We designed a responsive website to provide Easylease with the mobile-friendly user experience it was seeking across all devices, while updating its brand image.
Project
Custom eCommerce Website
Industry
Financial Services
Technology
WordPress, .NET, SQL
Mobile is definitely a growing market for us. I expect it to be 40% (of our business) at some point soon. It is definitely heading in that direction so we need to be prepared.
President & CEO, Easylease Corp.
About Easylease Corp.
Easylease Corp. is a Canadian leasing and financing brokerage focused on making it easier for businesses to overcome cash flow and resource constraints to acquire the assets they need to grow. Since 1997, Easylease has built relationships with many of Canada’s top financing partners to deliver unprecedented leasing flexibility for its customers in a wide range of industry sectors.
The Challenge
When it comes to adopting technology, Easylease aims to lead the competition not follow. Increased demand for mobile-friendly forms and content prompted Easylease to make changes to its website to tap into growing mobile market.
Easylease recognized the importance of an online web presence very early and worked with Whitecap Canada to launch its first website in 1998. The company has continued to look for ways to lead its industry in the adoption of new technologies, including marketing websites, broker portals, e-commerce applications to securely and seamlessly connect with customers or vendors, and more recently providing a broker software solution for real-time access to customer data and provide quotes from their smartphones.
“We were always ahead of our competition in terms of the look, feel and functionality of our websites,” says David Carmichael, President and CEO, Easylease Corp. “We always ranked well in a Google search and we still do today because the competition was never really there before. That started to change as competitors started to pay attention to SEO and online so we knew we had to change too to stay ahead.”
Over the years, Easylease has worked with Whitecap to continue to evolve and adopt best practices online, eventually creating three different public facing sites to respond to new device usage, and two versions of their leasing application, in addition to custom software and databases operating in the back-end.
The move to a mobile-first strategy required expertise to be certain all these elements worked seamlessly together.
Carmichael knew the broker experience had to be optimized through the transition since his broker network provides close to 98% of Easylease’s 40 million in annual sales. He also knew he needed to make certain Easylease didn’t lose sales leads from search engines that had begun to reward mobile-friendly websites.
“We were always used to getting a lot of business from our high search rankings and then our competition started getting a little smarter. They started to develop better websites and were paying more attention to SEO so their ranking started to improve and our rankings suffered a little,” he said. “To compete, we knew we needed a new website that was optimized for all devices and was mobile-friendly.”
The Solution
Pushing the possibilities
Whitecap created a responsive website design to provide Easylease with the mobile-friendly user experience it was seeking, while updating its brand image for a consistent user experience across all devices. All of Easylease’s customer forms and online tables were re-recreated to ensure customers could easily view content, navigate the site and complete the data fields in from any device including smartphones.
The new responsive website was built on a WordPress framework that has been customized to provide backward compatibility with older browsers, tight integration with Easylease’s databases, compatibility with custom .net applications, and online form programs. The key was ensuring the user experience was completely seamless across every device, while ensuring the right information was captured, validated and forwarded to the appropriate back-end application and database in a dynamic way that was transparent to the users and their choice of devices. Easylease’s tables were also converted to an HTML5 format since traditional tables don’t reproduce on smaller devices or on a mobile format.
Mobile is really changing our business and helping us to grow.
Last year, 12.5% of website sessions originated on mobile devices. In 2015, the number of people accessing the site from a mobile device increased by more than 86%.
President & CEO, Easylease Corp.
“Mobile is definitely a growing market for us. I expect it to be 40% (of our business) at some point soon. It is definitely heading in that direction so we need to be prepared.”
“Our tech-savvy sales people love the new site and think it is the best now that they can access our site easily from their phones and have it work on conjunction with our mobile app,” says Carmichael. “Mobile is really changing our business and helping us to grow.”
The Results
Staying ahead of the competition
Since the launch of the new Responsive website, analytics show mobile sessions have increased to 19.96% of overall website traffic (which is up more than 86% from a year ago). Additionally, click through rates from mobile have reached 8.81%, and mobile device session duration is up 202%, showing that people coming to the site are staying.
“We are always thinking of new ideas and looking for ways to stay ahead of our competition. Our new responsive website gives us everything we need.” says Carmichael. Carmichael explains that as a business where offering similar services to the competition, he needs his company to differentiate itself. “Easylease does that by providing top-quality service, supported by technology that makes it easy for people to find and do business with them.”
A strong online presence
And it’s working. A new customer came to Easylease following an online search for commercial leasing companies. Working with an Easylease associate, the customer has already secured close to $1 million in lease financing to support their business.
“You can’t dismiss the importance of a strong online presence and high search results. It’s too important to ignore, and is a growing source of business opportunities,” says Carmichael. “Everyone has to make sure they have a good, professional online presence that is intuitive and easy to use. And, you have to make sure you’re getting results from search. I think a responsive web site is an important part of our growth strategy and certainly if we didn’t have it, our search numbers would struggle as a result.”