Challenge
Every American consumer knows Land O’Lakes. The butter behemoth has been a staple on breakfast tables everywhere for its 100+ years of existence. But what you may not know is that the humble butter brand we all love is actually a thriving leader in all things farming. The farmer-owned cooperative houses multiple big brand names under the Land O’Lakes label, including:
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Winfield United – a crop and farming insights solution
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Trueterra – a brand focused on sustainability and agricultural impact
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Land O’Lakes Dairy Foods – everyone’s favorite dairy purveyor
And last, but certainly not least, Purina animal nutrition. They cater to a wide variety of domesticated species, including chickens, horses, cattle, goats, sheep, and more. It’s safe to say that Purina, and by extension, Land O’Lakes, is a company that cares about the animals and humans alike that they serve.
But last year, they faced a challenge. With such a wide array of animal food products, Purina struggled to create a web experience that addressed each buyers’ unique wants and needs. The content that appeals to a horse owner for example, will have no effect on a dairy farmer. They needed to find a way to boost conversions with a web experience that is personally tailored to each site visitor.
Why Lytics?
The Land O’Lakes request for proposal (RFP) process was extensive. So when evaluating all of their options for a web personalization solution, they did their homework. However, despite speaking with some of the “bigger name” brands, they found Lytics stood out from the pack. Whereas the bigger companies came in and essentially pitched Land O’Lakes every tool they didn’t currently have, Lytics took a different tack. Instead of showing off the breadth of their product offerings, Lytics took the time to understand Land O’Lakes unique goals. The focus was more on creating a partnership than closing a sale.
Furthermore, Land O’Lakes was enamored with Lytics intelligent CDP. Lytics doesn’t just collect data, but actually gives them the tools to action that data through personalization. And Lytics customer service team prides itself on working with their clients at every stage of their personalization journey to make recommendations and ensure that they’re getting the most out of the product.
Finally, the Lytics experience didn’t deceive them with any “gotchas.” For instance “you can get this feature, BUT only if you also buy these features you don’t really need.” Lytics cares only about delivering the insights Land O’Lakes needs to grow their business. It’s a true partnership focused on helping Land O’Lakes achieve the personalized web experience they desire.
The trial run
With any food product, the proof is in the pudding (or the horse feed in this case). In order to see a significant boost in sales, it’s incumbent upon Purina to drive more free trials. So they settle on a test: they decide to target horse owners specifically with a personalized web offer. Using Lytics, they are able to scan all the topics on their site, identify horse-related content, and build out an affinity audience of web visitors who demonstrate an interest in that content. Now they have tangible, behavioral information about otherwise anonymous site visitors. The question then becomes, what do they do with this information?
Purina decides to create a series of web banners on site pages that have the word “horse” in the URL. They then target these banners towards a multi-layer audience of site visitors within the previously defined Horse Affinity group, who are also existing newsletter subscribers (or who have clicked on a newsletter banner and converted or opted out). Finally, for an added layer of refinement, they exclude those who have already signed up for the horse feed trial. The custom experience fires after the first page of a visit, displays for up to 5 pages, and disables when a visitor closes or clicks the CTA.
The goal of this test is simple: to drive more users to the horse feed trial through personalization. In other words, to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. If successful, Purina can use Lytics to personalize the web experience for every unique site visitor, not just horse owners.
Outcome
After a test run of about half a month, the results were staggering. In an industry where a 1% clickthrough rate is considered successful, Purina saw a 28% average click rate on the horse feed free trial. Of that 28% of users who clicked through on the banner ad, 38% actually signed up for the trial. In other words, over a third of the clicks resulted in conversions. That’s an overwhelming success rate.
Given the success of the horse feed trial, Purina saw it fit to expand the experiment beyond a single animal. Using Lytics lookalike audiences, they were able to create similar affinity audiences for every species they cater to. Those audiences were then targeted with similar personalized web experiences, albeit with different ultimate goals (free trial, newsletter signup, content offer, etc). The outcome, again, was unprecedented. The average conversion rate across the myriad offers was just over 30%. Now Purina is able to offer a highly personalized experience to every site visitor, regardless of their animal affinity.
What’s next
Lytics has afforded Purina the opportunity to not only drive customer acquisition, but also keep users on the site longer. Using Lytics, Purina can track exit intent. That is, when a customer moves their mouse to the top of the page to close out the site. Before they’re able to do so, Purina can offer them a piece of content that is relevant to their demonstrated content affinities. Now they can keep that site visitor engaged and increase the likelihood of a conversion.
Finally, the big opportunity that remains on the horizon for Purina is to have Lytics connect to more tools to drive personalization in all of their marketing channels. That’s where Lytics’ newest innovation, Cloud Connect comes in. Cloud Connect is a product that allows Purina to connect their cloud data warehouse with all of their downstream tools. Now instead of only being able to connect their primary data source with built-in activations, they can easily generate highly targeted audiences in their cloud warehouse for use in any of their email, social media, or ad tools.
With Cloud Connect the possibilities for Purina’s personalization are literally endless.
