From rebrand to relaunch: Optimizely’s digital transformation

On the heels of a successful site relaunch and the flood of internal requests that were guaranteed to follow, those at the helm of the new Optimizely.com came up for air as many teams do.

What now?  

Bigger than a rebrand 

The myriad of tasks that consumed many an Optimizer's workload for the past year had come to a stage of fruition, and in this natural pause we reflected. 

In November 2019, Episerver welcomed Idio, which would become Intelligence Cloud. Then, Insite was also introduced in December of the same year to add best-in-class B2B commerce capabilities. By the time Episerver acquired Optimizely in October 2020, it created the industry’s most advanced digital experience platform (DXP), which was only made more complete by the Zaius customer data platform (CDP) offerings gained in March 2021.  

At this point, teams knew a thing or two about merging companies and systems—but this was different. The companies were bigger, capabilities were expanding and there was more at stake.   

Multiple company messages and purposes create branding headaches, so we had two options:

1. Methodically approach complex initiatives for the next 18 months, or...
2. Redesign and move fast.

After gaining board agreement to merge sites in November 2020, the verdict was in, but how fast was fast?  

Site consolidation was inevitable, but we were doing much more than that. We were performing a McKinsey style, multi-million-dollar reorganization disguised as a web relaunch. Multiple teams, brands, websites and unconsolidated views of customer data needed to come together.

Two marketing automation platforms, two Salesforce automation platforms and a plethora of other ancillary technologies to name a few. 

Talking to customers with multiple business accounts, names, with multiple representatives calling them, etc., was not an option operationally, so when the Salesforce team committed to an August 2021 relaunch, other teams including digital marketing matched the aggressive deadline.  

Relaunching Optimizely.com 

Research needed to be done to form a business case for a single brand—what would it be? 

Wanting to avoid a complete renaming, we considered a new iteration of Episerver or using Optimizely. We needed to bring Episerver into the future or position Optimizely as a newly equipped DXP. We needed to truly understand our audience and not assume we saw an obvious path forward.  

After much discovery work that will be explored with detail in future posts, mapping collective content, measuring search performance and analyzing traffic, Optimizely indicated stronger value as a brand with less risk considering their disciplined presence in a key growth market, North America. 

To quickly ramp up rebranding efforts, we launched a new color palate, logo and typography in April 2021.  

Simultaneously, the site relaunch and consolidation prioritization began. Partners like Vertic, Organic, the digital marketing team and the product marketing team made consolidating over 14 domains, 80 stakeholder voices and roughly 7,000 page URLs possible.  

Throughout this process, experience using our own products and what we’ve learned alongside customers helped guide rebranding, consolidation, migration and a unified launch. 

We needed to position this knowledge within the greater digital strategy conversation and showcase how our products directly catalyze great digital experiences.  

More on how we optimize 

Projects like these don’t happen in a vacuum, and our success is attributed to embedding principles of collaboration and continuous improvement within not only our products, but what we do and how we do it.  

We’d like to share how we optimize, as we optimize—because we aren’t done. In the posts that follow, you can expect candid interviews from our teams behind the curtain, in-depth posts about obstacles we encounter, best practices, quick videos on experiments we run and more. 

Our goal is to help you realize your digital potential from where you are, wherever that is on your digital journey.