“ From a developers’ perspective, I appreciate how easy it is with Sitecore to have a site that caters to our needs—members of our editorial and marketing teams can add and make adjustments to content, freeing IT to keep the site running smoothly. „

- Jon Heller, IT Director, Cabot Heritage Corporation

Challenge

With their custom-built CMS, Cabot’s former site was geared to existing customers with password-protected access to specific information. Potential new subscribers were limited to what essentially amounted to a static “about” page with minimal content.

Cabot offers eight targeted newsletters, ranging from daily to monthly, so new content for the password-protected sections of the old site was constantly being developed and would sometimes need to be changed overnight.

As many of the sections were hard-coded, the Cabot IT staff would have to contact their design firm, who would in turn have to contact the CMS vendor to make the requested changes on their behalf.

According to Jon Heller, IT Director at Cabot Heritage, “The driving force behind our search for a new solution was our goal of engaging our current customers on a new level, while also attracting new subscribers with current information on the stock market, investor education and Cabot investing advice.” And all of the new content would need to be updated in a timely and practical manner.

Solution

After researching several other CMS options, Cabot Heritage realized that Sitecore’s industry-leading CMS was the best fit for their needs. Says Heller, “When we were first looking at Sitecore, the answer to every requirement and goal was ‘yes, Sitecore does that.’ ”

Having made their selection, Cabot Heritage was able to start development quickly. Working with internal resources such as a graphic designer, IT staff and Heller, who successfully completed Sitecore’s comprehensive training program, they were able to design a site that would allow them to accomplish their goals of pleasing both existing and potential customers.

The Sitecore CMS user interface, designed to be intuitive for those without technical or developer backgrounds, was the perfect fit for Cabot, which currently employs 15 people full-time, most of them editorial and marketing staff. The designated developer on staff, Heller conducted internal training for content editors at Cabot Heritage.

Since the content editors were all familiar with the Microsoft Office suite, they quickly learned how to accomplish their goals with regular site updates using Sitecore CMS.

Result

Today, Cabot’s investment advisories deliver independent advice on investing in common stocks to more than 150,000 investors worldwide via newsletters on growth stocks, value stocks, green investments, emerging markets, and much more. Cabot Heritage has seen an uptick in traffic: both new customers and happy clients are coming to the site in record numbers. Organic traffic has increased to thousands of visitors per day, most of these prospects engaged by the site’s appealing look and feel. Sales of subscriptions to the newsletters have increased approximately 300% since the site’s relaunch.

“From a developers’ perspective,” says Heller, “I appreciate how easy it is with Sitecore to have a site that caters to our needs—members of our editorial and marketing teams can add and make adjustments to content, freeing IT to keep the site running smoothly.”

The implementation of Sitecore's CMS proceeded so smoothly that Cabot Heritage is already looking ahead to the future of the site: a re-design is already in the works to take advantage of Sitecore’s flexibility and strength in personalization by increasing dynamic content, such as displaying relevant stock data (price, increase/decrease, etc.) when that particular stock is recommended in a Cabot newsletter.

Other changes in the works include enhanced search features, enabling commenting, highlighting popular posts and more.

Technical Description

Site Special Ingredients

Proprietary database connection

Optimo integration