Our challenge

To stay relevant, competitive, and meet customer demand, organisations need to respond rapidly. This means constantly optimising the customer digital experience.

Optimizely approached Positive to help it create a campaign proving advanced digital businesses need to evolve from simple A/B testing to continuous experimentation that enables new insights.

Positive analysed extensive social networks to gauge the current understanding of experimentation across European prospects. The research team also interviewed ten Optimizely customers, including HelloFresh and MoneySuperMarket, delving into how experimentation works in practice to uncover key pain points. Optimizely then received a creative and differentiated Point of View (POV) for its European campaign.

Our response

Expanding on the core POV, Positive conducted research across 300 digital experimentation users in 14 European countries and eight sectors to identify the key trends across the continent. Positive then carried out intricate analysis of the findings, discovering three important cohorts on the experimentation maturity scale, and identifying each cohort’s stage on the customer journey. These were: organisations ‘Getting Started,’ those looking to move from ‘Good to Great’ beyond A/B testing and, at the top of the scale, experts asking ‘Where Next?.’ Positive also coined the term ‘the experimentation gap’ to measure the ideal number of experiments needed at each stage.

Next, Positive delivered several multimedia campaign assets based on these real-world customer experiences. These included long-form reports, snackable infographics and webinars to educate European prospects. For the core campaign assets, Positive commissioned market research exploring European segments’ maturity and culture of experimentation. This teased out the experimentation best practices European organisations use to best benefit from experimentation.

The research findings across the three key cohorts and practical next steps were exhaustively used by Optimizely. Positive’s strategy defined the theme and conversation tracks for the 500 delegates of Optimizely’s biggest event, Opticon 2019 Europe.

Positive ghost-wrote the keynote speeches for the Optimizely leadership team, making use of research findings to evidence their points. The research was also presented and referenced in customer presentations, including major high-street retailer H&M.

To maintain momentum after the event, Positive wrote and designed four webinars specifically aimed at different experience levels. This meant Opticon Europe 2019 attendees could seamlessly continue to learn on their return from the event. Positive then went on to create an asset based on experimentation focused on German-speakers titled, ‘Accelerating DACH to Customer Speed’, to benefit Optimizely’s sales efforts in an important market.

The results

Since August 2019, the overall campaign prompted over 2,900 downloads from prospects, which secured over 227 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and 149 Sales Accepted Lead (SALs) for Optimizely, a conversion rate of 66%. In addition, Positive drove high levels of engagement in key regions for Optimizely including UKI, DACH and the Nordics.

Working with Positive, Optimizely exceeded expectations for the ‘Accelerating Europe to Customer Speed’ campaign with downloads reaching over four times the target. MQLs, the fuel of sales, were 58% above forecast.