Challenge
Wärtsilä is a global leader in advanced technologies and complete lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets.
As a corporation striving to reach an international customer base, Wärtsilä’s website plays a pivotal role in the company’s digital marketing efforts. With unique content pages for each of Wärtsilä’s three different business units and regional sites for more than 50 different locations and languages, Wärtsilä’s website had become a complex ecosystem of digital content over the years.
In 2014, Wärtsilä finally reached the end of the line. The web content management system the company was using at the time was full of shortcomings. The user interface was complicated, which made it difficult for people to update the website in a timely fashion. Assets needed to be duplicated in many scenarios, which impacted scalability. Above all, the content management system simply lacked the features that many customers have come to expect, such as responsive design and mobile device compatibility.
Ongoing frustrations with the web content management system led Wärtsilä to explore other options, and in September 2014, the company began work on a new concept with digital services provider Siili Solutions. With such clear shortcomings in the existing content management platform, Wärtsilä set three specific requirements for the new system:
1. The website needed to deliver a modern user experience, complete with responsive design and support for mobile viewing.
2. The new content management system had to help Wärtsilä improve operations and cut costs—no more maintenance difficulties.
3. Wärtsilä viewed personalization as the way of the future, so the new website had to give Wärtsilä the ability to tailor web content to users.
After exploring a variety of options, Wärtsilä and Siili wound up going with Progress® Sitefinity®.
Solution
Work on the redesigned website started in September 2014. Despite all the content in the Wärtsilä digital ecosystem, the migration was a smooth process and the new global site was launched in March 2015.
Maud Bernard, Digital Marketing Specialist at Wärtsilä, credits the ease of the transition in part due to how approachable the Sitefinity platform is for new users. With more than 100 users, Wärtsilä needed a content management system that was easy to learn without any sacrifices to the overall functionality. This was particularly the case given the number of “part-time” users, who may not use the platform regularly but still had to be comfortable adding and updating content—people don’t want to feel like they have to relearn the system every time they use it.
“For Wärtsilä, the user-friendly interface of Sitefinity was a big selling point, it’s just easy to get people to work with the platform,” Bernard said. “With so many different departments and people creating and modifying content, it was very important to have a content management system that was approachable. It’s so easy for anyone to pick up and learn, you don’t need to spend hours in the backend to obtain a level of mastery.”
Redesigning and relaunching the website was only the first step for Wärtsilä. Once the site was launched and the content management processes were ironed out, Wärtsilä and Siili began assessing the digital marketing maturity of the company’s different business units. Wärtsilä wanted to further improve the customer journey with the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC), and decided the Marine business unit was a good place to start.
The Marine business unit has more than 200 product pages, designed to promote Wärtsilä products and services to a wide variety of segments, from merchant ships to navy vessels. Serving the right content to the right customer at the right time is vital to sending the message that Wärtsilä offers the product and services that prospects need.
Using Digital Experience Cloud, Wärtsilä could effectively score visitors for each action they took on the website. Based on this score, Wärtsilä could further personalize the user experience by serving tailored content recommendations. For example, if visitors researched the Ballast Water Management System, and further visited other pages of interest, Wärtsilä could display reminders to visit this product landing page. By consistently renewing and promoting interesting content about the value proposition of the Ballast Water Management System, Wärtsilä could then capture the visitor interest and get him/her to initiate a request via the contact form for further sales engagement.
Results
In the business-to-business space, every lead counts—a single converted lead could generate millions of dollars in revenue for Wärtsilä. Sitefinity and Digital Experience Cloud enable Wärtsilä to give each prospect the attention they deserve. By tracking visitor behaviors and personalizing their experience throughout the customer journey, Wärtsilä can move away from the “one message for all” approach and take a more innovative angle, with highly tailored experiences for each and every prospect.
“What we strive to do is empower Wärtsilä to be creative,” explained Kiril Jovchev, Solutions Architect, Siili Solutions. “The Sitefinity widgets enable Wärtsilä to be creative, they aren’t limited to the templates we provided. They can use any combination of out-of-the-box and specially developed widgets. No other content system has the same ability to give layout editing to the content editor.”
Since launching the pilot program with Digital Experience Cloud, Wärtsilä has garnered more than 100 highly qualified leads, which has led to numerous quotes and other engagements from both known prospects and unexpected ones. The initiative even garnered a completed sale—a major success when a single customer can bring in so much revenue.
“Digital Experience Cloud is the future of digital marketing at Wärtsilä,” Bernard added. “The B2B world needs more personalized experiences, and DEC enables us to create them.”
Looking to the future, Wärtsilä aims to continue rethinking and refining the way the customer journey is handled. With the flexibility of the Sitefinity platform and the help of Siili Solutions, the company is confident it can overcome any challenges that stand in its way.
Wärtsilä
Wärtsilä is a global leader in advanced technologies and complete lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets. By emphasizing sustainable innovation and total efficiency, Wärtsilä maximizes the environmental and economic performance of the vessels and power plants of its customers. In 2016, Wärtsilä's net sales totaled EUR 4.8 billion with approximately 18,000 employees. The company has operations in over 200 locations in more than 70 countries around the world. Wärtsilä is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki.
Siili Solutions
Siili Solutions (NASDAQ: SIILI) is a creative design and technology powerhouse. Since 2005, we’ve crafted services for the mobile age, bringing together the best of business, data and devices. Our passion lies in rapid business development, which is fueled by the lean startup philosophy, design thinking and agile methods. Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Siili is a fast-growing modern technology company with operations in Oulu (Finland), Wroclaw (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Los Angeles and New York (USA).