Cultivating Digital Growth for Modern Agribusiness
Andersons Grain
The Value
The Andersons Grain Group partnered with The C2 Group to deliver a transformative digital experience. This strategic redesign created personalized mobile and desktop experiences that directly addressed critical business objectives: increasing revenue, streamlining online operations, and significantly improving customer service. By providing highly tailored content, intuitive navigation, and seamless access to real-time data, C2 empowered The Andersons to foster stronger customer relationships, gain invaluable insights into site visitor behavior, and drive new memberships. The immediate improvement in user engagement solidifies The Andersons' position as a leader in serving the modern, mobile-minded farmer.
The Challenge
The Andersons Grain Group faced significant digital hurdles in effectively serving its diverse, on-the-go audience. The existing website lacked a consistent organizational structure, leading to user frustration because of its complexity and variety of its unorganized content. Farmers, often needing immediate information on pricing or product details, were left without clear direction and frequently resorted to time-consuming phone calls that often involved being passed between various internal representatives. Crucially, the site was not optimized for mobile devices, hindering farmers by failing to adequately display essential real-time market information and critical location details for nearby grain elevators in the field or on the go.
Furthermore, a significant point of friction was the lack of a single sign-on (SSO) ability between their main domain and their member portal. Users were forced into multiple log-ins just to manage contracts, orders, or pricing details, disrupting their workflow. Internally, the outdated CMS restricted the Andersons team's ability to easily manage and reuse its diverse content, and it lacked robust, out-of-the-box digital marketing features, limiting their capacity for targeted outreach and personalization.
The Outcome
In response to the imperative of meeting today’s modern, mobile-focused farmer, The C2 Group led a comprehensive and transformative digital redesign. Our solution centered on creating a user-centric, fully responsive website, powered by one of The C2 Group's most customized Optimizely implementations:
- User-Centric Design & Data-Driven Architecture: We employed visual analytics tools and in-depth user research to gain a precise understanding of site usage and trends. This informed the design and architecture of the new experience, resulting in a fully responsive, brand-aligned design with more user-friendly data visualization that perfectly accommodates today's on-the-go farmer.
- Real-time Information & Tools: The new site provides quick and easy access to critical information. This includes The Andersons Grain Group's "Freedom" pages, featuring a grain pricing strategy calculator. Custom integrations with iNET JavaScript data feeds and Google Maps APIs instantly pull content for "Weather" and "Market" pages, while new "Locations" pages offer mapping with filtering options for nearby grain elevators.
- Seamless Member Experience (SSO): A crucial custom integration with Active Directory Federated Services now allows member users to sign in once, enabling them to work seamlessly between andersonsgrain.com and GRAINweb, dramatically improving their workflow efficiency.
- Membership Growth Strategy: To effectively drive new memberships, C2 developed a custom, browser-based process that intelligently allows users a predetermined number of articles and videos before prompting them to sign in or register for an account, nurturing engagement towards conversion.
- Empowered Content Management & Personalization: The intuitive, feature-rich Optimizely editor interface ensures the site is easily managed and maintained by The Andersons' internal team. Leveraging Optimizely’s out-of-the-box visitor group functionality, content can now be highly tailored to users based on criteria such as weather in a specific area code or their individual behavior, enabling truly personalized experiences.
Post-launch user testing quickly confirmed the success of these efforts, with users reporting an easier time navigating the site and completing routine tasks, including finding grain elevator locations and visiting specialized pages. This granular approach to user experience and a personalized touch are planting the seeds for The Andersons Grain Group's continued business growth.
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