WHITE PAPER

Web Content Management

ROI Measurement

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Table of Contents

Introduction ....................................................................................................... 2

WCM Implementation Costs ............................................................................. 3

When to Calculate Web Content Management ROI Measurement................................ 4

ROI Measurement Criteria .............................................................................................. 4

Relative Advantage: Improved Efficiencies ..................................................... 5

Publishing Efficiencies .................................................................................................... 5

Improved Customer Service ........................................................................................... 6

Regulatory Penalty Avoidance........................................................................................ 6

Hardware Consolidation ................................................................................................. 6

Relative Advantage: New Revenue Streams ................................................... 8

Increased Engagement and Conversion ........................................................................ 8

Cross-Selling and Up-Selling Through Personalization ................................................. 8

Relative Advantage: Improved Online Branding ........................................... 11

Drive Brand Equity Through Consistency And Proactive Management ....................... 11

Brand Consistency Across Multi-Site And Multi-Lingual Deployments ........................ 12

Brand Consistency Across Multi-Channel Marketing ................................................... 12

Relative Advantage: Faster Time-To-Market ................................................. 14

Quicker Reaction To Competitors’ Initiatives ................................................................ 14

Business-To-Business-To-Consumer (B2b2c) Scenarios ............................................ 15

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 16

Additional Resources ...................................................................................... 17

Webinars: ...................................................................................................................... 17

Tools: ............................................................................................................................ 17

Additional White Papers: .............................................................................................. 17

Appendix I – Hypothetical Company’s WCM Investment Calculator ........... 18

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Introduction

Companies in a variety of vertical industries are rapidly adopting WCM

systems, and every vertical has its unique set of business drivers. Media and

entertainment companies turn to WCM for content delivery and monetization

(digital advertising, digital video, digital signage, in-game advertising,

podcasts, etc.), while global brands are investing in WCM to extend their

brands digitally both far and wide (i.e., cross-device/platform, social media,

transactional marketing, etc.). Financial services, government, business-to-

business (B2B), manufacturers, and healthcare/pharmaceutical companies

are also investing heavily in the WCM category.

While there’s still room for significant growth in the category, by all accounts, we’re

entering the late-majority phase of WCM adoption. Businesses that fail to seriously consider

how a WCM solution can drive business value will soon find themselves at a significant

competitive disadvantage.

Web content management systems (WCM) have the capacity to significantly improve

customer engagement and satisfaction (both internal and external) and deliver substantial

financial returns.

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WCM Implementation Costs

Before entering a discussion of the ROI

of WCM, it’s important to lay the

foundation. Therefore, we’ll start with a

high-level breakdown of WCM costs, to

include software licensing, software

maintenance, hardware, hosting &

bandwidth, installation, implementation

and ongoing development support. For

more details on this topic, see, “How to Determine Total Cost of Ownership

of WCM/CMS Projects,” December 2010, Siteworx, Inc.

WCM implementation and annual maintenance costs can vary widely depending on a

company’s size and needs. For a small to mid-size company, license size might range from

$100,000 - $150,000, with implementation costs of around three times that figure, for total

implementation costs of approximately $500,000. Open source systems typically are license-

free, but require greater implementation costs.

Enterprise customers, such as Fortune 500 companies with multi-site deployment and

additional complex needs, may need to budget up to $1,000,000 for a WCM license, with

implementation costs of three times that amount or greater. Support and maintenance fees

from the software provider can be expected to run twenty percent of licensing costs in order

to keep software up to date with patches, hotfixes and upgrades. Additional ongoing costs

include developers and system administrators for ongoing customization and support,

whether those services are provided in-house or by a services partner.

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WHEN TO CALCULATE WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT ROI MEASUREMENT

WCM represents a significant investment, which is why a comprehensive understanding of

return on investment (ROI) measurement is vital. Ideally, companies will conduct an initial

ROI calculation prior to their first implementation. This calculation can be difficult given the

significant unknowns associated with re-engineering business processes and understanding

target audience needs. However, an attempt should be made to create a baseline from which

to assess future scope and enhancement decisions.

There are two other scenarios under which an ROI assessment might prove beneficial:

If a WCM has already been implemented in specific business areas within the organization

and additional business areas are considering adoption, or when a business is considering

integration of new digital capabilities (email, mobile, social media, etc.) into an existing

WCM.

ROI MEASUREMENT CRITERIA

When calculating ROI for WCM, Siteworx recommends examining four key areas of

relative advantage:

Improved efficiencies resulting from publishing efficiencies, reduced

customer service expenditures, regulatory penalty avoidance and

hardware consolidation

Increased revenue generated by improving engagement metrics on

landing pages, conversion rates in sales funnel, presentation

sophistication in new marketing channels and cross- and up-sell

percentages after initial sale

Improved online branding through reduced concurrent redesign costs,

streamlined multi-site management and multi-channel campaign

management support, such as social media and email

Faster time-to-market, including first mover advantage, enhanced

competitive reaction time and benefits in B2B2C scenarios.

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Relative Advantage: Improved Efficiencies

PUBLISHING EFFICIENCIES

When considering how to measure publishing efficiencies, it’s important to ask the question,

―How much time does it take to publish a new piece of digital content within my

organization?‖ With minimal analysis, you may be surprised to learn that incremental costs

of publishing can be excessive. It’s not unusual to find that large organizations require as

much as 80 hours per piece of content without the aid of a WCM system.

If 80 hours per piece of content sounds like a high estimate, consider how many

organizational layers each piece of content must travel: a writer, editor, manager (which may

include different managers from multiple levels of management in varying departments), and

legal. For multi-language sites, add translation times. All this effort takes place, of course,

before the project even reaches a designer. Next, a designer will create the front-end look

and feel of the content, and a developer or multiple developers will need to create front-end

HTML and CSS and back-end database integrations as necessary. Then, the content will be

published to Web and database servers.

A ―best in class‖ WCM tool which effectively enables every individual to complete their

required tasks efficiently and with minimal friction, can help companies reduce this time to

as little as 20 hours per piece of content. A well-managed financial services company that

rigorously analyzed its publishing process discovered that it was spending 320 hours (or 2

Improved efficiencies, including publishing efficiencies, reduced customer service

expenditures, regulatory penalty avoidance and hardware consolidation, are the primary

driver for the majority of WCM implementations.

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months of labor) on every piece of content generated. Capturing this wasted time can

translate into phenomenal financial savings on a monthly basis.

IMPROVED CUSTOMER SERVICE

Reduced customer service costs can also

serve as a source of ROI for WCM

investments. For example, visit Bank of

America’s help page. The first item listed on

the site concerns how to find a routing

number. This is a very simple question to

answer, and by making the solution easily

findable for users on the website, Bank of

America reduces a large number of

unnecessary calls to its customer service

department. Companies with call centers can

reduce their top-ten most frequent call center

questions by placing the answers to those

questions in Frequently Asked Questions pages or help updates on their website. While these

savings are not as significant as those resulting from reduced publishing efficiencies, they

can be extremely relevant in industries such as telecommunications, where call center

support is a significant cost driver.

REGULATORY PENALTY AVOIDANCE

A company’s inability to change or remove content from its website within a short amount

of time can have substantial financial repercussions. One financial services company

approached Siteworx for WCM implementation after being repeatedly penalized for content

it was unable to change at the request of regulators. The client was routinely audited by all

50 states on insurance content on its websites and was facing regulatory penalties to the tune

of $50,000 - $100,000 each month due to its slow response to auditor requests to remove or

modify site content. A WCM implementation that allows rapid and efficient updates to web

content can immediately save costs for companies that are suffering similar unnecessary

regulatory penalties.

HARDWARE CONSOLIDATION

WCM implementation has noteworthy IT cost benefits with regard to potential hardware

consolidation via the cloud. Enterprise-class WCM products’ sophisticated out-of-the-box

clustering capabilities make quickly scaling capacity much easier than for organizations

relying on out-dated WCM solutions or even web servers serving static HTML content.

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To understand how a cloud deployment model can translate to significant financial savings,

consider sites that experience seasonal variation in their levels of Web traffic. Tax

companies, for example, have more traffic between January and April than between May and

December, and media sites will experience peaks in Web traffic based on current events.

Using an on-premise only model, companies are forced to manage the hardware,

infrastructure and bandwidth associated with supporting peak volume during non-peak

periods. With a cloud deployment, companies can throttle these variables up or down based

on their actual month-by-month usage. This flexible deployment model enables companies

to ramp up server capacity during periods of increased traffic, without having to pay for peak

charges during off-peak times.

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Relative Advantage: New Revenue Streams

INCREASED ENGAGEMENT AND CONVERSION

WCMs can help an organization tailor its website content

towards users arriving at the site through targeted

landing pages. This tactic results in increased time on

site and reduced bounce rates. In addition to the direct

benefits of improved user engagement, low bounce rates

can boost the site in Google’s organic rankings, which

can ultimately improve organic site traffic.

WCMs can also enable easier online site testing and more effective improvements to the site.

Online testing, such as A/B testing or multivariate testing, can help identify untapped

opportunities for conversions. In Siteworx’ experience, companies can gain increases in

conversion as much as 67 percent in direct conversions, and 33 percent in cross-selling and

up-selling through personalization.

CROSS-SELLING AND UP-SELLING THROUGH PERSONALIZATION

The ability to cross-sell and up-sell on Web and mobile properties in a largely automated

manner can be a critical revenue driver for organizations. The American Diabetes

Association (ADA) provides a great example of cross-selling and up-selling in the way it has

chosen to present additional advertising content through its WCM.

The ADA website features multiple promotions throughout its site that are initially set to a

baseline of standard promotions. However, as the WCM ―learns‖ more about each individual

user and the user’s behaviors and preferences, it tailors the promotions to match the user’s

interests. For example, after buying a healthy eating cookbook from the site, the user would

likely be presented with two promotions relating to cookbooks, rather than a more generic or

unrelated promotion. Such promotions present engaging opportunities which promote user

Additional revenue, including increased engagement from reduced bounce rates and

increased conversion rates, cross-selling and up-selling through personalization and

revenue from expansion across additional devices is the second-most driver of WCM

implementations. In the current economic environment, who isn’t looking for new

revenue streams?

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engagement and conversion. Cross-selling and up-selling work in effectively the same way

from a Web perspective – and they both can take your brand from cookbooks to cash in the

coffers.

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MULTI-CHANNEL/MULTI-MODE: ADDITIONAL DEVICES (PHONE, TABLET, TV)

WCM implementations can also drive increased revenue by opening up new engagement

channels, such as mobile phone and tablet devices. Companies that don’t optimize for

mobile access can typically expect to see their mobile phone and tablet traffic to account for

only single-digit percentages of total site traffic. Sophisticated WCMs can deliver mobile-

optimized user interfaces that are tailored to each individual device. With a better user

interface, users stay engaged longer, and become more likely to convert. It is not unusual to

see conversion rates from mobile devices double or even triple within a few months

following a WCM implementation.

A Pew Internet American Life Study found that the fastest age range of smartphone adoption

is occurring among 45- to 65-year olds whose primary adoption driver is usability: mature

users want to perform tasks faster and make their day-to-day lives easier. Siteworx worked

collaboratively with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group to build a mobile experience around the

process of finding and booking a hotel room, making the process far easier for its luxury-

seeking, jet-setting clientele. The implementation was so successful that it was cited as a best

practice case study of brand-appropriate mobile experiences by independent research firm,

Forrester Research, Inc.1 When Mandarin Oriental implemented their mobile site, mobile

site traffic increased from 4% to 12% of overall traffic. The luxury hotel brand achieved

breakeven and started to earn additional top-line revenue within just six weeks through the

additional bookings secured through the mobile site.

1 ―Case Study: Mandarin Oriental Creates a Brand-Appropriate Mobile Experience,‖ June

10, 2010, Forrester Research, Inc.

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Relative Advantage: Improved Online Branding

DRIVE BRAND EQUITY THROUGH CONSISTENCY AND PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT

A user’s overall experience with and impression of a brand in the digital space, while

difficult to quantify, affects that brand’s bottom line in ways the brand might not even

recognize.

When a top-five global management consulting firm engaged Siteworx for website redesign,

its perception was that potential clients were not utilizing the site to evaluate or purchase

their services. Rather, the company believed that referrals were coming from contacts within

its business network and from colleagues of clients. When Siteworx spoke with contacts at

the Fortune 100 companies who composed the consultancy’s client base, however, a

different portrait emerged.

While initial referrals mattered, 80 percent of prospective clients were relying on the

corporate website to identify the firm’s primary lines of business, expertise and examples of

thought leadership, such as white papers. Through this analysis, the firm recognized that an

unpolished brand experience online, even though the site itself was not necessarily

generating conversions, could be a ―disqualifier‖ for their highly-selective business buyers.

Leading brands should recognize that for many buyers—both business and consumer—their

website is the modern-day equivalent of a well-designed business card in the hands of their

Improved online branding through concurrent redesign, effective multi-site management

and multi-channel campaign management also serves as an important motivation for

WCM investment. The utilization of email campaign management through WCM, in

particular, can lead to significant savings.

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sales team. Your buyers will most likely seek you out online and will develop perceptions

about the quality of your products and services based on what they find–WCM

implementations enable brands to control their brand presence, regardless of the number of

sites or sub-brands within their brand family.

BRAND CONSISTENCY ACROSS MULTI-SITE AND MULTI-LINGUAL DEPLOYMENTS

WCM implementations can help to ensure brand consistency across multi-site deployments.

A Siteworx non-profit client provides an example: the organization’s Web presence featured

a home site belonging to the organization. This umbrella site for the organization served as

the focal point for the nonprofit’s online brand. However, websites for state-based affiliates

displayed a unique, variable web presence without a consistent brand influence. WCM

enabled the creation of content in a brand template, which was consistent from the national

organization down to the state-level sites. State affiliates could create highly specialized

content while maintaining visual consistency with the national organization, and could even

present the national organization’s content if the affiliates did not have the resources to

manage their own local content.

WCM implementations can also aid in maintaining brand-consistency across multi-lingual

deployments that necessitate management of the brand across time zone, linguistic and

national borders. At the enterprise level, WCMs can create numerous sites that can be

managed from a single template in multiple languages. To give an idea of the complexity

involved, the rule of thumb in English-Spanish translation is that 33% more content space is

required to communicate the same information in Spanish than in English. Using WCM,

templates can be automatically resized and rebuilt, with the Spanish content ported into the

template. Users of the Spanish site encounter additional space on the site for a brand-

consistent experience across the Americas.

BRAND CONSISTENCY ACROSS MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETING

In the ―Multi-Channel/Multi-Mode‖ section

above, this paper analyzed the relative benefit

of WCMs on increased revenue from additional

device platforms, such as mobile phones and

tablet. Here, we’ll assess the benefit of WCMs

upon brand consistency across diverse

marketing communication channels such as

social media or email.

Distributing highly sharable content is

extremely important – and a significant time

investment without WCM. With WCM, a Amazon.com Homepage

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company can create content once and publish it everywhere. Fresh content can be pushed to

social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, as part of the publishing

model. This results in the presentation of a consistent brand experience across diverse

channels.

The picture becomes even rosier when email campaign management comes into play. Email

campaign management is often handled by a separate program or department, or even

outsourced to an entirely different group. Today, companies can design email processes that

leverage their WCM and the assets within the WCM to develop, store and manage email

campaigns.

And what about those brand-consistent

mobile phones and tablet devices? Many

WCMs enable the automated publishing of

content through these channels, and some

even go a step further to manage print

collateral and content. For example, a

Siteworx client in the insurance vertical

utilizes a WCM system to manage their

print assets. When copy and graphics are

entered in the system, they are stored and

managed in standard and native formats

and then assembled outside of the WCM

system as camera-ready art. Thus, any print assets created once as content elements within

the WCM can be transformed seamlessly to deliver a consistent brand experience across

platforms, including the Web, social media, email and print. This translates to considerable

savings, as well as the maintenance of a consistent brand experience.

Amazon.com iPad App

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Relative Advantage: Faster Time-To-Market

FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE

The business landscape is ripe with

examples of first-mover advantage. Ten

years after it launched, Blogger remains the

industry leader ahead of Wordpress and

Moveable Type, largely due to its position

as first-mover. When Henry Ford Hospital

performed the first live surgery on Twitter,

it more than doubled its Twitter following,

which catapulted its number of followers to

continued growth. Sherman Health, which

performed the second surgery, increased its

Twitter following by roughly a third.

WCMs enable companies to launch new

products and services before their

competitors and to respond to market

developments more nimbly because they

help to significantly streamline publishing

processes.

QUICKER REACTION TO COMPETITORS’ INITIATIVES

It is worth noting that Sherman Health, while not experiencing as significant an impact as

first-mover Henry Ford, still garnered many new followers. Replicating the actions of a

competitor can still be advantageous, especially if competitive reaction time is minimized.

The probability of gaining market share is higher for companies that are capable of

emulating the competition quickly. This is especially important for those in competitive

industries in which many other companies are innovating. If your organization can be rapid

second-movers in a matter of days or weeks, as opposed to months, it can see improved

market share results.

Faster time-to-market, including first mover advantage, competitive reaction time and

benefits in B2B2C scenarios, frequently serves as a secondary driver for WCM

implementation. The overall ROI for WCM implementations is not dependent upon time-

to-market, but it does act as a nice complementary benefit.

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BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS-TO-CONSUMER (B2B2C) SCENARIOS

Companies that sell Web products to other companies that utilize those sites to gain

customers can achieve ROI for WCM implementations very quickly. For example, Siteworx

worked with an insurance company selling portals to companies to help their employees

manage health insurance. A WCM system allowed them to ramp up new websites more

quickly, both cutting operational overhead and assisting in the sales process through faster

delivery of product. Although this a scenario is fairly narrow, the general principals and

financial drivers also apply to providers of shared internal services, such as IT resources

which help marketing and other business units create websites.

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Conclusion

The foremost driver for many WCM implementations is improved efficiencies,

including publishing efficiencies, reduced customer service expenditures,

regulatory penalty avoidance and hardware consolidation.

The second most common driver for WCM implementations is additional revenue, including

increased engagement as a result of reduced bounce rates and improved conversion rates,

cross-selling and up-selling through personalization and revenue expansion across additional

devices.

Improved online branding can contribute significantly to ROI for WCM implementations,

and includes improvements due to concurrent redesign, multi-site and multi-channel

campaign management.

Faster time-to-market advantages, including first-mover advantage, competitive reaction

time and B2B2C benefits provide additional complementary benefits from WCM

implementations.

ABOUT SITEWORX

Siteworx is an award-winning interactive agency specializing in WCM and CMS deployment,

search and analytics. Web content management is at the core of Siteworx’ specialization. Siteworx

encompasses both traditional creative agency and traditional systems integrator roles, which

enables us to speak about ROI on WCM implementation from both a design and technology

standpoint.

Siteworx services primarily Fortune 1000 clients, and has a strong qualifying track record for

financial, media and nonprofit verticals. Siteworx has extensive experience delivering open source,

COTS and custom solutions, and is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

WCMs can help fundamentally reshape a company’s online strategy and business

process. They can streamline and supplement existing processes, while delivering

substantial financial returns. While they represent a significant investment, WCM

systems deliver value through a myriad of obvious and more nuanced means.

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Additional Resources

WEBINARS:

To view the complete ―Web Content Management ROI Measurement‖

webinar, please visit:

http://www.siteworx.com/Company/Thought-Leadership/Webinars/Web-

Content-Management-ROI-Measurement.

All ―Web Content Management ROI Measurement‖ presentation slides are

available on SlideRocket: http://portal.sliderocket.com/AHJRR/Web-

Content-Management-ROI-Measurement.

To learn more about budgeting for WCM/CMS projects, view the

Siteworx on-demand webinar webinar via

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/469960626.

TOOLS:

ROI for WCM Calculator: http://www.siteworx.com/~/media/White-papers/Siteworx-ROI-

for-WCM-Calculator

ADDITIONAL WHITE PAPERS:

For additional information on determining the total cost of ownership of

WCM/CMS projects, please read Siteworx’ white paper on the subject:

http://www.siteworx.com/~/media/White-Papers/How-To-Determine-

Total-Cost-of-Ownership-of-WCM-CMS-Projects.

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Appendix I – Hypothetical Company’s WCM Investment Calculator

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The above calculations represent those typical of a hypothetical financial services company

considering WCM investment. The hypothetical company whose calculations are outlined

above is a multinational conglomerate in the financial services industry offering insurance

services and asset management, including life insurance, asset management and tax

preparation. A business-to-business component of the company exists, as the life insurance

division sells both directly to consumers and also to businesses seeking a portal through

which to sell insurance to employees.