This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

 

At Optimizely, we love seeing customers being bold in driving impactful business results with their experiments. To celebrate these inspiring and creative ideas, we are thrilled to announce the finalists and winners of the 2019 Outperform Awards.

 

MOST DRAMATIC BUSINESS IMPACT

 

Summary: HP has been a strategic customer with Optimizely since 2015. In mid-2017, they developed aggressive goals for increasing experimentation velocity by expanding their program globally and set out to double their revenue benefits within two years. By defining a differentiated service offering for digital stakeholders across the company, there are now eight full-time members in the team supporting multiple functional groups across the Americas, EMEA & Asia Pacific markets.

 

After exceeding the two-year targets within the first 12 months, year to date HP has successfully executed over 1000 experiments marking year on year growth of over 65% in experimentation volume and are on track to deliver directly attributable revenue growth of over 30% for 2019.

 

Finalist:  Credit Union Australia, Chris Russell, Senior Manager Digital Optimization

 

MOST CUSTOMER-OBSESSED COMPANY CULTURE

 

Summary:  IBM has been undergoing a methodical digital transformation, injecting technology into business practices, in an effort to provide users the best experiences.

 

Championed by IBM Global Marketing, and led in large part by Ari & Suman’s efforts, experimentation began building momentum and grew from ‘none-to-ton’, with current adoption across 20+ BUs, 6,000+ marketers. Despite the rapid rate of adoption in a relatively short period of time, the internal cultural shift was perhaps the greatest challenge. IBM has always strived to be customer-centric, but an increasingly digital user journey required an otherwise traditional GTM model to adopt a deeper audience-driven methodology. This inevitably paved the way for a comprehensive experimentation program, powered by Optimizely’s technology in conjunction with IBM’s existing tech stack. There is still more to be done, but through Ari, Suman and team, IBM is evolving to meet market demand.

 

Finalist:  The Wall Street Journal, Peter Gray, VP of Product Optimization

 

MOST TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION

 

Summary:  StubHub uses Optimizely Full Stack to experiment deep in their product. By testing multiple iterations of their search engine algorithms, they were able to improve the conversion rate by 20% and increase revenue. StubHub also used Full Stack to test different versions of a new auto-pricing option for sellers. These improvements doubled the rate of sellers using the new auto pricing option which drove a significant lift in sell-through rate. Optimizely impacts StubHub’s whole business, and Marilyn and Todd are the heroes behind this innovation.

 

Finalist:  Hudson’s Bay Co., Ivy Lee, Director of Product & Insights

 

MOST INSPIRING SOCIAL IMPACT 

 

Summary:  Sierra Club, one of the world’s leading environmental nonprofits, has increased online donations by a 830% since 2015, and experimenting with Optimizely has been instrumental in fueling this growth. Partnering with Cro Metrics, they have used Optimizely to run tests around home page design, donation forms, and email signups. After seeing a dramatic improvement with their initial web and form tests (to the tune of two million dollars), Sierra Club has tripled the size of their internal team to nine and are running more complex tests like actions around advocacy, petition signups, and even encouraging members to write letters to Congress.

 

 Congratulations to all of the 2019 Outperform Award winners, finalists, and our customers and partner community for the outstanding work they have accomplished.