Best Friends: DXP & personalization

Getting started with Drupal personalization. Read about our success story with Best Friends!

Challenge

The marketing team manages the content of the website completely independently while the development team maintains control of all technical aspects.

Solution

A DXP with smart profiles and Drupal personalization. Some in-depth workshops to take their internal marketing and development teams to the next level in terms of personalized digital experiences.

Result

Marketers work independently to set up personalization and digital experiences while developers maintain and support personalization across all Drupal websites.

2 main challenges

The client is not happy with their online engagement and conversion rates for the website.
The marketing team has only limited possibilities of structuring and optimizing the website content.

Success criteria for the project?

The marketing team can build a personalization strategy. They are independent from developers to edit and personalize the Drupal sites to increase various Marketing KPIs. For example: increase conversion, time on site, return visits, and referrals.
The development team understands the technical aspects of Drupal personalization and can keep control of everything impacting the websites and deployments.

Best Friends reached out to Dropsolid, for our unique offering of Drupal personalization in an open DXP.

Everyone involved at Dropsolid has been so helpful and patient with all of our questions and hiccups.

We loved the marketing training setup. It was thought-provoking. The outcome was exactly what we needed to move forward with our next steps. We had no idea what to expect from the marketing workshops, but it was very helpful.

The approach in the technical training was very well perceived. Nick was extremely patient, he had our team in the driving position and he was guiding them forward.

Jennifer Borri

Project Manager

Double solution for Best Friends

We’ve put in place a double solution:

Dropsolid DXP with smart profiling and Drupal Personalization.
Workshops to get their internal teams to the next level of building personalized digital experiences, both marketers and developers.

Our devs connected with their devs

During the project kick-off meeting, the tracking script was put live and the developers saw behavioral data (events) coming in right away. The team was amazed and loved how easy it was to get started.

The tech team worked with Dropsolids technical experts to apply several best practices to their website like:

the optimization of the Google Tag Manager setup
the introduction of Drupal paragraphs

Once this was done, adding the personalization was a piece of cake. The impact on Varnish and deployment workflows was immediately understood to be very minimal.

Our marketers connected with their marketers

We did two strategic workshops with the marketing team to introduce them to the insight-driven approach of running personalization experiments.

Now that they’ve mastered this approach, and did their first experiments, they can include it in their day-to-day routines and marketing metrics. This way they can gradually enhance their digital stakeholder experiences.

Our approach

1. Define goals and KPIs

Always start from your strategic goals and the KPIs of your website.

2. Identify key audiences & journeys

Define your key audiences and how you can detect a visitor being part of one of those audiences. Get insights (from) where they enter your website and what their journey is, to get to the goal you want them to meet.

3. Use case ideation

Start small. Define a first use case which brings most business value and/or requires the lowest effort to start with.

4. Prepare content

Define exactly which messaging you want to bring and how you want to bring it: copy, visuals and call to actions.

5. Execute campaigns

Define segments, add personalization to your website, sit back and wait for the results to come in.

6. Test & iterate

Learn from your data. Does the engagement of the audience that got a personalized experience increase? If yes, keep enhancing. If no, try another way. Start over, there is always a better way.

The result?

The tech team is now capable of maintaining and supporting the modules required for personalization like the rest of the Drupal sites. No lock-in. Full freedom.

The marketers are now able to create segments, personalize content and follow up the effect of their campaigns in Google Data Studio. No technical support is needed to do their day-to-day job. Full freedom.

Visit the website

About Best Friends Animal Society

Best Friends Animal Society is a leading animal welfare organization working to end the killing of dogs and cats in America’s shelters by 2025. Founded in 1984, Best Friends is a pioneer in the no-kill movement and has helped reduce the number of animals killed in shelters from an estimated 17 million per year to around 625,000.

Best Friends runs lifesaving programs all across the country, as well as the nation’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary. Working collaboratively with a network of more than 3,300 animal welfare and shelter partners, and community members nationwide, Best Friends is working to Save Them All®. For more information, visit bestfriends.org.