A focus on collaboration, sharing and ease of use
Etex runs 33 different brands and websites. As Digital Product Manager (Web and Portal) Arne Rotty explained, the company migrated to Optimizely from a Sitecore legacy system that could not deliver the level of dynamic sharing and cross-system integrations that Etex strove to achieve.
Specifically, Etex approached Optimizely with a view to implementing a system of technologies that would allow their marketers to provide customers and prospects with personalized information and content– to be able to “communicate the right messaging to the right people, at the right time.” Furthermore, Etex is a corporation built on sharing, so marketing teams worldwide needed a centralized platform to share insights, expertise, and feedback.
On top of this functionality, Etex leadership were seeking a solution that would be easy-to-use, avoiding a complex architecture. Leadership wanted any potential solution to be simple for marketers to use to ensure that they had exactly what they needed to immediately create and distribute content, without having to compromise time by reading an instruction manual. Etex also craved a platform that would speak directly to a new breed of customer as the profile of a ‘typical’ buyer was shifting.
Working together across multiple websites and geographies
Etex worked with a long-term partner to find the best Content Management System (CMS) solution, and soon concluded that Optimizely provided a better solution than the incumbent Sitecore, or other shortlisted providers such as Adobe.
Optimizely’s CMS met all Etex’s requirements. Using Optimizely, Etex marketers quickly realized that they could develop and work with content in a way that helped them establish and nurture relationships with their end users, while previously, Etex’s relationship strategy had been limited to contractors.
As Arne Rotty explained, Optimizely’s CMS provides a host of benefits that were absent from the legacy system. These include enhanced scalability, a shared component base and a single backend for 33 different websites. Rotty also noted that Optimizely’s pricing was more competitive and there were additional add-ons that had not been available previously.
Ease of use was also a critically important factor for Etex’s internal teams. Rotty remarked that Optimizely’s CMS “works fluently from a content creator point of view. It is easy and intuitive to navigate and create content. Also, the ‘shared’ content folder makes its very easy to reuse content.”
Once the new system was in place, downtime became a thing of the past. Rotty detailed that “the fact that the CMS is hosted as a SaaS solution enables our marketing personnel to work on their content worldwide without any performance drops.”
Cross collaboration is also core to Etex’s needs. By using the projects functionality, a large number of people can work on the platform simultaneously. In this case, that equates to 550 people at a time creating web content across 33 sites in more than 70 languages.
