CIVIC Financial Services Taps Progress® Sitefinity® for Dynamic Content Creation, Personalization Capabilities
Industries:
Financial ServicesProducts:
SitefinityChallenge
With an inflexible proprietary backend that required a digital agency to update content, limited personalization and difficult third-party integrations, CIVIC Financial Services knew it needed to modernize its CMS to better thrive in the competitive real estate finance market.Solution
Deploy Sitefinity, empowering the marketing team to dynamically create, update and post content; benefit from a methodical migration process from Sitefinity partner Visus LLC, enabling a smooth transfer of all content.Result
Third-party customer reviews that previously took 30 days to post are now posted in less than one minute; since the Sitefinity launch, loan conversion rates have increased from 1% to 5% and marketing resources have been freed up significantly.
Full Story
Challenge
With an inflexible proprietary backend that required a digital agency to update content, limited personalization and difficult third-party integrations, CIVIC Financial Services knew it needed to modernize its CMS to better thrive in a competitive real estate finance market. First on CIVIC's list of priorities was to become self-sufficient.
"We are extremely limited in what we could do on our own without an agency," said CIVIC's Digital Marketing Manager. "We could only update verbiage here and there, and even that wasn't consistent. We're in a dynamic changing market that demands fresh, up-to-date content."
Also, on the wish list was the ability to provide a personalized digital experience based on persona, powerful integration capabilities and fast-loading pages to enhance the user experience and boost SEO.
After a thorough period of due diligence, CIVIC chose Sitefinity and certified Sitefinity partner Visus LLC, after signing off on a discovery engagement that produced a detailed statement of work and migration plan.
Solution
With its ability to enable multiple non-technical content authors to create, edit and publish updates to the site, combined with integration capabilities that streamline the posting of critical customer reviews and strong personalization and SEO capabilities, Sitefinity checked many boxes for CIVIC.
"With Sitefinity's content management and digital experience capabilities, it feels like we have been given the keys to the kingdom," stated the digital marketing manager.
The implementation process did not disappoint either.
"There was a process and project plan light years ahead of our previous implementation," he added. "We worked from a week-to-week checklist and methodically got it done without delay or aggravation."
"To make the content migration as smooth and effortless as possible to CIVIC, the Visus team analyzed the old proprietary CMS's APIs, created all the required templates and then migrated all the content programmatically to Sitefinity. This is the power and flexibility of Sitefinity and why we love working with it," said Michael Daoud, CEO, Visus LLC - Sitefinity Certified Partner.
Result
The implementation of Sitefinity has had a profound impact across CIVIC's business. Since implementation, the firm has increased engagement and fund conversation rates, while reducing expenses and time lag. In addition, its powerful integration with third-party review site Experience.com had shaved a 30-day process down to seconds.
Customer reviews have become an indispensable marketing and sales tool for many businesses, including CIVIC. Its old system required about 30 days just to upload the CSV files. Now the process takes less than a minute.
"The team developed a very easy-to-use API for us to go in and just import the reviews directly," he explained. "Now, we're able to see it as a draft and just check for any kind of typos and then hit save. So literally a 30-day process went down to 30 seconds more or less."
Even tasks like setting up paid search campaigns have been dramatically overhauled with Sitefinity. "Now we just create the landing page, integrate with our CRM team and we are on our way," he said. "The time efficiencies created by Sitefinity are allowing us as a team to be self-sufficient and get so much more done than before."
And when it comes to the impact on the business itself, online loan conversion rates are up.
"There's a lot of factors that affect application rates, but it is notable that before Sitefinity, we were at about 1% and that rate is now 5%. I also attribute that to our ability to produce more proactive marketing campaigns," stated the manager.
Moving forward, CIVIC is looking at a number of ways to further enhance the customer experience.
"Sitefinity has empowered us with time to do things we could have never done before," he explained. " For example, we have made a lot of progress with personalized content by persona and we are looking at new capabilities like rate calculators and further integration with our CRM that will improve the entire customer journey and experience."