Canadian Western Bank (CWB)

CWB thrives and differentiates its brand through strong, long-lasting customer relationships. The first phase of CWB’s digitization journey was to use Sitecore technology to transform its website from an older-generation brochureware site into a customer-centric powerhouse that extends CWB’s longstanding focus on relationships into the digital world. Driven by the improved digital experience enabled by Sitecore, CWB customers’ digital adoption has grown, with the bank’s marketing hub delivering nearly 3 million visits and over 8.4 million page views across its 15 brand websites.

Following its digital transformation, CWB’s website became a significant source of lead generation. Unique views rocketed by 35%, cross-selling opportunities by 50%, and mobile traffic by 262% year-on-year. By collecting and tracking lead information, it’s also now possible to identify product marketing opportunities. For example, analysis confirmed CWB’s investment and mortgage pages as top searches, guiding strategic spend of its advertising budget.

As Sitecore technology improved CWB’s visibility and understanding of its customers, it also revealed that they expected an even better digital and personalized experience. Therefore, CWB needed to further extend its differentiated client experience based on a deeper understanding of the client journey, as well as encourage and expand digital engagement. As part of its strategy, CWB aimed to unify branding across all partner companies, support expansion into new markets, and improve brand awareness and familiarity among Canadian business owners.

With its latest Sitecore iteration, CWB is now delivering greater and more in-depth website enhancements. Starting with targeting commercial banking and personal banking clients, CWB has leveraged Sitecore’s personalization features to tailor the experience for each user. For example, it is giving first-time visitors a special welcome, welcoming back returning visitors, developing more personalized and geo-targeted campaigns, increasing mobile personalization, retargeting inbound traffic, and improving content profiling.

“Sitecore ensures cwbank.com is our strongest lead generation tool. It empowers us to collect lead information, which we track toward department and organization-wide goals. Sitecore has highlighted product marketing opportunities and led us to devise a program that drives increased deposits, better productivity, and higher customer engagement,” says Seun Williams, Manager, Digital Marketing, Canadian Western Bank.

CWB has expanded its use of Sitecore to introduce more analytics and website enhancements and has implemented campaign tracking, goals, and A/B testing. This digital transformation coincided with CWB’s rebrand and underpinned the bank’s proactive, personalized service brand message of, “Obsessed with your Success™.” By gathering insights about the customer experience and journey, CWB is able to personalize the experience. Relevant information and content offer value-added advice and helps customers find what they are looking for while developing sales leads for the business.

Personalization helps CWB prioritize the experience through the customer’s eyes and allows CWB to provide helpful solutions that customers expect from a true financial partner. An updated magazine-like blog, grouped by Most Popular and Recent has created a hub of information to help clients become better business owners.

Marcus Miller, Manager, External Communications, Canadian Western Bank says, “Personalized service is part of what makes CWB different from its competitors. While our banking centre teams work directly with clients to help them meet their business and personal finance goals, CWB’s marketing team uses Sitecore to reflect a high-touch, personalized service via digital channels.”

The latest phase in CWB’s Sitecore-powered digital transformation has increased the bank’s understanding of customer needs and desires, content effectiveness, and they can also use customer journey data to create a more robust customer persona. The result has been a 50% increase in lead generation opportunities from web-based tactics and a 30% increase in visitor sessions. Tactics include paid search google display, organic search, re-marketing campaigns.

Sitecore-powered campaign support and lead generation processes have also improved local marketing effectiveness. For example, a Chinese New Year campaign run by CWB’s Richmond, British Columbia Banking Centre featured a combination of CWB’s first foreign language advertisement, traditional marketing tactics with QR codes, and a custom Sitecore-powered landing page. The web page acted as a hub of information for both clients and staff about the Chinese New Year and Chinese culture. This helped CWB establish an innovative and interactive way to engage the Asian community with meaningful, targeted messaging.

Williams says, “Capturing customer data and using Sitecore analytics enables CWB to develop effective and targeted data-driven marketing strategies.”

For CWB, the speed and efficiency of maintaining content, creating campaigns, and reviewing analytics has improved by 90%. There has been a 70% productivity gain because Sitecore’s user-friendly CMS allows authors to complete content for personalization without IT intervention. Because the Sitecore solution does not require technical skills, business users are able to carry out webmaster functions, increasing that pool from one to 17, and reducing business reliance on technical staff. Sitecore has also enabled increased content reuse by 25%.

Using Sitecore technology, CWB has improved standardization and has created a consistent visual identity and client experience across all CWB brands. 

Williams says, “CWB is building on our Sitecore success by adding advanced features as they are launched and extending personalization to other websites within CWB’s lines of business.”