Published on by Meghan Goetz, Director of Marketing
Top Class Actions turned to Crowd Favorite for a complete digital transformation journey that included discovery, strategy, implementation, and roll-out. The result was a client that went from having a business vision without the technical expertise to realize that vision, to a client empowered with a digital strategy and a DXP solution capable of delivering personalized experiences, in multiple countries, across several channels that would scale to meet their aggressive five-year business goals.
In 2008, Top Class Actions founder Scott Hardy recognized a need for consumers to have access to reliable and actionable information concerning class action litigation. This led his company to hire journalists to report the truth about consumer injustices and cement Top Class Actions as the expert in class action knowledge.
Just over a decade after its founding, leadership at Top Class Actions wanted to think bigger and drive their mission to help even more consumers, in more countries, without compromising their “content first” model. The executive leadership at Top Class Actions had an excellent business vision, but lacked the expertise to develop a digital roadmap that could match their ambitious goal of being able to engage 10x monthly visitors. They needed a digital partner for their journey.
Building a Digital Transformation Roadmap
Through a series of virtual workshops, Crowd Favorite built a detailed roadmap highlighting potential opportunities (in both the short and long term) and areas of improvement. Crowd Favorite’s expertise in IT infrastructure, Compliance (accessibility, GDPR and CCPA), user engagement, governance and process optimization helped Top Class Actions conceptualize their multi-year digital transformation in terms of incremental and iterative projects. This work led to several swimlanes that focused in specific areas such as newsletter strategy, content workflow, performance, and accessibility. Each possible solution was also presented in terms of level of effort (LOE) and return on investment (ROI) to allow Top Class Actions to have a deeper understanding of the priorities and level of effort.
To increase conversions and audience engagement, Crowd Favorite created a much deeper audience segment strategy, and started the longer process of sorting those segments. This intricate and complex task formed a solid foundation for the overall strategy because it touched every part of site visitor engagement and interaction. Once the foundation had been built, further newsletter improvements were able to be implemented such as user audits, sender A/B testing, UX redesigns, and automation of newsletter content based on website engagement.
Creating a Successful Process
The next goal was to reduce overhead and complexity while ensuring content could be assigned, drafted, reviewed, and published efficiently. Crowd Favorite identified a strategy for a “one to many” content workflow, where content is drafted, reviewed, published, and managed in one location, then pushed to one or more locations. This supports each international website in a dynamic manner while maintaining the strategic focus of each business segment.
Furthermore, in the prior content workflow, journalists worked directly inside WordPress, which risked crashing the website with one wrong click. Crowd Favorite moved the website to the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) and an API connection to Creatio, providing greater visibility, control, and automation for content creators without risking website usability issues.
A Focus on Accessibility & Performance
Crowd Favorite also developed a blueprint for SEO, performance, and accessibility fixes to Top Class Actions’ website. Once content creation was moved outside of WordPress it became possible to address overbearing plugins, like WP Bakery, and content tagging (loading over 73k content tags in the site XML) which were causing load times and overall performance issues. Overall, Crowd Favorite was able to reduce page load times by 88.3% and page size by 40.1%. The largest improvement in speed performance can be attributed to Crowd Favorite’s SpeedDaemon tool, which achieved a whopping 84% of the overall speed improvements. Crowd Favorite also laid the groundwork for GDPR, CCPA, and ADA compliance.
Leading with Best Practices
Crowd Favorite believes strongly that the end result of the digital journey should result in the client having the freedom, knowledge, and resources to work with any agency. Crowd Favorite identified and resolved 9,101 PHP sniff violations, which represent deviations from pre-defined coding standards. Now all of top Class Actions’ code adheres to industry standards, enabling them to easily work on any future project with multiple developers, without relying on specific agencies or incurring the cost of untangling nonstandard code.
Digital Roadmap for the Future
Crowd Favorite delivered a clean blueprint for how to grow from a Web Content Management System (WCMS) to a fully functional Digital Experience Platform (DXP) allowing Top Class Actions to extend and engage their customer and site visitor relationships in the same way the top fortune companies are doing today. The strategy ensured that the site would not enter into a maintenance period that would interrupt active engagements or inhibit the team’s ability to continue publishing live content; all while achieving the scalability needed and automation required for the upcoming international market expansion
The result of this blueprint was clear and concise, with a short, medium and long term strategy, that was highly actionable, measurable, and met the business objectives for Top Class Actions. This led Top Class Actions to continue the partnership with Crowd Favorite as an extension of their technical team and they asked Crowd Favorite to assist with implementation of the outlined strategy.
At Crowd Favorite, we understand Digital Transformations are a journey different for each company. We work to create a roadmap that aligns with your business goals. Our team brings established and scaling brands to digital optimization through our renowned digital strategy, design, development and digital support services. If you’d like help with getting started or need a partner to work alongside you through your digital transformation, please reach out to us.
