How Optimizely One & Opal Doubled Road Scholar's Conversions

Road Scholar leverage Optimizely One to revitalise its online digital presence, increase conversion rates and transform internal workflow management

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For Mark Fagiano, Senior e-Commerce Director at Road Scholar, the last nine years have been about building something remarkable: an experimentation culture that doesn't just test ideas — it transforms how the entire marketing organization works.

When Mark joined in 2017 as the first person in charge of Optimizely CMS, Road Scholar was just beginning its platform journey. Today, his team runs the full Optimizely One stack — CMS, CMP, Web and Feature Experimentation, ODP for personalization — with Opal AI now rolling out across the entire marketing organization. The results? Doubled mobile conversion rates and a completely new way of how teams work across every function, with more rigorous testing than ever before, better results, and all accelerated by AI.

But what keeps Mark up at night? Checkout redesigns that could tank revenue. Opal adoption across teams dealing with AI uncertainty. A complete personalization overhaul that requires stepping back before moving forward. These aren't incremental improvements — they're transformational bets. And as the winner of the Optimizely One Award in North America, Road Scholar is proving what happens when you take calculated risks, test relentlessly, and trust the platform to back you up.

Mark's role and three high-stakes projects at Road Scholar

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  • Mark Fagiano is Senior e-Commerce Director at Road Scholar, managing web developers, QA, and digital marketing including paid strategies and SEO — his days span developing new website functionality, working with the experimentation team to evaluate tests, and optimizing digital search.
  • Mark joined in 2017 when Road Scholar first brought on Optimizely CMS, making him the first person in charge of the platform — nine years later, he's leading three major projects simultaneously.
  • First: rolling out Opal AI across the entire marketing organization with adoption challenges around uncertainty. Second: rebuilding their personalization strategy with ODP to move beyond basic use cases. Third: completely redesigning their program pages and checkout flow — the one that really keeps him up at night because any checkout changes can tank conversion rates.

Winning the Optimizely One Award — Building over time

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  • Winning the Optimizely One Award recognizes years of team effort building up the platform piece by piece — starting with CMS, then adding CMP, Web Experimentation, Feature Experimentation, and all the different components.
  • Each new component required making sure everyone understood what was possible with the platform, working closely with Optimizely on good onboarding and structure, and ensuring everything worked seamlessly when the full suite rolled out.
  • Moving to Optimizely One streamlined everything into one platform: communication happens within CMP, no duplicate edits, clear approval tracking, and one point of contact for maintenance, instead of spending time trying to get different systems to talk to each other. The other benefit is that it really makes it easier to have one point of contact for all of your maintenance.

We had a number of different platforms bolted together... We would chase edits all the time, approvals, you know, it's really hard to track your approvals. We'd get duplicate edits all the time... Optimizely One consolidated all of that down into a much more streamlined flow.

Mark Fagiano|Senior e-Commerce Director

All roads led to Optimizely after never-ending frustrations

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  • There wasn't one aha moment for Road Scholar — it was building frustration over time that pushed them toward Optimizely One, solving pain points organically as new components became available.
  • CMP addressed their content management and production process struggles, Experimentation replaced a limited platform with a weak visual editor that couldn't give them flexibility, and ODP filled the gap when they didn't have a marketing database but knew personalization was critical.
  • Road Scholar reevaluates their platform every few years — they compare Optimizely One against competitors using criteria like integration, ease of use, customer support, and onboarding packages — and Optimizely continues to be the right choice for Road Scholar.

There's other products out there where a single component might be really strong, but there's not another platform out there where the whole ecosystem is as strong or offers as many pieces [as Optimizely].

Mark Fagiano|Senior e-Commerce Director

Opal unlocks efficiency through structured AI adoption

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  • Opal's biggest impact is creating efficiency by handling repetitive tasks — marketing managers previously had to translate meeting notes and break them into campaigns and tasks manually, but now Opal summarizes notes, generates campaign briefs, creates tasks and workflows, and writes briefs for individual marketing pieces.
  • For experimentation, Opal accelerated velocity by generating multiple hypotheses quickly, rather than the time-consuming manual process of developing and summarizing each one.
  • Road Scholar structured their Opal implementation around three pillars: adoption (addressing team uncertainty about AI replacing jobs or creative autonomy), deliverables (prompt library, prompt engineering course, metadata taxonomy, and rock-solid instructions ensuring on-brand output), and KPIs (measuring AI adoption rates, query growth, task time reduction, content effectiveness, and experiment velocity).
  • Six months into the journey, the team had to prove the investment with concrete metrics showing AI adoption across the team, measurable query increases over time, and reduced time per task — ensuring continued funding and demonstrating real value.

Doubling mobile conversions with Optimizely One

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  • Road Scholar's biggest win with Optimizely One is doubling their mobile conversion rate — critical because their average customer is 72 years old and mobile traffic now represents 70% of visits as tech-comfortable boomers age into their demographic.
  • Before optimization, mobile conversion rates were nowhere near desktop performance — customers would browse on mobile, then switch to desktop or call the contact center to complete purchases, which Road Scholar wanted to avoid.
  • Using experimentation to understand where opportunities existed, they built two separate checkout flows optimized for each device — the mobile flow is shorter, more fine-tuned, and gets people through the checkout funnel more effectively.
  • By keeping customers on mobile instead of forcing device switches, Road Scholar saw significant revenue impact and continues seeing more mobile checkouts — proving experimentation's effectiveness at optimizing their mobile experience.

Rapid fire and career advice: Don't be afraid to take a chance

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  • Mark's not sure if he wants to join a book club or jump on the mic, but he shares his favourite show at the moment! Plus, he's reading Brené Brown's Dare to Lead, that Julianne loves too.
  • What was Mark's first-ever job out of college? And how could Opal have helped him in that heated room!
  • His advice to his younger self: don't be afraid to take a chance — he exemplifies that organizations don't know what to do with AI right now, but Road Scholar decided to push forward with Opal and go all in, proving that if you can demonstrate the use case, you end up a hero.

Nine years of building, one platform, zero regrets

Mark Fagiano's journey with Optimizely isn't just about platform adoption — it's about transformation. When he joined Road Scholar in 2017 as the first person in charge of CMS, the organization was just starting to explore what integrated marketing technology could do. Nine years later, they're running the full Optimizely One stack with doubled mobile conversion rates, an award-winning experimentation program, and Opal AI rolling out across the entire marketing team.

The path wasn't linear. It was built on frustration — scattered platforms that didn't talk to each other, duplicate edits, impossible approval tracking, and a limited experimentation tool that couldn't deliver the flexibility they needed. Each new component solved a specific pain point: CMP streamlined content chaos, Experimentation replaced inflexible tools, ODP filled the marketing database gap, and Opal automated repetitive tasks that were eating up strategic capacity.

What makes Road Scholar's story remarkable isn't just the metrics, though those speak for themselves. It's the willingness to take calculated risks on high-stakes projects: checkout redesigns that could tank revenue, AI adoption despite organizational uncertainty, and personalization overhauls that require stepping back before moving forward. They test every component, prove every change, and never launch without data backing them up.

Mark's advice to his younger self captures it perfectly: don't be afraid to take a chance. When organizations don't know what to do with AI, that's exactly when you push forward and prove the use case. Every few years, Road Scholar reevaluates their platform against competitors. And every time, they land back on Optimizely — not because they're locked in, but because no other ecosystem offers the same strength across every component.

After nine years of partnership, Mark's team has never hit a wall. And with the Optimizely One Award recognizing their platform mastery, they're just getting started.