Humana
Drupal’s ability to integrate facilitates Web Experience Management
It was the kind of problem you want to have. The numbers were in on Humana’s long term lead generating campaign, and they were great. The question was, how to build on this success. With a company-wide rebrand in the works, Humana decided to lead with the campaign’s lifestyle website. The Humana sponsor called MarketBridge, their marketing agency managing the program, and asked for ideas.
MarketBridge brought in their digital partner, Digital Bungalow, and brainstorming ensued. Jason Yarrington, Vice President at Digital Bungalow, remembers, “We had already begun researching alternatives to our in-house .NET templating system. Although we could build great websites with it, the system was not extensible or reusable. We decided now was the time to make the leap to Drupal.”
“Acquia’s support for Drupal was a big factor in our choice. With Acquia behind us, we knew we could support a website of this size on Drupal.”
– Jason Yarrington, Vice President of Professional Services at Digital Bungalow
The program was great at acquiring registrants; the challenge was to keep them coming back to the site. Yarrington explains, “Instead of organized content that registrants could find, we wanted content that would bubble up and find them, based on their interests. We needed a Web Experience Management (WEM) campaign.” Drupal turned out to be the perfect choice for the new functionality.
Yarrington recalls, “With Drupal, there are so many places to go for ideas. Before, we were limited to our four walls. Now suddenly we could pull globally for ideas on how to do things. The community was a big draw for Drupal. We had a great team of developers that brought a lot of thought to everything they did and collaborated well. It was an important part of our culture. We got that same sense of collaboration from the Drupal community.”
Modules, collections of PHP files, extend Drupal’s capabilities, and thousands are freely available from drupal.org. “A problem we had in the past was building everything from scratch. With this site redesign, we had a whole laundry list of functionality to add, allowing registrants to save and to share, making recommendations to them and personalizing content for them. On our platform, we would have quoted a price then gone down the list until the money ran out. With Drupal, we can look at the list and know that 90% of that is already available. And what we do build will be in the form of a module that can be reused down the road.”
Mobile was also a major factor. “The old site was not designed for mobile, and more and more people in this age bracket are using mobile devices to access websites. We want registrants to live with the new site, to use it all day, everywhere, and that means mobile. Drupal has several solutions for mobile functionality, both for responsive design and for native apps.
“Most important for WEM is having a customer master that tracks everything. With it, you can look at segments and individuals and how the various marketing channels contribute to the goal. You tag that all back to one master user, then analyze your different marketing efforts. Drupal is strong enough to be the customer master in a campaign of this size.
“Drupal is also great at integration. Our partners need to use Adobe Site Catalyst for analytics, so we have that integrated into the site. We’ve also integrated with MailChimp email campaigns. In addition to website registrants, we track users generated from other sources and where they originated. All this data is sent to our partners at MarketBridge daily, where they compile it with other data sources to create a full picture of the program’s performance. When we input the processed data back into the site, the site uses it to target personalized content to registrants.”
The new site just launched in May 2012, and it captures data for personalization on three levels. The first level is with registration itself. The second is with an interactive assessment to find the member’s interests. The third level captures how the registrant interacts with content: reading, bookmarking, sharing.
The benefits to Digital Bungalow go beyond the Humana site. Yarrington explains, “In the last eight months, Drupal has transformed our agency. We started as a team building mostly the basics and not the exciting interactive experiences we dreamed of. Now we get the functionality in place quickly with Drupal and spend the majority of our time focusing on great user experiences.
“My vision when I came to Digital Bungalow was to develop a very simple, straightforward, rapid to deploy marketing platform that would integrate with third party tools, like direct mail solutions, MailChimp, Google Analytics. And now with Drupal we have that.”
