Modernising the digital customer experience.
Dun & Bradstreet doubles leads in a year with a digital strategy built on Adobe Experience Cloud.
55%
more content created with agile workflows
Objectives
Improve customer experiences by making customers feel like content speaks directly to them
Meet the demands of a fast-changing market with a flexible, go-to-market approach
Continuously optimise content to boost conversion and traffic through digital properties
Results
Doubled sales qualified leads in one year
55% more content created with agile workflows
Increased conversions with personal experiences
Consolidated multiple sites to one web portal
“By continuing to focus on the customer experience, we can provide strong support to the sales team and drive strong engagement for years to come.”
Josh Mueller
Global Head of Marketing, Dun & Bradstreet
Focus on customers with a modern digital strategy
In the information age, data is a highly valuable resource for any organisation. Companies use data to expand business, develop product strategies and learn more about their customers. For nearly two centuries, Dun & Bradstreet has helped its customers and partners use data to improve their business performance and gain a competitive edge.
As experts in data and insights, Dun & Bradstreet decided it was time to make the best use out of its own data by providing a world-class digital experience for current and potential customers. A large percentage of customers approach Dun & Bradstreet through its websites, but the company’s websites were historically divided by brand, country and product. The company wanted to modernise its digital strategy to focus on the needs of customers, no matter who or where they are.
“Our goal is to provide a truly great digital experience while using digital data to optimise and scale our demand generation engine,” says Josh Mueller, Global Head of Marketing at Dun & Bradstreet. “Our experiences and messaging should speak to the needs of individuals, such as marketers, finance or compliance professionals, rather than focusing just on our product lines.”
The first step was to lay down a strong foundation and consolidate all websites onto a single portal that would use personalisation to address the needs of individual visitors. Dun & Bradstreet’s legacy content management system (CMS), developed years ago in-house, was reaching its end of life. Dun & Bradstreet looked at multiple CMS options to find a solution that would be robust enough to handle high levels of personalisation while remaining agile enough to react quickly to international markets.
One CMS solution rose to the top: the Adobe Experience Manager solution, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
“Using Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager together, we’re developing a modern website experience to reach customers. The integrations allow us to work quickly and efficiently for a go-to-market approach that is boosting traffic and conversions.”
Tim Denney
Director of Web Development, Dun & Bradstreet
“We were already leveraging Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, but we weren’t using them to their full potential. It made sense for us to look at a CMS that could work with all of our systems, including Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce CRM, to deliver a holistic experience,” says Tim Denney, Director of Web Development at Dun & Bradstreet. “Using Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager together, we’re developing a modern digital experience to reach customers. The integrations allow us to work quickly and efficiently for a go-to-market approach that is boosting traffic and conversions.”
Personalised experiences across regions and brands in one website
Dun & Bradstreet completely re-designed its web experience into the new dnb.com website. By marrying its own extensive data libraries with Adobe technologies, the company can personalise a single web portal to provide a dozen different experiences based on who the customer is.
Dun & Bradstreet first uses its Visitor Intelligence solution to read the visitor’s IP address and browser cookies. By comparing the data to that in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, (delivering the world’s most comprehensive business data & analytical insights), Dun & Bradstreet can identify which company the visitor comes from and provide a different experience depending on whether it’s an enterprise or a small to medium-sized company.
Adobe Analytics and Visitor Intelligence are also used to help determine whether the visitor matches one of six distinct personas, such as a finance professional or marketer. The company size and persona data are then distributed to Adobe Target, which personalises the offers, content and thought leadership on the website for each individual visitor. Each customer gets the content that they’re looking for without Dun & Bradstreet needing to maintain separate websites.
“We want visitors to feel that Dun & Bradstreet is a destination made for them,” says Mueller. “The results from personalisation using Adobe Experience Cloud have been staggering. We doubled qualified sales leads in the first 12 months from launch. That might be normal results for a startup, but it’s certainly not usual for a company of our maturity.”
Delivering 55% more content
By standardising on Adobe Experience Manager, Dun & Bradstreet removed silos between web teams. Instead of working on separate content for each website, the teams now work together, sharing and borrowing content for different audiences. Tagging assets stored in Experience Manager allows teams to re-use content across personas or geographical regions. The web teams now create 55% more content under Experience Manager without increasing resources.
“Multi Site Manager in Adobe Experience Manager has really transformed how our team operates, creating efficiencies across our market sites and encouraging greater consistency in our international messaging and strategy,” says Jess Sidlowe, Senior Director of Website Management and Strategy at Dun & Bradstreet. “Rather than creating separate pages for each global site, we can control and roll out relevant content from a central location. Experience Manager even allows us to manage translations for the French Canadian version of our site with greater ease.”
The web team can be much more responsive to market or advertising needs, as creating a polished landing page simply involves swapping new components into templates. Moreover, all templates are responsive, which helps Dun & Bradstreet reach a growing mobile audience. While 30% of overall site visits come from mobile, 80% of visitors reading leadership content in particular come via mobile device. Responsive templates allow Dun & Bradstreet to put the visitor experience first without increasing effort for its web content team.
“Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target are helping me use data science to move business. Improving the digital experience is an ongoing journey and it’s tremendously helpful to have Adobe solutions on our side.”
Merritt Aho
Marketing Director, Testing and Optimisation, Dun & Bradstreet
Optimising the customer experience
Creating a new website experience is only the first step of Dun & Bradstreet’s customer-first digital strategy. Using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, the company is refocusing on ways to analyse performance and optimise content for audiences.
“We want to make sure that our time and cost investments pay off long term, so we’re using Adobe Analytics to determine what content connects with audiences on our website, which in turn informs our content strategy,” says Christopher Yeich, Senior Director, Content Marketing and Editorial Strategy at Dun & Bradstreet. “We might see that one article is performing very well, so we’ll develop an editorial series around it that helps our audiences dive deeper into the topic.”
Leveraging the integration between Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager, Dun & Bradstreet now runs an advanced optimisation programme to improve customer experiences. Adobe Analytics provides real-time analysis of site performance, allowing the optimisation team to gain insight into test performance and change direction quickly. Adobe Target allows the optimisation team to dramatically scale testing, even focusing on how content performs with specific audiences. The speed of Adobe Experience Manager allows the team to create new content or change the direction of content quickly.
The optimisation team has even expanded its reach across channels, following the customer journey across various lead sources. By analysing these customers, Dun & Bradstreet discovered that it gained much higher quality leads from visitors who connect via chat or call centre versus web forms. By studying the online journey of these customers, the team can encourage behaviours that lead to chats or calls.
“It’s almost unfathomable for me to imagine a company trying to do marketing without the right data to inform it,” says Merritt Aho, Marketing Director, Testing and Optimisation at Dun & Bradstreet. “Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target are helping me use data science to move business. Improving the digital experience is an ongoing journey and it’s tremendously helpful to have Adobe solutions on our side.”
Studying data from Adobe Analytics provides key insights into audience behaviour patterns, which allows Dun & Bradstreet to adjust how it approaches customers and increase demand generation. For instance, analysts once noticed a pattern in the content consumed by visitors from a major technology company. They passed this information on to the sales manager, which encouraged sales to introduce the offering and start a conversation with the customer.
“The Adobe Analytics dashboard is key to how we communicate with our data,” says Steven Alexander, Marketing Analytics Lead at Dun & Bradstreet. “I love how the dashboard allows us to build segments and tie in data from other systems to help us really understand our audiences and what they’re looking for. Since we’ve started our customer-first digital strategy with Adobe solutions, we’ve seen increases in traffic, repeat visitors and conversion.”
With the digital foundation in place, Dun & Bradstreet plans to continue scaling the website personalisation and optimisation programme across regions. The United States, Canada, Ireland and UK sites have already moved over, with more soon to follow. The company also plans to take analytics a step further into forecasting and predictive modelling that will continue to drive the company’s digital strategy. Dun & Bradstreet is also invested in Adobe Audience Manager and is looking forward to utilising the integration with Adobe Analytics to expand segmentation capabilities.
“We should be our own best case study for what is possible with Dun & Bradstreet data,” says Mueller. “By continuing to focus on the customer experience, we can provide strong support to the sales team and drive strong engagement for years to come.”
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