Cambridge Innovation Institute Quadruples Conversions by Personalizing Its Customer Journey with Sitefinity

Cambridge Innovation Institute discovered this firsthand. Serving leading commercial, academic, government and research institutions in the life science, energy and technology industries, CII shares cutting-edge research with its audience via in-depth conferences, exhibitions, publications and training courses. 

Content plays a critical role in CII’s digital strategy. Not only does content build the organization’s credibility as a thought leader, it also demonstrates the value of attending an event or training course – key website conversions for CII. However, as CII’s content library grew, showcasing targeted content to the right customers became near impossible. 

“We were frontloading so much information, our visitors just weren’t willing to comb through it to find the relevant content,” explained Jaime Parlee, Marketing Analytics Director, CII. 

At the time, CII was using Ektron to power its website. However, with Ektron being phased out, on top of some of the other challenges the organization was facing with content management, this was an ideal opportunity to explore new options. 

After evaluating different platforms, CII ultimately selected 
Progress® Sitefinity® for three key reasons: 

• Sitefinity’s personalization, optimization and analytics component, Sitefinity Insight℠, streamlines digital analysis and content optimization 

• Sitefinity is flexible, making it easy to customize and integrate various data sources 

• Sitefinity is intuitive, allowing 200+ content editors to onboard easily 

CII relied on data from a proprietary CRM to personalize and optimize the digital experience. The fact that Sitefinity is built with integration in mind was also a deciding factor. CII was able to easily connect Sitefinity to a proprietary CRM and use the data to define customer personas in Sitefinity Insight. 

“Since we were required to transition to a new CMS, we needed a solution that supported us in the near and long term,” Parlee added. “Sitefinity was ready to use out of the box, but it was also extremely scalable and customizable, which gave us confidence in our ability to evolve as new needs arise.” 

CII began transitioning to Sitefinity in 2018, with all 84 of its websites migrated to the platform. With Sitefinity and Sitefinity Insight working together, CII was able to seamlessly collect persona demographic, behavior and preference data and utilize it to deliver personalized experiences across websites. 

With more than 80 websites, CII was concerned at first that such comprehensive personalization may be too difficult to execute. But with features like easy-to-edit content blocks, Sitefinity has enabled both the marketing and IT team to work effectively without hindering each other’s efforts. 

In fact, the impact of Sitefinity Insight was evident immediately. By finetuning the customer journey and serving the right content to the right people at the right time, CII was able to: 

• Increase visitor engagement on the web by 30% 

• Provide sales with the leads 15x more likely to convert 

• Improve online conversion by 4x 

“It was very validating to be able to show that we were meeting our KPIs,” Parlee said. “Whenever personalized content is served to visitors, the level of engagement and conversion improves. That was our key objective when we started using Sitefinity.”