How Encompass migrated 3 websites in 5 months and took back control of their digital front door with Webflow

Encompass provides ERP software for beverage alcohol distributors, producers, and retailers. In a market with two major competitors, their website does double duty: it's where prospects research a potential switch, and it's where existing customers log in every day to manage production and distribution. When Zach McDowell took over marketing leadership 18 months ago, neither of those audiences was being well-served. Marketing couldn't make changes without filing tickets. The company had made acquisitions and now had three disconnected brand experiences. 

They migrated from Contentful to Webflow in five months, consolidated three websites, and moved publishing from days to minutes. More importantly, they moved from asking "can we build this?" to "should we build this?"

"We shifted from 'can we build this?' to 'should we build this, and why?' That's a fundamentally different conversation—and a much better problem to have."

— Jade Anthony, Demand Marketing, Encompass

"We wanted to start treating our website as a product," Zach explains. "We needed total control, the ability to make decisions and updates quickly, and to improve the end user experience as much as possible." That vision was fundamentally incompatible with the team's existing setup and the clock was ticking on a December contract expiration that would force a decision one way or another.

When your CMS becomes a bottleneck

"We hit roadblock after roadblock. The challenge shifted from delivery — our previous system’s configuration  was 'can we even get this out in time?' — to prioritization, because now we have the means to do everything."

— Jade Anthony, Demand Marketing, Encompass

The problems were technical, operational, and strategic all at once. Contentful offered structure, but that structure had calcified into constraint. The team was working with 25 pre-built modules developed years earlier and frozen in place. "If my product marketer came and was like, 'Hey, I have a really cool idea, can we make the image on this side?' we were confined, due to lack of dedicated development resources" Jade explains.

The publishing process itself was arduous. Making a single change required pushing to a staging environment and waiting 20 minutes to see if it worked. No preview function. No quick validation. "Sometimes it would take a full day of iteration just to get it right,” Jade recalls. “especially if we were trying to push the bounds of what our Contentful configuration could do."

For Zach, the operational pain translated to strategic limitation. "We (the marketing team) didn't have complete control over our website. We were required to go through development to get changes made." With the product org focused on their own roadmap and website updates nowhere near the top of that list, marketing was effectively locked out of one of their highest-value assets. 

The final complication: Encompass had made acquisitions, and each product had its own standalone website. Three separate properties, three disconnected brand experiences, no unified strategy. "We needed to unify them under one Encompass banner," Zach says. With a December deadline looming, the team had a decision to make.

Migration at the speed of business

"Our CEO is an ex-product marketer. He likes to change things, he likes to publish things. I might get a Slack from him at 10:30am on Friday, and he wants a change made. Before, that might take us until Tuesday or Wednesday the next week. Now that change can be made by 11 a.m. on Friday."

— Zach McDowell, VP of Marketing, Encompass

When Zach and Jade began evaluating platforms in mid-2024, Webflow kept rising to the top. Not just because of the feature set, but because of what Jade calls "the box model" — the visual, component-based design system that made the platform immediately comprehensible to anyone who understood basic HTML and CSS principles.

"Once you understand the box model, working within Webflow becomes a lot more attainable for different skill levels," Jade says. "We could get everyone on the team in there and learn this. It almost has the WYSIWYG feel. You can quickly preview, back out, and revert really quickly. That made it better for us to scale the tool outside of just me being a gatekeeper."

There was one problem: budget. Webflow was at the top of their expense range, and Zach wasn't sure they could afford both the platform and the migration support they'd need to hit the December deadline. "I called Sam, and said, 'I don't know if we're going to be able to do this within our budget constraints.' That put the deal at risk a little bit."

Sam, their Webflow AE, came back with a recommendation: Flow Ninja, an expert Webflow agency partner known for efficient, high-quality migrations. "He said, 'These guys are affordable, they do amazing work, and the budget fits.' We looked at their reviews, I had a reference call, and honestly, they fit our budgetary constraint and the reference call was great. That was probably the biggest component of it."

The partnership proved essential. Flow Ninja built out a five-batch project plan, working in sprints while the Encompass team reviewed and prioritized. 

Weekly check-ins kept everyone aligned, and Jade managed the content audit and migration prioritization while Flow Ninja handled the technical build. We ended up launching on our actual go-live date after massaging out a few things, but there wasn't a huge revert or anything. Nothing went wrong on the migration part,” Jade notes.The result: three websites consolidated, a one-for-one migration completed, and a new platform live by mid-December — five months from kickoff to launch.

The shift from "can we?" to "should we?"

"In our previous system, everything was going through me. Nobody else knew how to operate it. On Webflow, we can get everyone publishing without affecting larger development happening on the back end. That separation is huge."

— Jade Anthony, Demand Marketing, Encompass

The immediate wins were operational. Publishing a blog post went from 2+ hours to 5 minutes. Staging previews went from 20-minute waits to instant. Site backups that Jade assumed would "take a minute" were virtually instant.

"The challenge shifted from delivery to prioritization," Jade explains. "Before it was roadblock after roadblock. Now the challenge is: we can do so much, where do we start?"

The team is already moving beyond migration wins to strategic optimization like a homepage redesign that would have been deemed "not worth it" on Contentful due to dev effort required. "I don't think there's any stress around our ability to execute from a marketing perspective," Zach says. "Of course there's going to be stress in redesigning our homepage, but our ability to make it happen isn't in question."

They've shifted landing pages from HubSpot to Webflow, gaining creative latitude and brand continuity. "Our HubSpot landing pages are just content-forms," Zach says. "We're able to stretch beyond the bounds of that and really have the latitude to build whatever we want. We will no longer have landing pages that look completely different from the actual experience on the site." 

The team is exploring Webflow Analyze to inform content and engagement insights alongside their existing Amplitude setup, and planning to build out components and templates to further accelerate campaign execution.

The long-term vision centers on user journey optimization and experimentation. "We're excited to rework the website so that it works for our users, not just 'this is how it was built and we're constrained here,'" Jade says. "We're excited to think about the users and how they can best navigate the site." 

Jade and Zach come from diverse backgrounds, and they're bringing a user-first lens to the website. "My background's in product management and product marketing," Zach says. "Jade's background is in demand. We both care deeply about the user journey, and how we can update and change it to make more sense for the end user — and ultimately lead to a move effective top of funnel experience for our prospect and user community"

"It's going to be at the center of every marketing campaign that we run. Our ability to customize the experience and more seamlessly tie in our brand identity is a force multiplier.”

— Zach McDowell, VP of Marketing, Encompass

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