong to small businesses.
“Most SMBs are not aware that this is even an option for them, so when we get a chance to show them what we can do with the platform, they’re blown away,” he says.

Conscious Commerce now maintains a book of more than 60 loyal clients with sites on the Duda platform, a dozen of which pay a premium for eCommerce. Having achieved a 75 percent reduction in website-build times, Klayman has been able to bring on more team members dedicated to coaching clients through their marketing efforts online, as opposed to spending money on costly web developers. This has resulted in Conscious Commerce becoming a truly high-touch marketing agency that has refocused their efforts to maximize the success of both their agency and the people they serve.