ApostleTech helps Eastwood Homes step up its marketing automation game
Eastwood Homes is a family-owned, privately held homebuilder that was founded in 1977. The company is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina and builds homes and communities in both North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. The company is growing and needed a more robust and streamlined platform for gathering customer information and utilizing data to implement more marketing automation tools to communicate and connect with customers. When the management team was searching for the best technology platform to fit their operation, they met with ApostleTech and found the answer. ApostleTech is currently working with the marketing and management teams at Eastwood Homes on a new CRM implementation that is built on Salesforce using ApostleTech’s HCP solution with a HubSpot integration for marketing automation.To learn more about the implementation process and the goals and objectives for Eastwood Homes, we sat down with the company’s Marketing Manager, Donna Varjabedian and Digital Marketing Specialist, Tara Whiteley. They offered great insight on the challenges they were facing – like many growing homebuilding companies – and what they plan to achieve when their CRM implementation is complete.
How did you come to work with ApostleTech to help enhance your marketing automation effort?
ApostleTech was recommended to us by MiTek Kova, the company that will handle the heavy lifting of our purchasing and estimating departments, as well as the contracting, designing, and building out of our homes. Our executive team spearheaded the search and then asked our marketing team to weigh in. We were excited when we learned what ApostleTech was able to do with their HCP CRM platform created with Salesforce and that they were certified partners with HubSpot and able to integrate the two. We started our search more than a year ago and have been working with the folks at ApostleTech for four or five months as we prepare to launch HCP, and we are glad we made the decision we did.
How is the implementation process going?
The ApostleTech team have been great partners and advisors throughout the process. They are extremely organized, outlining a clear step-by-step plan, which helps keep us on track. We have weekly meetings with our client manager and the development team to walk us through the action items they are working on and give us a weekly “To Do” list to get accomplished. They let us know what needs to be done, so we make sure we are getting them what they need to move forward. The collaborative process is working well. They are also very responsive, so when we have questions, they get answers to us quickly. We are cleansing our current database to build a clean list for HCP and HubSpot and working with development on the options for purchasing in Kova. This will work together with our customer interface on the website for our homebuyers. We have about 120 employees that will use the new system, and the ApostleTech team will work with us on training. We will start training two divisions at a time. Overall, the implementation process is going smoothly, and we are excited to get it fully up and running with everyone trained.
What are your overall goals for a new CRM system?
We completed a full redesign of our website in 2019 to enhance our customer interface and provide more virtual options. We were very fortunate to have this completed prior to the pandemic – it positioned us well to pivot and continue to connect and engage our customers. We knew we needed more capabilities for reporting and the ability to track traffic at our communities better and more efficiently. One of our goals was to move away from paper registration cards and to be able to gain easier access to the customer data to better understand the traffic coming in our doors and make decisions based on the information.
How will the implementation of CRM and HubSpot integration change how you are working now?
We build in many different cities, and we are offering three different products: single-family home communities, townhouses, and 55+ communities. Knowing more on traffic analysis and the demographics of who is coming through to tour is valuable information as we look at our land positions and decide what we are going to build. The HubSpot integration will allow us to create Email drip campaigns from HCP and generate some automated campaigns with our homeowners. We will also use our traffic and customer data to create messaging on our social media posts. Having access to the information will allow us to automate marketing more and to be more consistent. We will have better lists, with access to them more quickly and it’s going to allow us to work smarter and more efficiently. To learn more about Eastwood Homes and the homes and communities they build visit eastwoodhomes.com.If you are a homebuilder or construction company interested in learning how ApostleTech can help your team enhance its marketing automation capabilities and manage customer data, contact us today to learn more and request a demo.
