Revolutionizing B2B SaaS Marketing: A Successful 6-Month Migration from Crownpeak to a Modern Tech Stack (Vercel, Sanity, Next.js)
Emburse, a leader in travel and expense management solutions, successfully transitioned from Crownpeak, a legacy Digital Experience Platform (DXP), to a modern stack including Sanity, Next.js, and Vercel. This transformation resulted in enhanced agility, performance, and speed for their primary website Emburse.com, and their sub-brand Certify.com, while also addressing key concerns for B2B SaaS marketers.
Introduction
Emburse, often regarded as a trailblazer in the expense management industry, is known for its innovative solutions that streamline financial processes for businesses worldwide. With a mission to humanize work by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks, Emburse serves over twelve million users across more than twenty thousand organizations in 120 countries. They cater to various sectors, including engineering, healthcare, and education, providing tools that increase spend visibility and drive better financial outcomes.
Challenge
Emburse's existing Crownpeak platform had become unwieldy, difficult to manage, increasingly cost-prohibitive, and lacked the performance needed to support their growing business. This legacy DXP hindered their marketing team's ability to launch new campaigns and update content efficiently. Additionally, the platform did not support seamless localization, which was crucial for their global operations.
Solution
Emburse adopted a new technology stack to address these challenges:
Empowered the marketing team
to control site content and create new experiences independently. Sanity also facilitated easy localization for multiple languages and regions (4 locales).
Excellent performance
with Next.js and enabled a comprehensive refresh of the user interface, enhancing the overall user experience.
Superior hosting performance
and an outstanding developer experience with Vercel, allowing for quick and easy deployments and seamless scalability.
Implementation
The implementation process included:
- Setting up Sanity for flexible content management, giving the marketing team full control over website updates and localization. Content permissions were also assigned to specific user roles, like administrators and developers, to maintain content quality and consistency. This ensured agility and the ability to manage content independently. Emburse also started fresh with Sanity’s DAM, boasting organizational capabilities such as tagging, which facilitated the filtering of their multiple directories.
- Utilizing Next.js to enhance site performance, improve SEO, and refresh the design. This improved the user experience and overall site functionality.
- Hosting the sites on Vercel, which offered rapid build times, advanced security measures, and seamless integration with other tools. This improved operational efficiency and scalability.
Results
The migration from Crownpeak to Sanity, Next.js, and Vercel was executed seamlessly, significantly de-risking the process. Emburse now enjoys a modernized technology stack that provides robust performance and enhanced functionality. The new system's scalability has removed previous limitations, allowing for the effortless addition of pages, templates, and languages.
Emburse achieved remarkable improvements in website performance, with all migrated pages receiving good mobile core web vitals and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) consistently below 200ms. This improvement has also positively impacted their search result positions in Google Search Console.
The newly implemented scalable architecture adheres to industry standards, encompassing naming conventions, site structure, DAM organization, image handling, taxonomy, meta-data, and atomized content architecture.
The client’s enthusiastic, fast-moving, and resourceful marketing team received thorough training on the new CMS platform, ensuring a smooth transition and long-term success. Marketing teams now operate with increased agility, independently managing and updating content, leading to faster campaign launches and site updates. Localization efforts have been simplified, enabling better global reach and user experience. The overall performance of the website has seen substantial improvements, with rapid load times and enhanced user experiences far surpassing the previous Crownpeak setup.
Highlights
- 6 Months to Launch: With Sanity, content authors launched new promotional campaigns and updated website content in multiple languages without developer assistance.
- Performance: Emburse’s new headless Next.js site on Vercel loaded nearly four times faster than their previous setup, outperforming 99% of websites globally.
- Efficiency: Vercel's frontend cloud allowed developers to build, deploy, and ship in one day, benefiting from fast build times and the latest features without building and maintaining custom infrastructure.
- Agility: Marketing teams gained independence in managing and updating content, resulting in faster campaign launches and site updates (across 4 different regions).
- Scalability: The new stack removed limitations, allowing for the effortless addition of pages, templates, and languages.
It is so rare to work with a consultant who feels like your own team.”
Heidi Wurpel, Senior Director, Operations & Technology for Customer Experience
Conclusion
For B2B SaaS marketers, particularly in the expense management sector, adopting a stack like Sanity, Next.js, and Vercel can dramatically improve digital presence. This combination offers unparalleled control, performance, and agility, essential for staying competitive in a fast-paced market.