CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
US MARKERBOARD
Pulse Secure Web Accelerator Boosts Sales for US Markerboard
"Our team’s time is best spent adding core features that grow the business in our areas of expertise instead of optimizing performance – which is best left to the experts."
Why was Pulse Secure chosen?
Pulse Secure Web Accelerator
Performance improvements
Runs on common off the shell servers based on Intel’s x86 architectures
Company
US Markerboard
Industry
Retail
Challenges
- Slow page loads inhibiting the business
- Web content getting more complex with business growth
- Scaling the site proving difficult without tackling performance challenges
Solutions
- Pulse Secure vADC with web accelerator
- Runs on common off the shell servers based on Intel’s x86 architectures
Benefits
- Page load times decreased from 9 to 3 seconds
- Page views increased by 27%
- Bounce rate reduced by 10%
- Conversion Rate: 25% improvement
- Average Order Value: 15% improvement
- Purchased Products: 65% improvement
Introduction
In fact, Inc. Magazine has recognized US Markerboard as one of the 5000 ‘Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies in America’ for four years consecutively.
Founded by CEO Scott Newman over ten years ago, the company has experienced sustained, rapid growth over the past decade. Today the company offers the largest selection of whiteboards and communication boards in the business, and has expanded into other facility furnishings such as floor and entrance mats.
US Markerboard’s growth has been driven by their early adoption of web-based sales, even with highly customizable products. They disrupted the whiteboard and chalkboard business at their inception when the vast majority of the market was limited to local vendors with extremely narrow product selections. USMarkerboard. com gave customers a place to explore a much larger selection of the most innovative and reliable products in the business, and they could order any of those unique or custom products with the click of a mouse.
Challenge
US Markerboard knew that their website was of the upmost importance to their business – but it was taking 9 seconds on average to load a page on their site. As the company had grown, so had the website’s size and complexity. Scott Newman, CEO at US Markerboard, noticed several areas where the site’s performance was affecting sales. “Our load times weren’t the worst in the world, but there was plenty of room for improvement. The way we looked at it – optimizing our site’s performance improves a lot of key business metrics, including increasing average order value and reducing cost per order for entering orders into the system. This made it a very easy business decision – we had to optimize our site’s performance.”
The company quickly identified that load times were limiting their ability to scale the site and grow their business with existing and new customers.
SOLUTIONS
Scott and his IT team determined they should make several operational improvements to their site, and at the top of the list was to invest in and quickly implement website acceleration software. “Our team’s time is best spent adding core features that grow the business in our areas of expertise instead of optimizing performance – which is best left to the experts”.
After researching the available solutions US Markerboard implemented Pulse Secure vADC software across 12 separate websites, including US Markerboard, US Entrance Mats and Brite Inc. Leveraging Pulse Secure web content optimization features to make adjustments for peak performance, implementation was a success across each site.
RESULTS
Upon installation, US Markerboard immediately began to see performance improvements across all the websites. First, and foremost - load times improved from 9 seconds down to 3 seconds. Page views increased by 27% and pages visited increased by 8%.
But some of the best results were directly related to sales: bounce rate was reduced 10%, and conversion rates increased by a whopping 25%.
The results didn’t stop there, however. Since installing Pulse Secure software, the number of products ordered (per order) has increased by 65%, and the average order value increased by 15% - which is unheard of in ecommerce. As Newman said, “This is a huge number.”