When revamping a website, the best guide is the user. Sunrise Senior Living knows this firsthand, having relaunched its website based on analyzing using preferences. The provider of senior services and care sought a data-based solution to help revamp its digital content and better support its network of 270 websites, while ensure an easy and engaging customer experience via desktop and mobile.
Challenge:
Sunrise Senior Living has provided senior services for more than 30 years and has grown to support 300 communities and more than 27,000 units worldwide. Though the company generates more than 2 million visitors across its network of websites, it found itself struggling to support its 270 community pages or engage with its customers in the mobile space.
“We were looking for a content management system that was scalable. We needed something quick and functional,” says Abby See, director of online marketing at Sunrise Senior Living. To that end, See set about finding such a solution, working closely with Kate Dalbey, senior account manager of the Sunrise account at digital agency Delphic Digital.
Strategy:
Dalbey and See found their solution in Sitecore, a provider of customer experience software that leverages data and provides clients with flexible content management solutions.
“Marketing has changed a lot over the years. We’re moving from data being a bottom-line priority to being top line,” says Nate Barad, director of product strategy at Sitecore. “Now marketers are charged with customer experience, too.”
Sunrise Senior Living put the data provided by Sitecore to work immediately, using A/B testing, as well as Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and social media monitoring, to analyze user behavior and optimize the user experience. Through this data, Dalbey and See began to notice a trend. “We were looking at traffic and seeing that mobile and tablet traffic was up,” Dalbey says. “Abby looked and saw this as an opportunity for us to be the first senior services company to deliver a responsive Web experience.”
Through Sitecore’s experience platform , Sunrise redesigned its core website, implementing responsive design, and revamped its online user experience by streamlining its network of community sites. The company also addressed issues its customers were having with finding and communicating with nearby community sites.
Results:
Following the launch of Sunrise Senior Living’s responsive site design, overall page visits increased 17%, while bounce rates decreased 11%. Additionally, Sunrise Senior Living set a simple rule in Sitecore’s digital marketing system that would transfer information from short forms on the site to longer forms, prepopulating many of the form fields and expediting the form process. “The short-form/long-form rule is subtle, but we see a lot of people making use of it,” See says. “We saw a 26% increase in page visits to our finance page by implementing the short-form/long-form rule.”
In addition to the responsive site, Sunrise used Sitecore’s data and marketing platform to foster more long-term engagement with its customers. “It goes back to engaging the user. It’s not enough to just get a conversion,” Dalbey explains.
“We’re using email and other channels to keep the conversation going as long as possible,” See adds. “We can expand our marketing in other areas now that we’re a bit ahead in this area.”
