“ The Uponorpro.com platform will continue to expand and be our secure portal for all our various partners. Distributors, suppliers, sales reps and customers will all use the same site and Sitecore allows us to manage unique content for all these user groups. „

- Don Costello, e-Commerce Manager, Uponor North America

Challenge

Uponor, Inc., which employs 380 people at its North American headquarters in Apple Valley, Minn., had two different audiences:

• Homeowners, who want to learn about Uponor’s products and systems and how they can incorporate them into their homes. For this audience, Uponor needed soft imagery to send a message of comfort and lifestyle.
• Contractors and installers, who want to learn how and why to install Uponor products and systems in their projects. This professional community required imagery that is more rugged and technical. 

With two very different audiences, Uponor decided to create an extranet specifically for the professional community – including Uponor’s PROadvantage loyalty program.

Solution

Working with Sitecore partner, Horizontal Integration, Uponor had previously integrated Sitecore’s CMS as the platform for their public-facing site (www.uponor-usa.com), and it was so successful that they knew they wanted to use Sitecore as the platform for their extranet.

The new site, UponorPRO (http://uponorpro.com), was built with several things in mind:

• Brand consistency: Uponor has stringent guidelines around their brand, so they wanted to be in control of fonts, look and feel, etc. Horizontal Integration removed most of the rich text areas from the editor within the CMS, and included standardized fields so that nobody can “go rogue” and change fonts, etc.
• Shared content: On the Uponor-usa.com site, they had already built up an extensive media library, and Uponor can share the media between their public site and the new extranet.  For example, if they post a brochure that both homeowners and professionals will want to see, they just need to post it once and then they can share the brochure across both sites.
• Better control of data: One of Uponor’s goals was to have a better way to collect information about their professional contractor audience. In the past, when contractors signed up for something, their information went through a third-party vendor site, and then the third-party vendor would share the information with Uponor.  However, Uponor wanted better control of their data.  So today, contractors sign up in Uponor’s extranet site, and their information goes directly into Uponor’s database. 

The new extranet offers information in six categories: products and applications; training and education; marketing and sales; news and events; a PROtalk forum; and technical support. Site visitors can sign up for a newsletter, see PROvideos, download the latest catalog, and join the PROadvantage loyalty program.

According to Don Costello, e-Commerce Manager, Uponor North America, “What’s great for me is that the content practically manages itself – pieces of content are automatically being pulled in, and when something expires, it automatically falls off and the next item appears.” 

According to Chris Staley, EVP Interactive Marketing, Horizontal Integration, “Uponor launched its extranet portal in record time by leveraging much of the architecture and components from the previously rolled-out consumer driven Sitecore sites. This implementation approach is a role model for how to build highly reusable and extensible web properties  on a single content management framework.”

Result

Uponor launched the new extranet at their convention with 500 contractors. The response was extremely positive and after two months, traffic more than doubled, with increasing growth steadily climbing every consecutive month.

The new site is tailored specifically to the needs of contractors, with 80% of the content available to the public – as Uponor didn’t want to discourage professionals from getting content.  The remaining 20% of content has a level of security to access it, to ensure that Uponor knows who is accessing that content.  Professionals can now order literature, brochures, and other information, and preferred customers can earn points that can be redeemed for Uponor tools and various other merchandise.

The PROtalk forum is successfully using Sitecore’s forum module to interact with customers on a real-time basis. After the first month, Uponor already had more than 200 members join the forum.

Uponor also used Sitecore’s mail list module to create and send out their first monthly e-newsletter to almost 2,000 users. 

“It has been extremely easy using Sitecore and having both sites on one platform,” says Costello. “We got everything we wanted to on the site.”

Moving forward, Uponor plans to take full advantage of Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite. Says Costello, “It will be a huge advantage for us to be able to see in real time what our customers are doing online.”

The Uponorpro.com site received the Web Marketing Association’s 2011 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development. The WMA’s annual WebAward competition recognizes the best websites in 96 industries and Uponor was in good company with winners such as Intel, Siemens and Staples.

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Sitecore’s forum module
• Salesforce for CRM