UL Personalization

Implementation and Campaign Creation

Who is UL?

The premier authority on applied safety science, UL’s safety certification and compliance testing services help designers, engineers, and manufacturers bring their products to market in an efficient and trusted manner.

The challenge

Target UL Lighting’s hub page to provide a personalized content experience for multiple audiences. We analyzed and identified an effective personalization use case for UL’s Lighting Safety Testing and Certification page. We configured UL's Acquia Personalization platform with their website to launch their first ever personalization campaign. The result? A 137% conversion rate increase in lead generation.

Don't risk budget on new tools

Personalization enhances current systems for an even higher return

Personalization is a big content marketing buzzword for 2023. It promises to completely transform the way companies do web marketing by optimizing customer journeys in a way that speaks directly to differing audiences. But after talking with some of our partners and clients, it seems as if personalization hasn't been pushed to the full extent of its promise yet. There’s a lot of chatter, but where are the actual case studies? The results?

First and foremost, this project was done to help our good friends at UL implement a solid personalization campaign to increase conversion rates and enhance user journeys. But what it ended up showing us was the true power of personalization. The key takeaway? Enterprises don't have to invest in new digital tools to be successful. Personalization can be implemented at scale to get the most out of your current systems. As you'll see in the story below, the slightest tweak to content can completely change the way customers interact with your site - and in a really big way.

The situation

Hounder worked with our good friends at Acquia to bring UL a personalized content experience on their Lighting Safety Testing and Certification page. A brief review of their site analytics gave us the insight we needed to start formulating a strategy.

We found that conversion rates average approximately 7% (6% file downloads and 1% form fills) of monthly traffic. As a primary hub for UL Lighting, this page has a lot of content supporting several different user journeys. To build an effective personalization strategy, each of these journeys should be parsed and directed at their corresponding customer segments, begging the questions:

How can we provide a more personalized experience to these different audiences?
How can we give them the content or resources they are looking for?
How do we increase overall conversions?

Our process

Identify customer segments

We split our target audience into two customer segments: Audience X and Audience Y.

The right personalization campaign would personalize UL Lighting by splitting the page’s content into two specific, customer-driven stories that most effectively resonate with these audiences. We needed to show these segments the content they're looking for.

Download our personalization worksheet to kickstart your next campaign

Learn about our crawl, walk, run approach to personalization

Personalization is a combination of hard data and deep research

Hounder’s marketing team performed both quantitative and behavioral analytics research to identify desired content for both Audience X and Audience Y. When priming for personalized content storytelling for two segments or more, always start with the data and pay close attention to the customer behaviors being described.

Data and analytics tools we used to scope audience behaviors

Google Analytics was used to segment the audience behavior to identify the different interests and engagement in each segment.
Hotjar was used to provide visual insights into what content visitors were most interested in. By connecting these insights with the data found in Google Analytics, we produced the following recommendations.

Arranging personalized data

Google Analytics and Hotjar gave us exactly the data we needed to start putting together more effective user journeys for UL’s customers. Here’s what we found after analyzing the data for Audiences X and Y:

Audience X's behavioral data

Audience X makes up 60% of the page traffic
Audience X are less engaged:Spend less time on the page, less scrolling the page, appear to make up their mind before scrolling the page.
Audience X is 3 times less likely to convert
When they do convert, Audience X is 90% more likely to download a resource than submit a contact form.
If they leave the page, they go to another UL Lighting page or go back to internal site search.

Audience Y's behavioral data

Audience Y make up 40% of the page traffic
The majority of Audience Y is very engaged: Scrolling the page content, looking for resources like downloads, ebooks, or webinars.
Audience Y is more likely to convert than Audience X.
Audience Y is more likely to download a resource than submit a contact form.
Audience Y is primarily interested in resource downloads.
10% of Audience Y converts (10% Conversion Rate)

What is Audience X thinking? The majority are looking for content to get started in their certification journey, and/or are looking for resources to help them solve current questions or problems.

What is Audience Y thinking? The majority are looking for resources such as ebooks and webinars to help them with a current question or problem, and are more likely to reach out to UL directly.

The result?

A 65% increase in lead generation!

70% increase in conversion rate for file downloads from Audience Y

15% increase in file downloads from Audience Y

75% increase in conversion rate for contact form submissions from both both Audience X and Y

137% increase in form submissions from Audience X

Personalization is a goldmine hiding in plain site

So, what did we learn? The slightest personalized tweak on UL's Lighting Safety Testing and Certification page made all the difference. No new tech, no need for grant money to fund the next big project. A simple change in perspective and storytelling on a single page (mind you, UL's site has more than 1,000 pages) completely changed the way customers interact. Personalization is a goldmine hiding in plain site, and is exactly the direction companies should be taking in order to better feed the fire of their marketing game.