ACCO triumphs: Optimizely’s content experience winner

ACCO Brands celebrates a resounding win for Best Content Experience at Optimizely’s UKI Customer Awards, showcasing a transformative digital journey that elevated user experiences and delivered unparalleled success for resellers

Optimizely is a leading digital experience platform offering A/B and multivariate testing for performance optimisation, website personalisation, web content management, and digital commerce tools. Their platform is beloved by some of the world’s most recognisable brands including H&M, PayPal, Zoom, Toyota, and Vodafone.

Each year, the company hosts its Customer Awards to recognise and showcase Optimizely customers who are using the platform in outstanding ways. The awards are open to all Optimizely customers, and winners of last year’s UKI Customer Excellence Awards presented at Opticon London included Mazda Europe, Channel 4, EPG Health, and Farrow & Ball.

The Best Content Experience category is presented to customers who have innovated how they plan, publish, and reuse content to deliver exceptional user experiences. The award recognises these organisations for their ability to connect campaign delivery to digital outcomes such as increased click-through rates, content production efficiency, personalisation at scale, or ADA-compliant website accessibility.

ACCO Brands is one of the world’s largest suppliers of business, consumer and academic products with a portfolio in Europe that includes brands such as Leitz, Rexel, Nobo, Esselte, GBC and Rapid. ACCO have been using the Optimizely content platform for over a decade to operate ten brand websites supported in up to 25 language and country combinations across Europe. However, over the past three years, the ACCO team has been working with Wunderman Thompson Technology (WTT) to maximise the Optimizely platform to provide best-in-class experiences for end-users and dealers alike.

ACCO and WTT set out to address three key issues the manufacturer faced. The first of these was its UX (user experience), with goals to enhance accessibility, compliance with eCommerce UX best practice guidelines, increase product registration form completions and increase “Where to Buy” conversions to deliver more leads to resellers. The second issue was to streamline ACCOs content localisation as so to free up internal resources to spend more time supporting resellers. The final issue to address was ACCO’s SEO with the team targeting the eCommerce benchmark of 77 to help win more organic traffic.

With Optimizely, WTT were able to significantly enhance ACCO’s performance in all areas, improving the internal workings of the organisation and giving ACCO more control over its content, SEO, and high accessibility standards. Organic ‘Where to Buy’ click events—ACCO Brands’ primary conversion metric—improved by an average of 80% across EMEA. Optimizely Campaign A/B testing helped to improve welcome journey CTRs by 41% in Q1 ‘23 versus Q1 ‘22, driving an increase in “Where to Buy” CTAs from email sessions. Product registration completion rate rose from 52% to 88%, while site health improved by an average of 10% across all countries.

The work that ACCO has put into its digital experiences over the past several years is just part of its commitment to delivering industry-leading consumer experiences. The success that these internal improvements have brought to ACCO’s resellers network is the outcome the company is most proud of, with Marketing Director for ACCO UK & Ireland Elisabete Wells commenting: “Everything we do we do with both our resellers and end users in mind. Our mission as a manufacturer is to provide great products and to help our channel partners offer the best experience possible. The Optimizely platform and our partnership with WTT have enabled us to do that, but what we’re most proud of is that our work has delivered more ‘Where to Buy’ leads than ever to our resellers across Europe. In fact, in the UK, we have delivered 157% more of these leads to our dealers this year already.”

ACCO submitted their project for consideration in the Best Content Experience category of Optimizely’s 2023 UKI Customer Awards in hopes of serving as an example for other businesses of what is possible using the platform. This victory is a testament to the team’s three years of hard work and proof it has truly paid off.

Björn Barnard, Director for Online Strategy at ACCO Brands EMEA, says: “It is great for our work to be recognised by Optimizely in this way. Behind this award sits a dedicated team that strives to ensure that the online experiences that we deliver across all of our brands, in every country, matches the high standards set by our products and the expectations of our consumers and resellers. There’s always more to do but we’re very much on the right path.”

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