Supernova Award Category
The Problem
Aspire was looking for a better way to communicate its investment in people, processes and technology capabilities. However, its existing corporate site, which is also a gateway to its customer portal, was designed using WordPress, a platform that didn’t support or represent the company’s vision and goals. In addition to scalability and security concerns, WordPress required managing more than 10 disjointed sites—a setup insufficient to serve Aspire’s broad base of customers and prospects. As the new Chief Marketing Officer and SVP at Aspire, Shelia Reed decided to develop a new website from scratch—one that would reflect critical changes in brand and strategy while taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies. The team also wanted to build and integrate MVC widgets, which would enable them to create custom functionality and drop it into page templates and individual pages.
The Solution
Aspire and Bayshore Solutions worked to envision, design, develop and market the brand’s new online presence, consolidating 10 separate websites with more than 100 alias domains, and a corporate domain that was changed to AspireOnline.com—designed to preserve an uninterrupted navigation flow with its hundreds of thousands of users. Leveraging Sitefinity CMS and Kendo UI® by Progress, the new site accomplishes several goals:
• Position Aspire as the growing market leader in the smart retirement solutions industry
• Offer new and innovative resources and tools to increase customer engagement and conversion
• Improve the directed paths for target audience groups with the sub-goals of increasing communication and conversion
• Enable a subscription-based portal for richer content, online proposal generation and value-added content not offered in the main areas of the site
The results
“We knocked it out of the park with the new site. With the help of Sitefinity CMS and Kendo UI, we built an awardwinning website that increases productivity, scalability and digital marketing efficiencies,” said Shelia Reed, Chief Marketing Officer and SVP, Aspire Financial Services. “We’ve also increased our self-sufficiency by enabling staff to update web content without depending on a skilled web developer—and that enables us to get content to market faster.”
Metrics
Launched in 2013 with subsequent build-outs, AspireOnline.com now has an average of 75,000 monthly users. In the first month after its launch:
• Website visits grew 193%
• Mobile phone visitors grew 385%
• The website delivered 111 qualified leads
In just three months:
• All traffic increased by 253%
• Visit duration grew 79%
• Bounce rate decreased 56%
Since its launch, the new website has merited numerous industry awards, including a 2014 Gold ADDY in the Tampa AAF American Advertising Awards for design and creative excellence in a B-to-B services website, a Silver in the 2014 American Business “Stevie” Awards competition and two 2014 Horizon Awards: Gold Honors for Financial Services websites and Silver Honors for Responsive/ Mobile websites, among many others. Continued customer feedback about the impressive and informative website is testimony to its success, as well.
The Technology
The team used Kendo UI to enrich the site with graphical elements such as ROI calculators and calendars. They built an MVC widget for the main navigation.
Because the new site is built on Sitefinity CMS, Aspire’s web administrators can easily and instantly manage and update it. Sitefinity CMS also enables enterprise expansion and scaling, multiple page type templates, HTML content input through a WYSIWYG editor, user and user role-based website management and permission-based security.
Disruptive Factor
A unique feature of the Aspire website design is the custom implementation of the InvestDesignSM Center advisor and TPA portal, a robust proposal generator to support clients and enable a professional, interactive and white-labeled presentation to end users. Bayshore Solutions' developers leveraged the Sitefinity CMS mobile module and integrated Bootstrap into master pages, a front-end web development framework that helps improve responsiveness. The scalable infrastructure of the Sitefinity platform enabled the developers to build multiple lead generation tools and automate data capture for daily proposals, while taking advantage of the platform’s advanced user role controls to increase efficiency without jeopardizing security.