Napoleon: Fireplaces

The Client

The largest privately-owned manufacturer of grills, fireplaces, and gas furnaces in North America, Napoleon is based in Ontario. The company was founded in 1976 and employs more than 1,600 staff worldwide.

The Situation

Because Napoleon offers three primary product lines (fireplaces, grills, and heating/cooling) in dozens of markets across the globe, this has historically created a fragmented user experience and resulted in disconnected marketing and customer-facing efforts. As part of a three-year digital strategy, Napoleon wanted to create a foundational digital framework upon which customer experience, personalized marketing, and product integration would be built. 

After integrating its Grills product line into the framework, Napoleon wanted to continue with the integration of its Fireplace division. Specifically, the company wanted to: 

• continue to expand and evolve the digital framework using the content management system to incorporate the Fireplaces division and all associated regions and languages;
• continue to improve the online customer experience to match other channels;
• improve the quality of product information and customer information management;
• deliver a new Fireplaces site that was fully responsive and mobile-friendly;
• allow for scalability with personalization to feed marketing and target content; and
• integrate into the site search structure to make content more searchable, and results more user-friendly.

The Challenge

The Napoleon team supported and maintained dozens of distinct web properties relating to Napoleon’s product lines marketed in different countries and languages, all of which were built on different technologies. Additionally, within the Fireplaces division, there were numerous ongoing challenges, including:

• many one-off web properties require a large level of effort to support;
• a lack of brand consistency between web properties;
• a lack of online functionality in comparison to the Grills property; and
• fragmented product information creating missed opportunities for marketing tactics to support sales follow-through and customer service.

The Solution

Working with Digital Echidna, the new site is built on Drupal 8 and also uses Acquia Personalization, which allows Napoleon's marketers to create more unified content and serve targeted, personalized marketing campaigns to site visitors. Additionally, IP and regionalization deliver in-context, personalized experiences across several different languages and regions, and Lingotek integration provides a multilingual site, allowing for an unlimited number of languages, including manually translated content.

The new site integrates with product information management (PIM) system Salsify to automate product data update and with Bazaarvoice to pull in reviews and ratings for Napoleon products. SOLR provides subsite-specific search, department-specific search, advanced facets and custom facets, including AJAX slider facets, for a total of six search views.

The site uses one megamenu combined with a responsive menu — which provides a different menu per region and department, IP geolocation and redirects based on IP — providing a much more relevant experience for visitors. The site also offers a dealer locator feature and custom Google Maps integration so users can find Napoleon brand retailers close to them. Social media integration and chat for instant customer service are also available on the site. 

Using one common technology across all Napoleon products and regions allowed the teams to develop standardizations and processes. Additionally, the platform supports personalization of the web experience based on user segmentation, has handy “frequently bought together” and “accessories” per item prompts, and supports interactions with user persona scoring, such as page visits, form submissions, video plays, document downloads, visits of personalized pages and CRM data.

The Results

Napoleon has developed a fully responsive, WCAG 2.0 Level AA-compliant solution that centralizes the management of all former Napoleon domains and marketing campaigns that exist across several regions and languages. It provides an extendable and flexible framework to grow as the company’s needs evolve. 

Success metrics include:

• The cost of investment is offset by the significant savings in overall digital spend, reduced human errors and reduction of duplicated work
• Integration of the Fireplaces division into the Napoleon.com framework, replacing legacy accounts and domains
• Dramatically improving site uptime to 99.9% reliability, improving over the legacy DNN sites, which would be down multiple times a day
• Serving targeted, multilingual content, whilst maintaining a consistent brand UI/UX for products
• The ability for the sales team to target promotions by product and region simultaneously
• A new regional website strategy allows regional distinctions between product selection, pricing and marketing messaging