TBG & Citadel

Citadel Federal Credit Union and TBG partnered on the redesign and replatforming of Citadelbanking.com. We continue to collaborate, implementing new features to make the most of the extended digital marketing feature set of Sitecore CMS to advance Citadel’s digital universe. The focus of the project was to both redesign the site to improve usability and bring the design up to a contemporary high standard as well as rebuild the site in Sitecore’s latest version.

Utilizing Sitecore, the new digital experience improves Citadel’s digital marketing in many areas, including digital operations, content management, template flexibility, and high-value tools that are easy to update and manipulate. The fully responsive site, built for personalization, goes above and beyond a basic marketing tool and offers the ability for Citadel to attract new customers and sell more to existing customers. It represents a major strategic shift away from the old site, which was much more simple in structure, to a state-of-the-art interactive digital powerhouse that features informative, relevant financial literacy content based on milestones such as applying for a new job, getting married, starting a family, and retirement. In addition, portlets that feature related content at the bottom of a page lead customers along their journeys through the site and take them to the next logical page. Within a month of the site going live, this improved user experience quickly led to significant increases in page views and time spent on the page. In fact, session duration has lengthened more than 75% since launch.

A primary goal of the project was to create a straightforward, interactive, and accessible user experience with the intention of helping customers achieve their needs on the site, whether to find product information prior to visiting a branch, open a bank account, or apply for a home mortgage. Through hover animations and high-contrast, multi-dimensional (yet minimal) graphics, the new site is not only pleasurable to the eye but also offers dynamic presentations of content, such as powerful infographics to present information that Citadel’s digital team can easily manage on the Sitecore back-end. Integral to the redesign and rebuild process, digital operations strategy was always top-of-mind throughout the project: the new experience must be able to scale both from a content and offerings perspective but especially from a management perspective. TBG continues to consult with Citadel to help maximize operational efficiency.

Last but not least, TBG developed all of the templates flexibly with the ability to adapt to the individual user—that is, to allow for a personalized user experience and to trigger digital marketing actions—the next phase in TBG’s work with Citadel. Further user research findings will help define target audiences and user behavior that will determine personalization strategy and implementation as well multichannel marketing activity, such as email marketing. As the digital universe evolves, Citadelbanking.com will utilize the best and most advanced aspects of Sitecore’s robust platform. Already, site analytics have revealed a substantial growth in visits and entrances coupled with a sharp decline in bounce rate.