2020 Best of the Best Winners: Website

Recognizing Marketing’s Finest

FIFTY INDIVIDUAL MARKETING EFFORTS EARN AWARDS IN OUR 2020 CONTEST

Judging for tED magazine’s 2020 Best of the Best Marketing Awards Competition took place in late April and, for the first time in the competition’s history, over Zoom. Over the course of a week, our four judges weighed the entries submitted for the contest’s 11 categories. Ultimately, 50 entries were determined winners, with two companies—OneSource Distributors and Intermatic—taking home the honor of Best of the Best Overall Distributor and Best of the Best Overall Supplier, respectively. Here we present all of this year’s winning submissions, highlighting a different category each week.

WEBSITE /

Distributor $101 Million to $400 Million
Loeb Electric
New Website

Building a new website started with phone-based customer research built around vendor preferences and their selection process, evaluating third-party industry research to build a knowledge base around buyer needs for both contractor and national account audiences, and building website audience profiles. In parallel, the company launched a rebrand. With the research and rebrand complete, Loeb progressed into a website strategy that focused on three main goals.

FROM THE JUDGES: “The design is clean and fresh and it’s easy to navigate and drill down to get details. I also liked the thorough process they used to develop it.”

Distributor $401 Million to $700 Million
Summit Electric Supply
Summit.com Refresh

To update summit.com to create a web experience that is engaging, easy to use, and drives more electronic transactions, Summit Electric Supply’s web and marketing teams examined best practices across multiple industries, employed user experience experts, and created several design mock-ups to test the new site. From simplified navigation to shopping shortcuts and the use of branded colors, the resulting update fundamentally changed the way users interact with summit.com.

FROM THE JUDGES: “The site is cleaner, simpler, and more streamlined—and visitors can get to what they need with fewer clicks, which is always appreciated!”

Distributor More Than $700 Million
OneSource Distributors
New Search

OneSource Distributors set out to improve its website search function, significantly reduce the number of abandoned searches, increase the number of products listed, and add filter capabilities. This was accomplished by adding 150,000+ new products, putting into place 1,000+ smart filters, implementing machine learning to personalize and improve results, and adding more spec sheets. The update was then promoted via a campaign that encouraged customers to try the new search function.

FROM THE JUDGES: “I love that they responded to a problem. Great insight, good metrics, and it was very well promoted!”

Supplier Less Than $250 Million
Topaz
Customer Portal

Topaz needed a way to provide an online experience while maintaining personal relationships. The existing website already had the capabilities to offer personalized log-ins, so the marketing team made a list of the information they wanted to display—tracking, shipping address, invoice due date, etc.—and began working with the web manager and IT team to connect the appropriate data fields from the company’s ERP system to the web platform. This was followed by several rounds of testing, training, and a direct launch to distributors via a staggered email campaign.

FROM THE JUDGES: “Topaz really did its research and created a powerful and useful tool for all of its segments.”

Supplier More Than $250 Million
Legrand North America
Distributor Transaction Website Portal Launch

Legrand designed its myLegrand business-to-business website to significantly improve the customer experience by providing a single platform that makes it easier for its distribution partners to order products and access information across multiple Legrand product lines. After creation, communications were designed to generate awareness of the new tool and to help educate users on the site’s capabilities, which resulted in rapid adoption.

FROM THE JUDGES: “Nice job of executing a theme across the guide, shirts, marketing materials, and swag. Also, the metrics show that people really were engaged with the rollout.”