Land O’Lakes boosts conversion rate by 38% with Lytics CDP personalization

Land O’Lakes is a leader in the agricultural industry, and Land O’Lakes Dairy Food’s products have been a staple on U.S. breakfast tables for more than a century. The farmer-owned cooperative houses multiple leading brand names under the Land O’Lakes label, including Purina animal nutrition. 

Purina caters to a wide variety of domesticated species, including chickens, horses, cattle, goats and sheep, and was challenged by creating a web experience that could address disparate audiences, and cater to each buyers’ unique wants and needs. The content that appeals to a horse owner, for example, would not be relevant or interesting to a dairy farmer. 

To boost conversions and free trials, Purina wanted to create a web experience that was personally tailored to each site visitor. Their goals were to improve personalization and use of behavioral data, with the overall aim of boosting customer engagement and conversions. 

Land O’Lakes began research for a web personalization solution, and after an extensive RFP process, found that Lytics, a Contentstack company, stood out from the pack. Lytics real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) does more than simply collect data—it gives marketers tools to put that data to work through personalization. Lytics also beat the competition in terms of customer service—by taking the time to understand Land O’Lakes unique goals, Lytics offered a solution that met their specific needs. 

The Purina team started with a test project to make sure Lytics was a good fit. By targeting horse owners with a personalized web offer, they would attempt to increase free trial adoption for this segment. 

Using Lytics, Purina scanned all the assets on their website, identified horse-related content, and built out an affinity audience of web visitors who demonstrated an interest in that content. With this process, Purina was able to transform anonymous site visitors into a specific cohort using its existing and untapped behavioral data. 

Next, Purina created a series of web banners on site pages which included the word “horse” in the URL. These banners were targeted to newsletter subscribers within the horse affinity cohort, screening to exclude those who had already signed up to a trial of horse feed in the past. The custom experience was triggered at the first visit, displayed the content for up to 5 pages, and disabled when a visitor closed or clicked the CTA.

Within two weeks, Purina saw a 29% average click rate on the custom banners, and within that group 38% signed up for the free trial, more than a third of users. 

With the success of the trial, Purina has since adopted Lytics to personalize across their website. Using Lytics Lookalike Audiences, they have easily replicated similar affinity audiences for every type of animal owner they serve, and now target buyers according to specific business goals, with endless possibilities available. One group has been targeted for a newsletter sign-up initiative for example, while another has been given a specific content offer. The average conversion rate across all offers is 30%. 

As well as driving customer acquisition and personalization, Purina is using Lytics to track exit intent and keep visitors on the site for longer. When a customer moves their mouse to the top of the page to leave the website, Purina now offers them a piece of content that is relevant to their demonstrated content affinities, re-engaging them on the website and increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Today, Purina can use Lytics to offer a highly personalized web experience for every unique site visitor. Their next steps are to use Lytics Cloud Connect to connect their cloud data with all of their downstream tools, easily generating highly targeted audiences in their cloud warehouse to use for email, social media, or advertising. 

Key wins for Land O’Lakes include: 

• Data-driven optimization: Instead of anonymous site visitors, Land O’Lakes’ brand Purina can now identify cohorts and audiences within its customers, targeting the right content to relevant buyers at the right time. 
• Improved conversion rates: More than one third of the audience who engaged with the content signed up for the free trial after Purina used web personalization, compared with a 1% industry average for generic marketing. 
• Boosted customer engagement: By experimenting with the use of targeted content, Purina was able to encourage 3% of customers with exit intent to stay on the website and re-engage.