How VSP, a global eye care leader, increased leads and sales with Magnolia

VSP runs numerous websites for members, clients, doctors and brokers. The Eyefinity website is a gateway for doctors, educating them about industry developments and enabling them to access practice management and laboratory products and services. It plays a crucial role in supporting sales efforts and lead generation.

Prior to Magnolia, VSP was managing content in a variety of ways, from simple static pages to a variety of CMSes. Editors needed to make content changes on Word documents, which were then passed to front-end developers to implement, while back-end developers needed to publish each change. The whole process was cumbersome, costing time and money. VSP needed more flexibility and power to help its business grow.

VSP decided to try Magnolia Community Edition first, particularly because of the ease of managing content. The team were impressed by Magnolia and wanted to roll out a solution that would work for the entire enterprise, allowing it to implement changes easily and scale up to stay ahead of the market.

VSP then decided to go with the Enterprise Edition of Magnolia, particularly because of its scaling abilities, workflow capabilities and multisite features. Magnolia’s app framework enabled it to create custom apps to simplify and speed up everyday functions, while the workflow allowed the marketing teams to organize the right approvals quickly, giving them the ability to go live with changes in minutes rather than weeks.

The VSP marketing teams can now create and edit content independently with Magnolia’s powerful, yet intuitive tools. This means developers can now concentrate on development, while marketing employees can focus on producing engaging content and managing a powerful web presence across multiple sites.

Easy collaboration and increased engagement

Magnolia has made it easier for teams within VSP to collaborate. At Eyefinity, the first company to adopt Magnolia, marketing managers often start with page concepts and then hand them over to designers to polish the layout. Once they have worked their visual magic, they pass on the layout to product managers to add copy. The workflow also enables the marketing teams to get an alert so that they can approve material before it goes live. This allows the marketing teams to work together to come up with a website that meets their needs.

Because Magnolia is easy to use, new users need little or no training and can get up to speed quickly. Since it can be accessed from anywhere, editors can log in and make changes regardless of their location. This increases flexibility and engagement, allowing employees to make important changes even outside office hours.

Endless possibilities

VSP employees appreciate Magnolia’s open-suite approach, which makes developing within Magnolia limitless. Developers can extend and configure as they like, using their knowledge from other systems. This has made it easy to create customizations, from sending a simple email from the system to developing custom page content components and creating a six-eye workflow.

Powerful connectors to key sales and marketing tools

Magnolia makes integrations with Act-On, Salesforce and Google Analytics straightforward. This enables the marketing teams to use their marketing automation tool Act-On to get lead generation forms live within minutes. The contact results go straight into Salesforce for sales teams to follow up in real time, allowing Eyefinity to convert leads efficiently. 

The marketing teams also use Google Analytics to check how successful promotions are, and to gauge whether they need to tweak their efforts to get more traffic. Because Magnolia enables new integrations at any time, Eyefinity can adapt new tools to keep ahead of the market.

Since it started using Magnolia, Eyefinity has been able to work in a more agile way, from developing and deploying a message to testing and improving it. The company has also been able to get much more out of its marketing and development teams. As a result, it’s now able to take cues from customers to develop effective and relevant messages. It’s no surprise that the marketing team has seen an increase in lead generation and sales.

Eyefinity is also using Magnolia to become more mobile-optimized. It is personalizing its content so that its sites can deliver relevant and targeted content to different users, from receptionists to doctors. VSP is now working on moving Marchon.com into Magnolia, along with a complete redesign of the site. It is also planning to move more VSP sites to Magnolia to take advantage of the agility, collaboration and engagement possibilities Magnolia offers.