Adobe® Marketing Cloud Success Story
University of Phoenix
Personalizing online education
Apollo Group
Phoenix, AZ
www.phoenix.edu
Results
• Supported state-of-the-art
websites providing visitors with
rich, relevant experiences
• Increased engineer productivity by
reducing need for hand coding
• Enabled business users to create
pages in minutes
• Provided immediate feedback on
site tests for fast time to market
• Centralized site management for
greater control and consistency
University of Phoenix keeps connected to students using Adobe
Marketing Cloud, including Adobe CQ, Adobe SiteCatalyst®, and
Adobe Test&Target™
University of Phoenix is constantly innovating to help students balance education
and life in a rapidly changing world. Flexible schedules, challenging courses, and
interactive learning can help students pursue personal and career aspirations
without putting their lives on hold. As the flagship university of Apollo Group, Inc.,
University of Phoenix serves a diverse student population, offering associate’s,
bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs from campuses and learning
centers across the United States as well as online throughout the world.
The University of Phoenix has been offering education designed to enhance employability since
1976—long before the Internet—and realized early that in order to meet student needs, online
interaction with students would be key. The university benefited from its early adoption of online
communications, and wanted to continue to strengthen its image for innovation by delivering
contemporary best practices for online search, e-commerce, and other digital experiences.
“www.phoenix.edu is the primary web communication tool, experience, and face of the University
of Phoenix online,” says Justin Richmond, chief digital officer and senior vice president of Apollo
Group. “The site needs to provide the best possible user experience, right information at the right
time, informative features and functionality, and all in a brand reverent manner to allow users to
make more informed decisions regarding their educational needs.”
While the University of Phoenix website was accomplishing its fundamental objectives as a connection
point for existing and prospective students, it lacked the flexibility to quickly accommodate day-to-day
digital experience needs such as the launch of new informational or educational content. This was
primarily due to the fact that its legacy web content management system was inflexible and relied on
the use of technical resources to make changes to page structure and content.
“The reliance on technical resources to maintain and update www.phoenix.edu was putting a big
strain on our ability to be responsive to digital content strategy needs and, ultimately, to our students,”
says Lance Nelson, senior vice president of technology at Apollo Group. “We needed a system that
would allow us to offload content publishing to stakeholders in the organization who have a vested
interest in content strategy for the website, and enable our valuable technical resources to focus on
their core competencies.”
Nelson began an evaluation of web content management solutions. The Apollo Group, Inc. wanted
a solution that included integrated digital asset management and would enable them to create a
foundation for distributed content publishing while maintaining a consistent brand experience
throughout the site. The system needed to scale in order to maintain performance while serving a
large audience with an immense volume of content—supporting nearly 200 academic programs
with more than 2,000 courses—including redundant instances to maintain zero downtime.
With Adobe CQ, University of Phoenix marketing managers can quickly update the website
with timely informational or educational content, helping ensure current and prospective
students always have access to the latest digital content. Previously, it was necessary to
engage the organization’s technical team to update web content.
Challenge
• Upgrade website elements to
reflect current e-commerce and
SEO best practices
• Reduce time engineers spent handcoding and fixing content issues
• Empower business users to create
and control online content
After investigating the available alternatives, the Apollo Group, Inc. chose Adobe Marketing Cloud,
including the Adobe Experience Manager solution. Ultimately, the Apollo Group, Inc. adopted Adobe CQ
Web Content Management and Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management, along with Adobe SiteCatalyst
and Test&Target. Adobe CQ Web Content Management and Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management
provide digital marketers with easy-to-use, web-based applications for creating, managing, and
delivering personalized online experiences. With Adobe CQ, the Apollo team can easily reuse
existing assets and control brand consistency across properties.
Solution
• Use Adobe Marketing Cloud,
including Adobe Experience
Manager, Adobe Analytics, and
Adobe Target solutions, to bring all
parts of the website up-to-date with
SEO and e-commerce best practices
• Use Adobe CQ to reduce web
management costs and accelerate
publishing timely content to online
properties
By choosing Adobe solutions, the Apollo Group, Inc. could also take advantage of Adobe CQ out-ofthe-box integration with other products in the Adobe Marketing Cloud—specifically, SiteCatalyst and
Test&Target—so that the team could continuously measure and improve website visitor experiences.
Additionally, the Apollo Group, Inc. worked closely with Adobe Consulting in phases as it rolled out the
different components of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Systems at a glance
Adobe Marketing Cloud, including
Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe
Analytics, and Adobe Target.
Components used include:
• Adobe CQ Web Content
Management
• Adobe CQ Digital Asset
Management
• Adobe SiteCatalyst
• Adobe Test&Target
Adobe Consulting
Building a better online presence
Using Adobe CQ, the University of Phoenix now has a rich set of templates and components that
support the structure of www.phoenix.edu. To help ensure brand consistency, user experience, and
that broader website objectives are properly maintained, certain page elements are locked and all
content goes through a review and approval process.
Today, more than 40 content stakeholders across the organization leverage this structure to create their
own pages and publish their own content, relieving the technology organization from the burden of
maintaining and updating pages. Not only does this provide the University of Phoenix with a more
efficient, faster ability to execute on its digital strategies, it also allows it to be more responsive to the
climate of the market, including economic and competitive forces.
The university has now successfully migrated its entire web property to Adobe CQ and has enhanced
the user experience by allowing each user to log in to receive personalized content, including video.
“The visitor experience is personalized for each user through a user login,” says Nelson. “It doesn’t
matter through which channel a user came in—from a search engine, through an email communication,
through informational content posted to a third-party website—we deliver content personalized just for
them. Adobe helps enable this to happen.”
With Adobe CQ, Test&Target, and SiteCatalyst providing an integrated solution for building pages,
testing the optimal content experience, and tracking interactions, the university can now focus on
the strategy rather than how to enable it. “When students come to the website, we want to make
sure that we are giving them effective access to the data and tools to help them properly inform
themselves on what the University of Phoenix can do for them and why it’s the right choice,” says
Richmond. “Adobe Marketing Cloud enables the university to execute on this vision.”
By leveraging Adobe CQ integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud products, including
Adobe SiteCatalyst and Adobe Test&Target, the innovative Apollo Group, Inc. team can
continuously measure and improve users’ online experiences.
“The site needs to provide the
best possible user experience,
right information at the right
time, informative features and
functionality, and all in a brand
reverent manner to allow users
to make more informed decisions
regarding their educational needs.”
Justin Richmond, chief digital officer and SVP,
Apollo Group
Investing in success
While successfully rolling out Adobe CQ for www.phoenix.edu, the Apollo Group, Inc. has been
able to leverage Adobe CQ for a number of additional websites, including extranet and intranet
properties, reusing the site structure that the University of Phoenix has created in Adobe CQ.
“The ability to reuse Adobe CQ templates and components to roll out new websites has cut the
time required to build new sites dramatically,” says Nelson.
By empowering its business managers to quickly update their own online content, the University of
Phoenix and other Apollo Group entities are helping ensure current and prospective students always have
access to timely program information. In the competitive market for education services—where working
students juggle many responsibilities and other educational institutions vie for their attention—Adobe
Marketing Cloud gives University of Phoenix a proven platform to differentiate its services through rich,
relevant digital experiences.
“With the Adobe Experience Manager solution, we are taking online personalization to a new level,”
says Richmond. “Whether University of Phoenix managers are making a simple change to a web page
or reworking an entire section of the site, Adobe Marketing Cloud delivers an integrated set of tools
that enable us to provide millions of website visitors with easier access to the exact information and
experiences they need, when they need them.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/
digital-marketing.html
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Adobe, the Adobe logo, SiteCatalyst, and Test&Targetare either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States
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