Sanofi + Magnolia

As an innovative global healthcare company with a presence in approximately 100 countries and a workforce exceeding 100,000 individuals, Sanofi faced a significant digital challenge. The number of websites was continually growing, with each country launching its own web properties. This proliferation of websites created a complex and disjointed online presence, lacking a unified strategy and making effective management and maintenance increasingly difficult.

Moreover, its rapid tech growth had led to a diverse range of systems and applications that proved challenging to integrate and synchronize, resulting in operational complexities and inefficiencies across the company. Over time, this widespread and varied web presence, developed without consistent governance, evolved into a hurdle rather than a strategic advantage. Sanofi could no longer ensure its stability, scalability, and security.

Having recognized this, Sanofi developed a cohesive and unified digital strategy to effectively engage its various target audiences, including patients, consumers, and healthcare professionals (HCPs). This strategy aims to strike a balance between providing optimized digital experiences and maintaining overall consistency at the technology level.

While providing a content hub for future headless projects, the Magnolia DXP offers traditional templating and content delivery, allowing Sanofi to swiftly migrate hundreds of websites from Sitecore, its previous DXP suite, to Magnolia.

Magnolia partner Crescendo efficiently migrated 300 websites in under two years, reaching top speed during the migration for Sanofi's corporate communications team: 70 websites comprising over 7,000 pages were migrated in less than two months, reducing the migration cost per site to a minimum.

Sanofi established a Magnolia training program early in the project with beginner, intermediate, and advanced accreditations. After completing their author training, over 500 business users and 80 agency partners now use Magnolia to manage their web properties self-sufficiently in Magnolia’s intuitive, unified authoring interface. Sanofi’s recent usage statistics show that most users use Magnolia frequently or daily.

A template-based approach with a common global template library gives these disparate teams autonomy over the digital experience for their product, campaign, or region while also applying Sanofi’s brand identity.

Implementing a central content factory introduces a streamlined process in collaboration with agencies, strategically assisting Sanofi with the medical content lifecycle, empowering business users with a comprehensive, unified content strategy, and enabling real collaboration across team boundaries.

As its next major milestone, Sanofi is planning to integrate Veeva Vault MedComms, its vast repository of medical content, seamlessly into the Magnolia platform. The aim is the efficient production and localization of modular content at a massive scale, increasing content velocity by speeding up the approval process and simplifying content updates while ensuring medical accuracy.

Sanofi relies heavily on content personalization for its 40 Healthcare Professional (HCP) portals and capitalizes on integrating user profile data. The process involves the discernment of distinct specialties and therapeutic interests, allowing Sanofi to finely tune the web experiences to resonate with each user's unique needs and preferences. This personalized content delivery is seamlessly facilitated by Akamai, ensuring that HCPs are greeted with relevant and engaging information that enhances their interactions and engagement with the brand.

Aiming to provide a Google-like search experience, Sanofi integrated Algolia on dozens of websites, primarily focusing on its HCP portals. The use cases include simple search, faceted search to categorize content and narrow results by treatment area, and personalized search results for logged-in HCP users. Algolia offered features like typo tolerance, relevance rankings, and rapid real-time responses. Bringing real composability to life, the Magnolia DXP seamlessly integrated with Algolia, using tagging and permissions to tailor content to different user roles and specialties, ultimately enhancing the HCP’s user experience.

Leveraging Magnolia's hybrid headless model, Sanofi utilizes a single DX platform for both traditional and headless content delivery. Following the migration of all web properties, Sanofi's development teams embarked on creating decoupled frontends for sections of sanofi.com and building new versions of HCP portals using the headless approach – all while ensuring a consistent technology stack.

From an authoring perspective, the content creation process for the decoupled frontends was built to be error-proof using pre-defined fields, making content easy to create and fast to push.

Sanofi implemented a comprehensive content strategy through a unified global platform built upon a consistent tech stack. This strategic approach has effectively replaced Sitecore and eradicated six other legacy CMS platforms and shadow IT projects, standardizing Sanofi’s digital experience IT landscape and simplifying its operation and maintenance.

The platform's stability and high-security standards have been paramount to Sanofi's success, ensuring impeccable uptime for both external-facing web properties and the authoring environment, greatly benefiting content creators. Notably, the migration to Magnolia's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has yielded remarkable improvements in bounce and conversion rates as well as SEO, with many websites experiencing an immediate rise in Lighthouse scores and SEO rankings.

Sanofi's satisfaction with Magnolia extends to its blend of out-of-the-box functionality and the platform's flexibility for customization, catering to the brand’s unique requirements. Anna Majewska, Director for Sanofi Digital Commerce and Global Web Product Line Lead, highlighted the significant time and cost efficiencies of over 20% realized with Magnolia, as teams found content and page creation notably easier and faster than in the previous solution, accelerating adoption, content velocity, and digital delivery overall.