The global health crisis that began in the first quarter of 2020, increased the need for wellbeing support platforms that could help people deal with daily health routines. Fears of contracting the coronavirus followed by social isolation, created new opportunities for offering value and promoting through digital streams.

Lifebuoy, one of the world's top-selling hygiene brands, was fast at responding to the created situation with a specific focus on creating and launching the first COVID-19 microsite in the NAME region, which was aimed to be educational at the core and act as a new sales channel for the brand.

Being the team behind the delivery, the main challenge was to deliver the user experience, interface, assets, and development in Adobe Experience Manager, in time for end-users. By March 15th, together with Lifebuoy's brand team, we launched one of the first COVID-19-related platforms in the NAME region, within 72 hours of work while the pandemic was still a distant reality for the majority.

Organizing a thoughtful UX within 24 hours

The user experience, for Lifebuoy's platform, was heavily focused on two primary pillars, to have the digital experience be usable and valuable. For usability, the user experience promoted the informative and educational segment, designed to showcase every step one should take to avoid the virus and tips to reduce stress and promote well-being.

To offer value to the user, a channel redirecting to retailer placements of Lifebuoy’s soap and sanitizer products was offered with promotional codes of 20% discounts.

After the experience journey definition, the design team carefully illustrated the necessary educational materials and the interface within the time period in order to create a visually appealing story for the platform.

Delivery of the COVID-19 platform in Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive, enterprise-level platform that offers personalized, content-led experiences and allows organizations to send context-optimized messaging that scales across products, services, organizations, and markets. It offers a powerful content management system, coupled with digital asset management and digital enrollment and forms, all via the cloud service, to help manage complex digital experience deliveries.

Adobe Experience Manager also has seamless integration with Adobe Analytics and Audience Manager, which was crucial to get the market data and profile segmentations needed in order to promote the sanitation products sold by Lifebuoy.

Considering the limited time, our team was segmented into two groups to deliver the platform and similar experiences for 2 markets simultaneously. Development progressed over 48 hours (2 business days), across four sprint cycles, where the dev team built the experiences on a component-basis, where components were repurposed across market platforms. We delivered these by using vanilla JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and parts of the React framework, while the four cycles served the team to optimize the platform across multiple devices.

Pre live date, the team injected important tagging within the platform as a tag management solution in order to have important call-to-actions and attributes such as Custom Insight Conversion Variables (or eVars) be traceable and linked toward every digital dollar spent on a digital advertisement that was going to occur throughout the lifecycle of the campaign.

This agile development process allowed the team to utilize the building blocks offered by powerful technologies like AEM and its coupling applications to deliver a whole digital experience within such a short period of time.

Once the campaign launched, we modded the platform to become more personalized with the introduction of product recommendations and cross-channel content.

The first quarter of the go-live

After the pandemic intensified, the platform served as the go-to informational hub for many visitors, and within the first 3-months, it reached ~345,000 page views, ~185,000 unique visitors, and around 6 mins of time spent per visit on mobile and 2 mins time spent per visit on desktop. The conversion rates from all devices were at ~3.5% and the number of signups for Lifebuoy’s brand newsletter was at ~5000.

These data qualified the interest of the brand to expand the same platform within other neighboring markets and it turned into a brand-wide strategy towards promoting sanitation as a preventive measure against the existing pandemic and other potentially infectious diseases.