MasterControl Boosts Conversion Rates Over 57% with Progress Sitefinity
Industries:
Technology & SoftwareProducts:
SitefinityChallenge
MasterControl needed to refresh the frontend and backend user experience, modernize localized websites and find a controlled way for content contributors to safely create pages.
Solution
MasterControl designed a deep UX structure based on flexible widgets and themes with refreshed and localized content of over 3,000 pages across seven international sites.Result
MasterControl boosted homepage conversions by 64% and crafted over 27 widgets and 42 theme variations.Full Story
Challenge
For over 25 years, MasterControl has been a leading provider of integrated quality management system (QMS) software that empowers customers to develop, manufacture and commercialize products designed to help people live longer, healthier and more enjoyable lives. Servicing more than 1,000 customers from its offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia, MasterControl is a true global enterprise—with an international web presence to match.
Like most established companies, MasterControl has accumulated a significant amount of web content, including over 3,000 web pages, translated in several languages, including English, French and German. Charlie Lynch, Senior Director of Digital Experience, decided the time had come for an overhaul, “We wanted to update the brand and make it stand out against our competitors,” he said.
The digital experience team also needed to streamline content management and make it easier for a broader pool of users to get into the backend and build pages without sacrificing the holistic design of the website or its user experience. And because inbound site traffic is crucial to MasterControl’s business, the new experience needed to boost engagement and conversion. A full effort from the entire team would be required to get it done quickly—and with zero downtime.
Solution
As a long time Progress® Sitefinity® customer, MasterControl’s digital experience team knew the product offered vast flexibility to extend, integrate and localize, allowing marketers to work with standardized templates as well as publish in the language and on the page of their choice.
The team restructured every page to accommodate a variety of widgets meant to simplify content management without sacrificing control. “We were really only using the content block piece of things,” Lynch said. “Moving to a widgetized structure gave us exponentially more ways to create pages.” Using widgets, the team could empower users to create pages without needing HTML or CSS training.
The site’s new English content was localized and translated via a Smartling integration, and all 3,000 pages were cascaded across seven international sites, all centrally managed through Sitefinity.
The team integrated Sitefinity with its marketing automation tool, Pardot, to track lead information all the way from first touch to last touch, streamlining and enhancing lead scoring. It further integrated Sitefinity with other solutions, including Uberflip, Influitive, Mouseflow and Evergage to manage, measure and optimize its marketing funnel.
Meanwhile, the team used Sitefinity to develop a customer-facing site, which included a deep API integration with Salesforce. The integration authenticates customers and gives them permissions to access specific release notes, frequently asked questions, product downloads and more.
Result
The site redesign was a resounding success. From the sophisticated customer experience to its user-friendly backend, MasterControl now had one global theme and 42 theme variants to accommodate its business needs across all the global sites. The team also created 27 widgets with light, dark and neutral color palettes. The streamlined content administration enabled MasterControl to inject five to 10 times more images on the site than it had before, equipping content creators to craft a more interesting story for site visitors.
“Our administrators give different levels of access to our content authors, so they can change the pages as they want,” Lynch said. “This was one of my goals; it’s important that content management is no longer solely housed under the digital team.”
And these refined experiences paid off with better conversion rates. “Our homepage conversion rate increased from 1.7% to 2.8%, which is a solid 64% improvement. Our product pages were converting around 3.5% and are now at 5.5%, an increase of 57%. Overall, we’ve seen good improvements across the board when it comes to conversion metrics,” Lynch explained.
Best of all, the digital experience team was able to complete the entire project in-house, “You get so much more bang for the buck with Sitefinity,” he said. “The platform gives us a lot of flexibility and functionality without having to pay exorbitant costs—and we could do it all ourselves.”