SearchStax Partner Spotlight
During the month of March, we want to shine the spotlight on Horizontal Digital, a SearchStax partner headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota that offers experience forward consulting services that deliver meaningful digital experiences and address the marketing needs and opportunities of their clients. 

As a certified minority-owned business, Horizontal Digital is part of Horizontal Inc., a corporation that knows that every day is an opportunity to raise the bar through talent acquisition and digital experiences. With an exceptionally diverse team, Horizontal builds outstanding websites and apps that meet customers with the right message at the right moment.
 
Horizontal is built on equal parts empathy and hustle and since its inception in 2003, they have always prioritized working together while making an impact that sustains change. For that reason, in 2020 the Horizontal Cares Program was established following the company’s guiding principle of serving the communities around them for the greater good and allowing employees to donate their time and talent to causes they care about.

Taking A Stand During Times Of Crisis 
2020 was a year that flipped the whole world upside down with the spread of the COVID-19 but Minneapolis, the home of Horizontal, was also the focal point of the social justice movement that swept major cities across the country. This situation resulted in an unsettling time for Minneapolis and its residents. Horizontal was inspired to take action and find a tangible, impactful way to give back. That is how the Horizontal Cares Program came to be. 

Through this program, Horizontal believes that authentic investment in communities benefits everyone and that positivity fuels possibility. In Minneapolis, those principles were materialized by purchasing meals and supplies from struggling local small businesses and giving them to those in need. By doing so, Horizontal Cares was able to help two groups of struggling community members – individuals and businesses alike.

Other noteworthy activities that took place during these times of crisis in Minneapolis as part of the program include delivering tacos to the Twin Cities’ first responders, feeding 100 families during Ramadan, and putting together a charity campaign that brought lunch to frontline staff at St. Therese of New Hope. The goal was to do as much good as possible while providing relief to the communities and local businesses.
Making An International Impact 
Minneapolis was not the only community positively impacted by Horizontal Cares. In Jaipur, India, where one of Horizontal’s international offices is located, the program made a donation to The Blueberry Foundation dedicated to helping India’s underserved children pursue STEM education. The program also donated a total of $21,000 across three other nonprofit organizations that represented groups hit the hardest by the pandemic: Aflatoun International, Common Future and She’s the First.  

In addition to that, Horizontal was one of the original partners of Habitat for Humanity’s Entrepreneur House, a community service project where a group of companies join up to raise funds and ultimately build a whole Habitat house for a family, making a lasting social contribution. To this day, Habitat remains one of several organizations that receive annual support from Horizontal in the form of funding and volunteer time. 
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Horizontal: Putting People At The Center of Everything They Do
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2022 Sitecore MVP
Elite distinction awarded for commitment and dedication to the Sitecore community

MINNEAPOLIS — January 31, 2022 —Horizontal Digital, a global digital consultancy that creates greater possibilities between brands and their customers, today announces that 12 members have been honored with Sitecore’s 2022 Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award, an elite group chosen by Sitecore®, the global leader in digital experience management software. Five of the awards came in Sitecore’s Ambassador category, four in the Technology category and three in the Strategy category. 

Recognizing professionals within the Sitecore community who actively apply their talent and expertise to help others best utilize Sitecore products to deliver premier customer experiences, the MVP program is now in its 16th year. Of more than 16,000 certified developers and over 30,000 active community participants, the 235 MVPs are truly an elite group. This year’s MVPs were selected for the quality, quantity and impact of the contributions they made in 2021, including the sharing of product expertise and mastery of the Sitecore platform to support both partners and customers.

Horizontal Digital’s list of 2022 MVP’s include:

    Sheetal Jain (10th year) – Ambassador MVP
    Kiran Patil (10th year) – Technology MVP
    Sabin Ephrem (5th  year) – Ambassador MVP
    Dave Michela (4th year) – Strategy MVP
    George Smith (4th  year) – Strategy MVP
    Mitch Talbot (3rd year) – Ambassador MVP
    Arvind Gehlot (3rd year) – Technology MVP
    Anne Norman (2nd year) – Ambassador MVP
    Khushboo Sorthiya (2nd year) – Technology MVP
    Robert McGovern (1st year) – Strategy MVP
    Dharmesh Harji (1st year) – Ambassador MVP


    Yamini Punyavathi Muttevi  (1st Year) – Technology MVP

As one of a select few globally specialized partners across the entire Sitecore suite, we’re extremely proud of the hard work and dedication our teams put in every day to maintain the status as an elite among the elites — and the MVP award is a further affirmation of that,” said Sabin Ephrem, 5-time Sitecore Ambassador MVP and Co-Founder/Chief Executive Office of Horizontal. “The fact that we won Sitecore’s Global Product Expertise Award, for having the deepest level of platform knowledge and expertise, further affirms the work we do to push the limits of the platform and raise the bar for our clients in their journey to build connected experiences on a composable framework while staying cutting edge with their technology. We appreciate our tight-knit partnership with Sitecore and thank them for acknowledging the efforts of our truly exceptional team this past year and for over 2 decades.”

“The Sitecore community is one of our greatest assets. It’s a highly collaborative environment where members freely share their knowledge and insights across numerous channels and at events,” said Dave O’Flanagan, Sitecore chief product officer. “Sitecore MVPs stand out as community leaders who are dedicated to helping others build greater digital experiences for their organizations and customers. They are an invaluable resource and important part of the Sitecore user experience, for which we are truly grateful.”

More information can be found about the MVP Program on the Sitecore MVP site.

About Horizontal Digital

Horizontal Digital is an experience-forward consultancy that builds exceptional website, mobile, ecommerce and portal experiences that meet customers with the right message at the right moment. We deliver on this promise by fusing every digital touchpoint with customer data from sales, service, ecommerce and marketing programs we design and implement. These connected experiences create and continue conversations for customers across all departments and channels — empowering organizations to build stronger relationships with them in the process. Our unwavering focus on delivering meaningful digital experiences at every touchpoint has allowed us to successfully solve complex challenges for some of the world’s most recognizable brands.
Learn more at www.horizontaldigital.com.
Horizontal Digital’s Team Members win Sitecore Most Valuable Professional award
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2021 Fast 50: Horizontal Digital up two spots on The List 
Minneapolis, MN, October 28, 2021 – Horizontal announced today that it has been ranked No. 48 by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal at its Fast 50 Awards reception.  The rankings were published October 28, 2021.  To view the complete article, visit https://bizj.us/1qckuh.

The companies were ranked by growth rate.

This repeat Fast 50 honoree had a growth rate of nearly 22 percent. Last year, the digital-consultant and talent-solutions firm reported revenue of nearly 124 million dollars.

About Fast 50

To be eligible, companies must be based in the Twin Cities 24-county metro area and show revenue of at least one million dollars in the first of their three most recent fiscal years. And, the companies had to increase revenue during each of the following two years. To confirm the accuracy of submissions, accountants from Wipfli validated all of the audited revenue from the past three fiscal years.

About Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal is a multi-platform media company providing in-depth coverage of local business communities and breaking news reaching more than 491,000 readers each week. Through print, digital products such as its twice-a-day emailed news digests and face-to-face events, the Business Journal offers business leaders many avenues for making connections and gives them a competitive edge locally, regionally and nationally. Visit us at mspbj.com to learn more.
Horizontal ranked among fastest-growing private companies in cities metro-area by Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
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2021 Fast 50: Horizontal Digital up two spots on The List 

Horizontal Digital Featured in Digiday
Though most of marketing is experienced and evaluated on the front end — what the target customer sees or hears — there are times when back-end adjustments and improvements move the proverbial sales needle just as effectively. That was the motivation behind Horizontal Digital, a digital consultancy that specializes in building and optimizing web and mobile experiences for a wide variety of companies, from casinos to shipping firms.

Launched in Minneapolis in 2003 by co-founders Chris Staley and Sabin Ephrem, Horizontal saw an opportunity to take on the Deloittes and Accentures by becoming the granular specialist in Salesforce and Sitecore, but also servicing the back-end needs of many companies looking to draw customers in with strong CSR chops.

Before starting Horizontal, Staley worked at large agencies including McCann Erickson, witnessing firsthand that “they were great about strategy but not really able to serve the back end” of client needs.

“They [consultancies] have been busy buying ad agencies, while the IPGs of the world are looking more like consultancies,” said Staley, who noted that he saw early on how the CMO and CIO overlapped, and the white space left between agencies and IT firms to service that. “Our job is to connect people’s experiences [for Horizontal’s clients] and keep conversations going.”

One of Horizontal’s clients, Seminole/Hard Rock Casinos, turned to Horizontal after major ad agencies it worked with didn’t possess enough technological know-how to help unify the back-end of a complex set of websites that had been operating on differing systems, explained Rosalie Stahley, vp of digital marketing and e-commerce for Seminole Hard Rock Support Services.

“We didn’t want to be a small fish in a big pond because that’s what was happening before, going out and finding these big agencies that said that they knew [content management system] Sitecore, but they weren’t taking care of us,” she said, adding that her group in the casino company has launched 10 sites in the last year with Horizontal.

“It was such a huge opportunity to bring together the brand consistency and user experience, but also all the efficiencies and savings to be had across the board,” said Stahley. “We’ve increased our conversions for hotel bookings because of how we did the user experience integrating with the loyalty website. Plus, our signups have increased because we prompt them.” Citing company policy, Stahley declined to cite the specifics of those increases.

But the casinos’ experience is magnified across many industries, from car-rental firms to entertainment. “Most consumers’ touchpoint with a company starts with a site or a mobile app, and that accelerated even more with COVID,” said Horizontal’s Staley. “We like to say you’re only as good as your worst customer experience.”

That’s why Seminole’s Stahley wanted more than just a finished product from Horizontal — she said she wanted to know how it works so the company could eventually do it on their own. “I just don’t want to see the front-end product. I want to understand the back-end just as much, right? Because how you set up that CMS, that affects your team members. I don’t want to make a CMS so complicated that my users don’t want to use it.”

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‘You’re only as good as your worst customer experience’: Horizontal Digital looks to fill a gap between agencies and consultancies
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Horizontal Digital Featured in Digiday

GCI Honored with Sitecore Experience Award
“We love when our collective work gets recognized with an Experience Award by Sitecore. The criteria for recognition illustrates our shared dedication with our clients to drive innovation while putting the customer at the center of everything to do,” said Julie Koepsell, President of North America, Horizontal Digital. “Congratulations to our client GCI on earning this award, we are honored to be your partner in this journey of transformation and continued success for your business.”

“The innovations shaped by technology are not only impacting the digital realm – they are enhancing physical commerce as well,” said Lee Miles, Chief Customer Success Officer, Sitecore . “This groundbreaking hybrid is creating a ‘phygital’ revolution unlike any other, enabling consumers to choose exactly where and when they want to shop. Brands need to keep up by providing an immersive experience with content that is as engaging as it is relevant. This year’s Sitecore Experience Awards honors the brands that have flexed their creative muscles, producing rich customer experiences that resonate from start to finish.”

Through the rigorous selection process, each entry was judged by a panel consisting of Sitecore leadership from that entry’s region. There are three regions that evaluated and approved all regional selections based on specific selection and scoring criteria.

About Sitecore

Sitecore delivers a digital experience platform that empowers the world’s smartest brands to build lifelong relationships with their customers. A highly decorated industry leader, Sitecore is the only company bringing together content, commerce, and data into one connected platform that delivers millions of digital experiences every day. Leading companies including American Express, ASOS, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars rely on Sitecore to provide more engaging, personalized experiences for their customers. Learn more at Sitecore.com.

About Horizontal Digital

Horizontal Digital is an experience-forward consultancy that builds exceptional website, mobile, ecommerce and portal experiences that meet customers with the right message, at the right moment. We deliver on this promise by fusing every digital touchpoint with customer data from sales, service, ecommerce and marketing programs we design and implement. These connected experiences create and continue conversations for customers across all departments and channels — empowering organizations to build stronger relationships with them in the process. Our unwavering focus on delivering meaningful digital experiences at every touchpoint has allowed us to successfully solve complex challenges for some of the world’s most recognizable brands.
[Minneapolis] (Oct. 5, 2021) – Horizontal Digital today announced it has received a Sitecore Experience Award (SEA) honorable mention in the Leading the Way for “Phy-gital” future category for its work with GCI. The entry was selected from more than 140 submissions, recognized with an entry for how GCI increased customer engagement on its digital commerce site with Sitecore.

The Sitecore Experience Awards 2021 recognize brands that have built truly customer-centric digital experiences with Sitecore® technology. The SEAs are awarded to Sitecore customers and their partners whose entries clearly demonstrate their Sitecore solution is delivering ground-breaking customer experiences and great overall value to their business. The SEAs highlight best-in-class brands from four specialized categories.
GCI and Horizontal Digital are Named a 2021 Sitecore Experience Honorable Mention in Leading the Way For the 'Phy-gital' Future Category
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Demystifying AI for Personalization
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What comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence and machine learning? If you’re picturing HAL 9000 from the sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you might be getting a bit ahead of yourself. AI and ML are hot topics these days, with some of the discourse centering around the potential negative consequences of unregulated AI advancements: computers gaining sentience and taking over the world. While this is a scary thought, the reality of how this technology is being used in the real world is a little more prosaic.

The Reality of AI: Personalization
While advanced use cases like image recognition and autonomous driving are often praised, the most common use cases for AI and machine learning from a commerce point of view revolve around personalization. In this context, like many other types of personalization, it basically comes down to taking signals from a particular data set or some past behavior, and using that to inform a future action.

For example, if a system finds out over time that the users that interact with content about car maintenance tend to end up buying more car insurance, then it can prioritize showing more car insurance product suggestions to users that interact with car maintenance content, thus streamlining the journey.

This action can also be done manually of course, but with the help of AI / ML it can be done without a human having to trawl through a sea of data to find the insights and set up an action. AI / ML can uncover patterns that humans may not see, and can be set up to automatically act on them without explicit go-ahead. Look at it like a helping hand in implementing personalization, letting you free up your marketing team to concentrate on other creative tasks like creating campaigns or copy.

Identifying Consumer Segments
Another particularly helpful role AI / ML can play is to detect customer segments and help create personas. This technology can be very effective at finding ways to group customers together that might not be overly apparent to the human eye.

Creating personas can be a difficult thing for brands to get right. Much of the time, true insights can be hidden behind the data, and marketers can end up relying on basic demographic-based characteristics like age, gender, or geography when creating their personas. AI / ML can help discover nuanced segments that human analysts might have missed.

AI won’t work without data

When done well, personalization can have an outsized benefit for retailers, increasing conversion, cross-selling and brand affinity, and AI / ML is making it easier for companies to get it right.

All this comes with a caveat, though. To really utilize AI / ML, you need data -- the more, the better.

It’s never been more important for brands to take their first-party data strategy seriously and it’s not just to take advantage of AI / ML. Bolstering your first-party data can have benefits across your whole business, strengthening your ability to sell directly to your customers, increasing margins and lifetime customer value.

In a post-third-party-cookie world, brands that rely on middlemen to reach their customers will be increasingly at a disadvantage while brands that take their first-party data seriously and use technology like AI / ML to utilize it will be well placed for tomorrow.

Read the original article on MediaPost here
Horizontal's Robert McGovern's Article Featured in MediaPost
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Demystifying AI for Personalization

First Tech Honored with Sitecore Experience Award
“I’m proud of our team’s unwavering focus to delivering unforgettable connected experiences and for the work to be recognized as a top digital brand experience across the globe. Congratulations to First Tech on this great recognition,” said Chris Staley, Co-Founder & EVP.

“We have some of the most innovative customers and partners in the world leveraging our platform to implement digital-first strategies that dramatically enhance the consumer experience,” said Lee Miles, Chief Customer Success Officer, Sitecore. “They recognize that digital has become ingrained at every level of the customer experience. It is more than a key component for organizations that want to move beyond the status quo – it is absolutely essential to any brand that wants to make those experiences even more immersive and impactful. We are proud to honor their achievements with this year’s Sitecore Experience Awards.”

Through the rigorous selection process, each entry was judged by a panel consisting of Sitecore leadership from that entry’s region. There are three regions that evaluated and approved all regional selections based on specific selection and scoring criteria.

About Sitecore

Sitecore delivers a digital experience platform that empowers the world’s smartest brands to build lifelong relationships with their customers. A highly decorated industry leader, Sitecore is the only company bringing together content, commerce, and data into one connected platform that delivers millions of digital experiences every day. Leading companies including American Express, ASOS, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars rely on Sitecore to provide more engaging, personalized experiences for their customers. Learn more at Sitecore.com.

About Horizontal Digital

Horizontal Digital is an experience-forward consultancy that builds exceptional website, mobile, ecommerce and portal experiences that meet customers with the right message, at the right moment. We deliver on this promise by fusing every digital touchpoint with customer data from sales, service, ecommerce and marketing programs we design and implement. These connected experiences create and continue conversations for customers across all departments and channels — empowering organizations to build stronger relationships with them in the process. Our unwavering focus on delivering meaningful digital experiences at every touchpoint has allowed us to successfully solve complex challenges for some of the world’s most recognizable brands.
[Minneapolis] (Oct. 5, 2021) – Horizontal Digital today announced it has received a Sitecore Experience Award (SEA) honorable mention in the Best Digital Experience Transformation category for its work with First Tech. The entry was selected from more than 140 submissions, recognized with an entry for how First Tech saw a 351% increase in student loan and 340% increase in home loan applications enabled by their Sitecore site.

The Sitecore Experience Awards 2021 recognize brands that have built truly customer-centric digital experiences with Sitecore® technology. The SEAs are awarded to Sitecore customers and their partners whose entries clearly demonstrate their Sitecore solution is delivering ground-breaking customer experiences and great overall value to their business. The SEAs highlight best-in-class brands from four specialized categories.
First Tech Federal and Horizontal Digital Are Named a 2021 Sitecore Experience Honorable Mention in the Best Digital Experience Transformation Category 
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First Tech Honored with Sitecore Experience Award

Horizontal named a 2021 Top Workplace
St. Louis Park, MN June 16th, 2021— Horizontal has been named one of the Top Workplaces in Minnesota by the Star Tribune. This is the 8th time that Horizontal has been chosen for this award.

Produced by the same team that compiles the 30-year-old Star Tribune 100 report of the best-performing public companies in Minnesota, Top Workplaces recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota based on employee opinions measuring engagement, organizational health and satisfaction. The analysis included responses from over 76,000 employees at Minnesota public, private and nonprofit organizations. 

The results of the Star Tribune Top Workplaces are based on survey information collected by Energage, an independent company specializing in employee engagement and retention. 

To qualify for the Star Tribune Top Workplaces, a company must have more than 50 employees in Minnesota. Nearly 3,000 companies were invited to participate. Rankings were composite scores calculated purely on the basis of employee responses. 
 
We're thrilled to have been included on the list and are very thankful to all our employees who helped make this happen. Find out more at StarTribune.com/topworkplaces2021. 

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