From reducing the build-up of scale and scum, to better tasting water, the benefits of water softeners are endless. As the UK’s number one water softener, Harvey Water Softeners (Harvey’s) are determined to eliminate the damaging effects of hard water on households across the UK.

A key part of Harvey’s sales cycle is lead capture and onward nurturing. A lead is an inbound enquiry via their website form, quotation request or direct call, which is then qualified by their sales team.

Noticing a decline in lead quality, they challenged RocketMill with driving leads with a higher propensity to convert, setting the following targets:

• Increase lead to win ratio from paid search by 20%
• Increase lead to win ratio from paid social by 30%

To achieve this, a change in strategy was required. We needed to pivot to focus on quality rather than quantity.

With leads flowing directly into Harvey’s Salesforce CRM system, the first step was to integrate this into Google Ads. This  provided us with a view of conversion rates between each stage of the funnel,  allowing us to assign values to a lead based on their source. Depending on the strength of the lead (i.e. did the lead come via a direct call or a quotation request?), we then activated value based bidding which optimises towards users who are more likely to buy a water softener.

From there, we altered the lead form process on both Google Ads and Meta. We changed a setting in both platforms so they were optimising to quality rather than quantity, as well as adding in more form fields, knowing this would increase drop off but would ensure the user was committed to the process, to further qualify a potential customer.

In order to strike a balance between direct response and brand building, we also launched a brand campaign across multiple channels to maintain awareness within a broader audience. In parallel to our sales activation drive, we launched ‘The Horrors of Hard Water’ a full funnel creative strategy which focused on dramatising the negative impacts of hard water.

In just four months, the pivot in our strategy to focus on quality over quantity proved transformational:  

• • 40% increase in lead to opportunity won from paid search
  • 57% increase in lead to opportunity won from paid social 
• This equates to a 50% increase in revenue from both paid search and paid social.

In addition, our new brand campaign ‘The Horrors of Hard Water’ performed well and has been woven into Harvey’s visual identity across their digital estate.

• +7%increase in brand recall
• +1.5% increase in purchase intent

“RocketMill’s knowledge of paid media platforms was essential to ensuring our paid channels were still delivering the business value required from our investment in them. Pivoting strategy to focus on lead quality has saved our sales team hours of time previously spent validating leads whilst also increasing month-on-month revenues too.”