About Aerzen USA
At Aerzen USA, they’ve stayed ahead of the curve for over 25 years by putting their people, the planet, and product offerings first. With an environmentally friendly approach to business, including a new state-of-the art 40,000 square foot green manufacturing building in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Aerzen offers their customers unsurpassed quality and value.
Founded in the United States in 1983, Aerzen USA manufactures positive displacement blowers, compressors and vacuum pumps for the power, petrochemical/plastics, food, wastewater treatment, and cement industries. Customers like Delta Airlines use their compressors to start their jet engines, and clients like General Mills use their blowers to push a product through the piping within their entire facility.
Aerzen’s special blowers and screw compressors have other unique applications—such as supplying 100% oil free air in environments where food and pharmaceutical products are being manufactured.
Aerzen USA is a wholly owned division of the German manufacturer, Aerzener Maschinenfabrik GmbH. Founded in 1864, Aerzener Maschinenfabrik is a recognized world leader in the production of rotary positive displacement machines.
Challenges: Providing a Better Experience for New and Existing Capital Equipment Customers Ralph Wilton, Marketing Manager for Aerzen USA, quickly discovered that their “customers – end users, engineers, plant managers and contractors – were no longer sitting down to read our ads in magazines or going to tradeshows.” If any one of them wanted to obtain more information about a compressor or blower, they fired-up their computer and went online. This shift from offline to online greatly impacted Aerzen’s business, and Mr. Wilton wanted to carry out the company’s mission of staying ahead of the curve. In order to make this a reality, he focused on constructing a website that would reach new and existing customers in an efficient way.
Aerzen’s original website basically consisted of a page that was taken from their parent company’s site. This placeholder site didn’t do Aerzen USA or their products justice for US buyers, especially since much of the content was in German. Mr. Wilton knew that there was no way that customers could understand or even locate the company and their products with such limited, non-descriptive information. The site detracted from the level of service that Aerzen could provide to prospects who wanted more buying information online—and ultimately, it held them back from achieving their full sales potential.
Aerzen USA needed to provide their existing and prospective customers with detailed product and service information in one central location so that they could start “sales conversations” with them, and Mr. Wilton set out to build a site that would do so. He sought to provide much more thorough descriptions of their products and applications, and easier ways for prospects to learn whether Aerzen’s products could meet their needs. In addition, he aimed to make Aerzen easily searchable, and to give customers ways to request additional information and even purchase equipment over the web. By elevating their level of online service in this way, Aerzen would ultimately boost orders.
The company also believed that a reporting tool to measure their results and return on investment (ROI) would be invaluable to future growth.
“It was extremely important for us to have a very robust website to drive traffic and create a lot of activity,” Mr. Wilton said. “But it was also pertinent to have a good reporting tool to understand the effectiveness of our programs, and ThomasNet brought all of this to the table.”
Solution: Searchable Content and RFQ/Direct Sales Platform As a former consultant to Aerzen, on the ad agency side, Mr. Wilton was brought onboard full-time. He immediately went to work to create a website that would attract the “right” customers. That’s when Mr. Wilton turned to ThomasNet. He had clients that had worked with ThomasNet in the past, and they all “raved” about ThomasNet’s offerings.
Upon meeting with a ThomasNet consultant, Mr. Wilton knew this was the best possible strategic move. ThomasNet’s online sales consultant and engineers not only had the industry knowledge and expertise, but they already understood Aerzen’s market niche and the highly specific needs of their customers. “It's a very vertical type of industry, and no one knows the industrial marketplace like ThomasNet,” added Mr. Wilton.
By combining extraordinary industry insight and the latest technology, ThomasNet’s Web Solutions team built Mr. Wilton a website that served as an around-the-clock salesperson. With ThomasNet’s Navigator platform, ThomasNet created an online catalog that featured their key product lines—blowers, compressors, vacuum pumps and vacuum boosters—in a strategic way that made it easy for plant managers, engineers and OEM professionals to search for and find what they needed, and stay engaged through the point of purchase. From clicking on a photo of a blower on the homepage, to a detailed description on the product page, to the line-level drill downs, the online catalog gave buyers multiple pathways to content and enabled Aerzen to replicate conversations that once took place over the phone online.
Even more, buyers could compare products, such as Aerzen’s V-Belts, side-by-side according to variables such as price, size and item number. ThomasNet structured Aerzen’s product information in a compelling, easy-to-use format that encouraged successive “calls to action” such as downloading specs, downloading PDFs, or completing requests for information or quotes. Buyers could even complete purchases using ThomasNet’s E-Commerce technology, and for the first time, Aerzen was able to accept payment online through major credit cards.
Results: User Sessions Jump to Over 40 Percent in Four Months When Aerzen USA’s website went live in January 2008, their new searchable online catalog put Aerzen in all of the right places—ultimately where their buyers would be looking for them. In fact, “we have seen many orders come in, and we’re satisfying the needs of our customers exponentially more thanks to ThomasNet,” noted Mr. Wilton. In the first few months of 2008 alone, the company sold $6,000 in parts ranging from $5-$100—this is a very impressive total considering they were literally “starting from zero” in this area.
Over 10 months, they also received 47 direct Request for Quotes (RFQ) from the site. This was a record for Aerzen. Some of these requests turned into sales from companies like Dupont, Holcim, Fluor and Cemex, averaging about $20,000.
In fact, prospective customers were so intrigued by the new site and product information that Aerzen’s user sessions went from 1,390 to 2,485 within four months, a 40 percent increase.
As a result of the robust content, Aerzen showed up in all the appropriate categories through the major search engines, which positioned them and enabled
qualified buyers to find them right away through detailed keyword searches. “Since we launched our ThomasNet-built online catalog, we were blown away by the amount of search engine optimization this type of program brought to life,” said Mr. Wilton. “With our new and more relevant content, prospects who typed what they were looking for into a search engine were quickly directed to Aerzen’s site, leading to even more web activity. Ultimately, prospects stayed on the site to continue searching, to send in an RFQ, or perhaps to make an order.
Reporting has made a huge impact on their success, as well. ThomasNet’s Web Traxs tool shows Mr. Wilton how the company’s “dollars are doing.” With Web Traxs, management is able to see the activity that is happening and if the program is providing the results they’re looking for. They can track numbers of monthly visitors, where they come from, what pages they view, how long they stay, and more. Mr. Wilton is able to say to management, “Here are results that we’re getting from our new web strategy, and we’re seeing an impressive return.” The tool is also very easy, quick and robust,” he added. Graphs and charts show everyone how orders, inquiries and sales are doing. “
From the company’s new website to their “green” mission, customers are saying, “this is the type of company that we want to do business with,” said Mr. Wilton. “We’re back on track for staying ahead of the curve, thanks to ThomasNet.”
