Work > Marketing Services Case Study

Parse.ly & WP VIP How Mutations supports Parse.ly’s growth marketing goals as their dedicated technical team

Parse.ly came to Mutations in 2020 with a short-term request: Help the team decide on the right CMS for their marketing site. The longer-term challenge Parse.ly faced was a lack of dedicated devs focused on strategic technical marketing projects. Once the Parse.ly CTO realized that Mutations could support their marketing goals long-term, the partnership was born.

Parse.ly CMS Selection
When Mutations took on our project, they started out by supplementing the frontend team that did the initial design work on the website. Then, over time, they became our primary web development partner.
— Andrew Montalenti, Founder & CTO, Parse.ly

ABOUT PARSE.LY

Parse.ly is a leader in content marketing analytics. Their product gives creators, marketers, and developers the tools to understand content performance, prove content value, and deliver tailored content experiences that drive meaningful results. In early 2021, Parse.ly was acquired by WordPress VIP, the enterprise division of Automattic.

THE CHALLENGE

When Parse.ly came to Mutations in 2020, their Founder and CTO at the time, Andrew Montalenti, knew that he needed a new CMS to support their marketing site, blog, and their high-performing technical docs and knowledge base articles. Additionally, Montalenti had several other performance and site redesign efforts underway with no dedicated internal team to work on them. He had the classic problem in high-growth product companies where he needed the marketing stack to be managed and regularly updated, but he also needed to dedicate his engineers to product efforts. 

THE SOLUTION

Mutations stepped in first to evaluate CMS options for Parse.ly by performing a needs assessment with the Parse.ly marketing team. Mutations gathered information about the team’s deployment workflow and their priorities around data ownership and content. Mutations screened the market for CMS options and built Proof-of-Concept implementations for four short-listed options to demonstrate the differences to the Parse.ly team. After Parse.ly chose a CMS, Mutations migrated the help and knowledge base articles in two months’ time. 

Post-migration, the Parse.ly team and Mutations together unearthed several other Martech stack improvements that would lead to improved outcomes for Parse.ly. Some of the technical projects Mutations tackled for Parse.ly:

  • Building marketing automation software behind forms, funnels, and email (Marketo, Pardot)
  • Content management on the Parse.ly blog (powered by WordPress)
  • Organization of the knowledge base 
  • Information Architecture
  • Web performance improvements

As the engagement and budget increased, Mutations also saw the need for increased project management and leadership. Mutations supported this need by adding a weekly stakeholder meeting to the engagement, a technical project manager to prioritize tasks in sprints, a ticketing system to support the team’s feature requests and bugs, and detailed monthly budget reports. Montalenti found great value in Mutations’ approach:

“They’re the best vendor I’ve ever worked with when it comes to project management.”

Andrew Montalenti, Founder & CTO, Parse.ly

THE OUTCOME

The partnership with Mutations has resulted in solid outcomes for the Parse.ly team. 

  • The site conversion rate improved by more than 10%
  • Revenue growth from the website channel grew by 50% or more YOY in the years after Mutations assisted with site improvements.

In addition, there were other major benefits for the Parse.ly team from working with Mutations. First, it has allowed Parse.ly’s core product development team to focus on critical product engineering. Mutations has become an extension of Parse.ly’s development team, responding rapidly to the marketing team’s requests for changes or feature improvements. Second, it allowed the marketing team to make great progress on their aggressive growth strategies. 

“We’ve had our strongest revenue year after launching the website in 2020, and it has been performing optimally on every metric, such as organic traffic and engagement. The platform also loads faster and is ranking better from an SEO standpoint… Thanks to the efforts of Mutations Limited, the company has increased their overall digital impact, garnering more organic traffic and engagement.” 

Andrew Montalenti, Founder & CTO, Parse.ly

Mutations partnered with Parse.ly through their acquisition by WordPress VIP in 2021, and continues to be the marketing team’s partner today. Read more about how Mutations helped Parse.ly migrate from Netlify to WordPress VIP hosting in 2022.

THE TECH

  • WORDPRESS (HEADLESS)
  • WORDPRESS VIP
  • GATSBY.JS & GATSBY CLOUD
  • NETLIFY
  • NEXT.JS
  • TYPESCRIPT
  • AWS
  • AMPLITUDE
  • RESEARCH & STRATEGY
  • WEB & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
  • THIRD-PARTY INTEGRATIONS
  • CMS MIGRATION & IMPLEMENTATION

More Work

Let's Work Our Magic—Together

HAVE A PROJECT in mind and want to talk more? We are interested in partnering with you and would love to hear more about your needs.