The Situation

Soleil Floors is a flooring and home remodeling company in Round Rock, Texas, with a 20-year reputation built on referrals and repeat clients. The brand existed. The work was strong. The relationships were real.
What did not exist was a system to convert any of that into recurring lead flow.
Customer history was scattered across Pipedrive, QuickBooks, Calendly, and Typeform. None of those tools talked to each other. There was no paid media running. No email program. No lifecycle automation. No mechanism for past clients to come back, and no way for new prospects to find Soleil outside of word of mouth.
This was a business that had earned its reputation the slow way and was running into the ceiling of what referrals alone could produce.

Key Outcomes

Performance Results

• 5,114 Google Ads conversions at $14.23 per conversion across calls, form submissions, directions requests, and other local intent actions
• 3,004 Performance Max conversions at $5.03 each at scale
• 2,025 phone calls and 2,979 lead form submissions tracked across paid media
• 100+ Meta prospecting leads at $31 to $38 CPL

System Built

• Custom Pipedrive-to-Mailchimp CRM sync through Zapier
• Lifecycle email program across welcome, post-consultation, re-engagement, and project content
• Homepage A/B testing before paid media scaled
• Blog infrastructure for SEO and email content distribution

The Primary Challenge

The instinct with a business like Soleil is to start running ads. The faster instinct is to start running ads and sending email blasts.
Both would have made the account look active while leaving the real problem untouched.
Ads without a tested landing page convert at whatever rate the homepage happens to convert at, which for most businesses is below their potential. Email without sender reputation, deliverability safeguards, and clean CRM sync damages the domain in the first month and takes six months to repair. Lifecycle automation without a content engine to feed it goes silent after the welcome series.
Building any one of these channels in isolation would have left the others unsupported. Building them in the wrong order would have wasted spend feeding broken infrastructure.
The challenge was sequencing the entire system so each layer was ready before the next one activated.

The Goal

Build a full acquisition and lifecycle system where every layer fed the next. Paid media feeding tested landing pages. Landing pages feeding clean CRM sync. CRM data feeding lifecycle email. Email reusing content infrastructure. The result needed to be a system Soleil could operate, not just inherit.

Our Approach

We treated the engagement as system architecture, not channel activation.
The build sequence was deliberate: data infrastructure first, then conversion testing, then paid media, then lifecycle email, then content infrastructure to feed everything else. Each layer had to be operating cleanly before the next one came online. Anything else would have produced channels that competed instead of compounded.
The other principle was operability. Soleil is a small team running a flooring business, not a marketing department. Every tool decision (Mailchimp over Klaviyo, WordPress over a heavier stack) was made for the operator who would inherit the system, not for the agency that built it.

Execution Highlights

Email and Data Infrastructure Built First

Before paid media activated, we built the email and CRM foundation that would decide whether leads were captured, segmented, and nurtured properly. Mailchimp was configured from a cold start with domain authentication, conservative sending parameters, and deliverability monitoring.
Then we built a custom Pipedrive-to-Mailchimp sync in Zapier rather than relying on native integrations. Lead source, lifecycle stage, consultation status, and customer history all moved cleanly between systems in real time. Direct integrations from Calendly and Typeform routed around CRM passthrough delays so welcome triggers fired at peak intent rather than waiting on slower sync windows.

Homepage A/B Testing Before Paid Media Scaled

The homepage was the destination for nearly all paid traffic, which meant its conversion rate would set the ceiling for paid media efficiency. Most agencies skip this step and let ads run against whatever homepage exists.
We tested variants of the homepage against each other before scaling spend. The winning variant established the baseline conversion rate that every paid campaign would inherit. The $14 cost per conversion Google Ads eventually produced did not come from campaign settings alone. It came from sending paid traffic into a page that had already been tested.

Paid Media Across Google and Meta

Once the foundation was in place, paid media activated.
On Google, Performance Max became the volume driver, delivering 3,004 conversions at $5.03 each. Unbranded search captured high-intent demand at $17.86 per conversion. Brand search held the bottom of the funnel at strong efficiency. Generic local search drove 337 “Get Directions” actions and meaningful foot traffic to the showroom.
On Meta, prospecting campaigns ran with both standard landing pages and Meta Lead Forms. The Lead Form variant outperformed the landing page flow at $31 per lead, validating it as the stronger acquisition path for cold traffic. Retargeting played a supporting role, as it should in a small local account where prospecting carries the volume.
The combined channels delivered 2,025 phone calls and 2,979 lead form submissions, both signals that mattered more for a flooring business than impression metrics.

Lifecycle Email Program

With the data infrastructure operating cleanly, lifecycle email took over the work that paid media could not do alone.
The program covered the full customer arc: welcome emails that set expectations, founder-voice messaging that built trust, post-consultation follow-up that drove re-engagement, project content that turned completed installations into useful stories, and re-engagement emails with sunset logic to protect deliverability.
The sunset logic deserves specific attention. Most local businesses never implement it, which means their lists slowly degrade and pull deliverability down with them. Soleil’s program automatically removes inactive subscribers after a controlled re-engagement window, which keeps the active list clean and the sender reputation strong as new contacts come in.

Content Infrastructure

We built a blog section into the WordPress site to support both SEO and email content distribution. Project case studies like the 360 Nueces Condo renovation function as both blog posts and email content, which means content production for one channel feeds the other automatically. This is the kind of operational efficiency that compounds over months without requiring additional team capacity.

Results

Across the engagement, paid media has produced 5,114 conversions on Google at $14.23 per conversion, with 3,004 of those coming from Performance Max alone at $5.03 per conversion. The Google account has tracked 2,025 phone calls and 2,979 lead form submissions. Meta prospecting added another 100+ leads at $31 to $38 CPL.
The lifecycle email program operates continuously, converting paid traffic into long-term subscribers, re-engaging past clients, and giving Soleil a communication channel that does not depend on ad spend.
The system was built to be operated by a small team running a flooring business. After handoff, it kept running.

Why This Worked

Most local services businesses buy marketing channels in isolation. Paid media from one vendor. Email from another. Web from a third. Each vendor optimizes for their channel without visibility into the others, and the channels end up competing for credit instead of compounding for the business.
Soleil’s results came from the integration. The homepage test set the conversion ceiling that paid media operated under. The CRM sync ensured that every paid lead landed in a system ready to nurture them. The email program turned ad spend into long-term subscriber relationships. The content infrastructure fed both email and SEO without requiring duplicate production.
When the channels are built to feed each other, the math changes. A lead is not a one-time cost against a single channel. It is an entry point into a system that continues working long after the ad budget for that month has been spent.

Strategic Takeaway

For local services businesses, the question is rarely which channel to invest in. It is whether the channels are connected.
Paid media without conversion testing wastes the budget. Email without clean data damages the domain. Content without distribution sits unread. Each channel underperforms in isolation and compounds when integrated.
Soleil’s engagement covered every layer: data infrastructure, conversion optimization, paid acquisition across Google and Meta, lifecycle email, and content infrastructure. The results are what happens when the system is built to operate as one piece, not five.
That is the difference between buying marketing and engineering it.