Franklin Madison

The Client

An industry pioneer with nearly 50 years of experience, Franklin Madison builds financial security for individuals and families by delivering industry-leading insurance products and marketing services through its brand partners. Franklin Madison helps generate increased loyalty and incremental revenue for more than 3,500 financial institutions. Based in Franklin, Tennessee, Franklin Madison has approximately 200 employees.

The Situation

Franklin Madison is a leading marketplace for insurance products, where an entire range of brand partners and vendors can sell their insurance products to end customers. It also acts as a marketing partner for its banking and credit union clients. 

As part of an overall digital transformation initiative, Franklin Madison wanted to revamp its digital platforms to adapt and respond to evolving needs. The company wanted to offer a unified user experience to both sets of clients — its vendors and their customers. Franklin Madison wanted to build a truly integrated digital solution that provides a unified customer experience. 

The Challenge

Franklin Madison's needed to overhaul its sales experience and marketing automation platforms due to numerous challenges:

• Suboptimal UX: Navigation inconsistencies and information islands existed due to disparate sales and service systems. This required separate authentication and created user data inconsistencies.
• Limited CMS capabilities: Franklin Madison’s sales experience was built on a homegrown CMS, which had gone through multiple iterations over time. The system was primitive, with limited capabilities and support for content publishing, access control, workflows, content versioning, etc.
• Manual processes: Creating and customizing microsites required manual action, including copy-pasting the code. Even simple change requests, like updates to colors, logos, and other branding guidelines, sometimes required an experienced developer to implement. 
• Inability to scale: Because developers had to be involved in even the tiniest website changes, scalability was adversely affected. With a couple hundred sites on the platform and Franklin Madison’s current development team, managing all the sites was no longer scalable. 
• Manual microsite tracking: Nearly 40+ microsites had custom changes, which were needed for legal or demographic reasons. It was difficult for Franklin Madison’s limited team to manage these microsite customizations on its legacy CMS.
• Disparate sales and service workflows: Workflows across business units were completely separate, making it difficult for vendors to manage their sales and marketing efforts.
• Manual change deployment: Deploying changes from staging to production required manual intervention, as no CI/CD pipelines and content publishing processes were in place.  

The Solution

Franklin Madison partnered with digital experience design and development firm Axelerant. The teams started with discovery calls to understand the legacy system’s challenges and limitations. They also reviewed the existing assets to help inform the subsequent architecture and development work.

Axelerant organized discovery and feature ideation workshops with the Franklin Madison team, helping determine the features necessary to deliver an MVP that bridged the gap between the marketing, sales, and service experience for consumers.

Hosting Franklin Madison’s digital platform built on Acquia Cloud Platform helped achieve optimal performance for the Drupal-based system. It also helped with the automation of the development and deployment workflow. Acquia Site Studio facilitated the creation of reusable components and templates at scale. Site editing with GUI actions such as drag-and-drop of components and point-and-click configurations enabled Franklin Madison to launch new microsites in minutes instead of days. Additionally, Acquia Campaign Studio helped Franklin Madison set up various email campaigns. It allowed Franklin Madison’s team to segment users based on different criteria and provide a precisely targeted campaign. It also helped generate various reports to analyze the email campaign impact, like open rate, conversion rate, etc.

The Results

Franklin Madison’s new site has delivered impressive results in numerous areas:

• Scale: The company’s new digital platform is built for scalability. While there are about 200 microsites today, Franklin Madison wants to scale further by onboarding more clients and products. This new platform allows its lean team to scale efficiently, even at 10 times the current volume.
• Responsiveness: With Acquia Site Studio's low-code solution, Franklin Madison's content authoring and marketing team can respond and adapt to geographical, cultural, legal, product, and usability changes across the carriers’ and insurers’ needs.
  Efficiency and flexibility: The new platform helped reduce the time for spinning up a new microsite from a few days to a few minutes – without intervention from development team members. This was achieved by configuring customized, flexible, and reusable templates to reach a broad audience across channels. It also ensured enterprise-wide brand consistency, governance, and compliance simultaneously across channels
• Automated deployments: With automated deployments in place, Franklin Madison can develop and add new features for customers much faster. The cycles for making customized changes have become substantially shorter – only a few minutes are needed for deployment through automation.