United Rentals: Specialty Rentals

The Client

Founded in 1997, United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with a store network nearly three times the size of any other provider and locations in 49 states and 10 Canadian provinces.

The Situation

While the core of United Rentals’ business is the rental of general construction equipment and aerial work platforms, the company also provides services through several acquired specialty business units including fluid management, onsite sanitation and power/HVAC equipment rentals. Historically, these specialty units have been underrepresented in United Rentals’ digital space, leaving a huge growth opportunity to generate leads and revenue for these services.

The Challenge

The company faced many challenges in trying to increase the digital value of its specialty services on the e-commerce site. For example, lead forms for specialty services were being managed and hosted on a third-party CRM system, leaving them outdated and off-brand compared to the content hosted on the main site. Because the forms were hosted off-domain, had poor navigation flow and lacked basic SEO best practices, they had low discoverability value and almost no organic search traffic. Plus, the customers who did find the forms didn’t trust them. 

Additionally, while United Rentals had standardized on Salesforce for its CRM platform, the lead forms were submitted to a different CRM system. This created huge inefficiencies for sales reps having to work out of multiple systems and stitch together customer information.

The Solution

Working with VMLY&R, the teams rebuilt all the existing lead forms in Drupal using a common United Rentals theme and a library of components built to standardize the user experience, which allowed the discoverability team to leverage powerful contributed modules to immediately raise the lead forms’ SEO value. 

By bringing these forms onto the site, the teams were able to provide standardized navigation to specialty content and build cross-content relationships with United Rentals’ blog and product catalog, allowing for more conversion opportunities for prospective customers. Additionally, bringing the forms on-domain and using a theme built to United Rentals’ brand standards increased customer trust that filling out a form was a safe, efficient way to begin the process of reserving specialty equipment. 

VMLY&R integrated all lead forms directly with Salesforce, allowing United Rentals’ sales reps to access a unified customer profile, including expanded specialty sales opportunities, to help increase customer spend.

The Results

Immediately after enacting these changes, United Rentals enjoyed a 400% increase in generated leads for specialty rentals. This surge in lead quantity and quality helped increase the year-over-year digital revenue growth of United Rentals by 20%, even during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the Acquia Cloud platform allowed the VMLY&R team to rapidly develop and deploy iterative updates to the lead forms, greatly increasing speed to market and allowing United Rentals to recognize increased revenue and lead generation within a few development sprints.