Legendary Boat Brand Returns to the Top

Wellcraft Boat Brand Returns to the Top

Known best for its deep-V hulls in the 1970s and the iconic Scarab offshore boats of the 1980s, Wellcraft owners have trusted this brand for over 60 years.

But today is about this great brand’s future with a special shout-out to the Wellcraft team that brought back this legend — complete with new boats, a newly branded website and a digital marketing campaign.

For over five years, CQL has watched this team patiently planning to surge forward. Trust us when we say this has not been easy. Wellcraft has faced some significant challenges and technology gaps as they worked to combat a shrinking market. And they were not alone; the entire marine industry has weathered some difficult times. Today, only the best brands are still in the fight.

But that was then and this is now.

We see the launch of www.wellcraft.com as a bit of a ‘coming-out’ party as they introduce an entirely new set of boats for 2016. With nine boats coming and a focus on winning the fishing market, Wellcraft knew this was their moment.

Inside the business, the Global Marketing team for Wellcraft was feeling the wind at their back because of the recent acquisition by Beneteau, a premium boat builder based in France. We clearly remember the call from the team in early 2015…

“It’s time.”

Working with the global marketing team, the CQL strategists, UX designers, and software engineers started planning new, state-of-the-art websites for each of the four brands, starting with Wellcraft. These would require a single Content Management System (CMS), common across the sites, and a Product Information Management solution (PIM).

(Look for future blogs on the PIM and CMS technologies that drive this enterprise.)

The core of the experience design was to provide the boater the ability to easily choose and customize the boat of their dreams, and share their wish list with Wellcraft’s global network of dealers.

But this is just a beachhead; there are ambitious goals in 2016 centered around a powerful, integrated, omni-channel marketing plan. This will be a combination of website, email, event, digital marketing, social media, and print initiatives all carefully constructed and controlled to deliver qualified, valuable traffic and leads. Boaters are seeing impactful, relevant brand and product messaging that is integrated in to every part of their experience. (You can expect to see a second brand launching soon, another part of the unfolding strategic vision.)

The results are already measurable.

In the first ten days of January, site traffic is up and the all important ‘leads-to-dealers’ metric is up triple digits. This is also important because the dealers are receiving information about what boat, color, engine, packages and options the customer wants to purchase.

In addition to lead generation, the Wellcraft site has seen increases in raw traffic — a double digit increase in average session time and page views per session are up as well.

These improvements are all visible because of the analytics engine that allows the customer to gain critical insights to consumer behavior. For the first time, they can see what every visitor looks at from boats models, to colors, to engines, to packages and send them to their local dealership. This data will be folded into business decisions going forward, creating better products and messages based on empirical data drawn from site visitors.

Make sure you subscribe to our blog to hear more about the Product Information Management System and the Content Management System that drives this enterprise forward.