Beginning with a specialized, in-person workshop with IBM’s PartnerWorld team, we compared other competitive programs, defined content pillars, and created an actionable roadmap for the project.

The workshop revealed the need to rethink, redesign, and rewrite navigation for over 175,000 unique pages to build a connected brand experience that gives Business Partners easy access to the true value of PartnerWorld.

Over the course of our five-year partnership, the work expanded and evolved to include personalized incentives, public-facing web pages, email campaigns, marketing materials, benefits packages, and member-centric tools.

Partners needed a clear path to useful resources and available benefits that inspired them to join

Navigating to relevant resources should be easy for partners. PartnerWorld needed to communicate more clearly what resources and benefits were available to partners to streamline their online experience and support their business growth.

Streamlining navigation to minimize search

How can you tell if a program’s website is hard to navigate? Find out how often users are using the search function to find what they need — the more they do, the clearer it is that your navigation isn’t intuitive enough. By redesigning the PartnerWorld UX to focus on navigation efficacy, users can more easily locate tools, resources, and offerings they need while still allowing for personalization by partner type, tier, region, etc.

Showing Partners what to do, where to go, and how to get there

Consistency is as crucial as clarity. A lack of persistent and well-organized menu systems left Business Partners without a true understanding of site structure and hierarchy. Without an easy-to-navigate high-level partner site menu, Business Partners were wasting valuable time searching instead of networking or reselling products and services. Eliminating obstacles for users allows them to fulfill their partnership roles by making valuable information and resources appear in persistent, consistently well-organized menus on every page, site-wide.

Creating a seamless user experience that brings lasting engagement

Usability friction was causing higher abandonment rates, prolonging the ROI of PartnerWorld for IBM. Identifying usability problems and removing roadblocks helped Partners complete onboarding faster. They were able to take advantage of selling and networking tools in less time, accelerating ROI for both Partners and IBM.

The value of Value Package wasn’t being shared with partners

The true value of the Value Package was being watered down by the numerous other elements of PartnerWorld. PartnerWorld was having difficulty communicating the value of Value Package, PartnerWorld needed to show partners this subscription service was a lot more than just a yearly payment. PartnerWorld had to showcase Value Package as a plethora of untapped partner resources that enabled partners to better succeed by providing a sandbox of extra tools and incentives.

Educate your partners on benefits they could be missing out on

Grow adoption of Value Package and Software Access Option by spotlighting the competitive value Business Partners gain within long-term and short-term attainment through the subscription-based service. In order to do so, Somnio and IBM created an automated email program targeted to specific audiences to communicate the five pillars through a messaging framework that was then the guardrails for the automated email campaign. In addition, we create new custom landing pages that separated Value Package vs. Software Access Option so users could choose the offering best suited to their business needs.