Company: Optimizely
Entry submitted by: Amanda Swan (amanda_optly) Community Manager
Community: The Optiverse Community (https://community.optimizely.com/)
Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch
Optimizely is the world's leading experience optimization platform, providing A/B testing, targeting and multichannel optimization for websites and mobile apps. The platform's ease of use and speed of deployment empowers organizations to conceive of and run experiments that help them make better data-inspired decisions. Optimizely meets the diverse needs of more than 8,000 customers looking to deliver connected experiences to their audiences across channels. To date, those customers have created and delivered more than 7 billion optimized visitor experiences. To learn more, visit optimizely.com.
The goal of our Community promotion
We live in an increasingly digital and fast-paced world. Much of our daily interaction now exists online. When we’re unsure, we resort to Google or Quora. When we need help, we file a support ticket and expect our question to be answered instantaneously. What’s the challenge with this reality? It’s easy to forget that real humans are answering our support tickets, or responding to our community discussions.
So, for the 1 year anniversary of Optimizely’s community, Optiverse, I want to showcase the talented and fearless people who participate in our community every day. I created a weeklong campaign that was centered around the most crucial part of any community: its members. The goals of the promotion were 1) to make our community members proud that they are a part of Optiverse, and 2) to increase awareness about our community and encourage new registrations.
Our promotion strategy
We sent a message to our top community contributors and asked them to take a picture of themselves holding a sign that follows the prompt: “I am _______.” Each of these individual photos were used to create a video that emphasizes the idea -- “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Each unique community member has an impact on the success of the Optiverse.
To distribute the video, we sent an email to all existing Community members and a separate emails to our customer base who have not yet joined the Community. Each had a unique message and CTA. We used Optimizely to drive each segment to a personalized community landing page.
We gave each of the featured members their own “social pack” to make it easy for them to share on social networks. The pack included their photo, suggested tweets and LinkedIn posts.
Over the course of the week, Optimizely shared the journey of the Optiverse on Twitter. We shared some data highlights of the past year, but the main focus around the people (see screenshots below). We posted pictures of our VIPS alongside quotes about why they love the Optiverse. Typically, “year in review” campaigns are centered around all the statistics, data points, and numbers that convey success, so this approach was unique.
Finally, as an added incentive, we had a “birthday gift giveaway” running all week long for certain actions. As part of the week-long campaign, we were choosing random winners who posted, shared a testing story, or shared the community across social networks. This was a fun way to reward our top members and to involve those who aren’t always so active.
Promotion results
Over the course of the week, we saw large increases in posts, unique visitors, pageviews, and registrations. Here are a few results:
- Engagement (posts + kudos) increased 125% as compared to an average week in the prior month.
- Registrations increased 81% as compared to an average week in the prior month.
- Page Views increased 66% as compared to an average week in the prior month.
- Visits increased 71% as compared to an average week in the prior month.
- Unique Visitors increased 75% as compared to an average week in the prior month.
Our video
