Land O’Lakes redefines customer engagement through personalization and real-time data

Land O’Lakes knew that the future of customer engagement depended on relevance. The company wanted to go beyond traditional analytics and deliver experiences that spoke directly to the interests and behaviors of its diverse audiences.

Their existing approach relied on static analytics segments that were activity-based rather than behavioral. “If someone clicked on one article, they were locked into that audience, whether it was relevant or not,” said Steve Rude, Senior Manager of Digital Experience. “We needed something living, something that could evolve with our customers.”

The team shifted from static, one-dimensional segments to Living Audiences, dynamic groups that adapt as customers engage, move, and change interests across digital touchpoints.

The goal was to unify content and customer data to deliver adaptive, behavior-based personalization at scale without slowing teams down.

With Contentstack’s Real-time Data and Insights, Land O’Lakes brought its Living Audiences strategy to life by moving from manual, static segmentation to dynamic targeting that automatically adapts as user preferences change. This allows marketers to launch or optimize campaigns in hours rather than weeks.

Their success came from connecting insights across business units and giving marketing teams more direct control over personalization. Using behavioral and engagement data, they can quickly identify high-intent audiences, test creative variations, and trigger new experiences based on real-time activity. This shift removed the manual work of building and refreshing static lists and made it possible to act on audience behavior the moment it happens.

This process is now standardized through a shared playbook that lets teams replicate what works. When one business unit achieves strong performance, the same approach is adapted and deployed across others, helping Land O’Lakes scale personalization faster and maintain consistent quality across brands.

The shared playbook has become a blueprint for scalable personalization that ensures consistency across brands while giving each team flexibility to experiment and innovate. “If we need to, we can bring something to life the same day, including the audience build,” said Madi Landsburg, Digital Marketing Specialist. “That speed and flexibility have completely changed how we operate.”

Today, Land O’Lakes runs nearly 300 personalized experiences per year, connecting content and data to deliver tailored, high-impact campaigns across every business unit:

• Purina Animal Nutrition: A horse feed trial campaign achieved a 91% conversion rate. The team built a high-intent "living audience" by targeting users who had viewed specific content (like the horse feed calculator and weight management pages) while excluding those who had already converted or seen the trial modals.

• Food Service: Personalized experiences now drive 30% of all product guide downloads, a key conversion KPI.

• Purina product launches: 66% of new product page views stem from personalized campaigns.

• Dairy Retail: Visitors engaging with personalized content view significantly more pages per session, a 225% increase compared to general visitors.

Real-time personalization has become a shared framework across the company, enabling collaboration between teams and creating a unified approach to content and data activation.

The success of Real-time Data and Insights has changed both the metrics and the mindset at Land O’Lakes. “We’re at a minimum, doubling engagement,” said Rude. “That’s our baseline metric.”

A key part of the ROI story is not just new conversions, but maximizing the value of existing media spend. The team found that while media campaigns drove the majority of initial feed trials, Contentstack’s platform was crucial to recapture high-intent visitors who had been reached by media but did not convert. By retargeting this audience with a different, personalized path, Land O’Lakes converts users who would have otherwise been lost.

This capability bridges the gap between media performance and digital experience, ensuring that every ad dollar continues to deliver value beyond the initial campaign. For strategic and operational leaders, it proves how personalization directly contributes to ROI by extending the life and impact of existing marketing investments.

Each business unit now measures personalization’s direct contribution to engagement, awareness, and conversion goals. Beyond the numbers, the transformation has elevated personalization from a marketing tactic to a company-wide discipline

“Leadership now brings us into 2026 planning earlier and more strategically than ever before. It’s proof that personalization is driving the business forward,” said Rude. 

Landsburg added, “When something doesn’t work, we pivot, test, and try again. When something does work, we scale it. It’s made our jobs more creative and collaborative, and the results speak for themselves.”

What began as isolated campaign wins has evolved into a repeatable enterprise framework. The shared playbook ensures every team, from Purina to Dairy Retail, builds on the same foundation of data, experimentation, and real-time insight.

Beyond the technology, what stood out most to the Land O’Lakes team was Contentstack’s partnership model and continuous innovation.

With personalization now part of its foundation, Land O’Lakes is expanding the strategy beyond owned channels to deliver consistency across social, search, and paid media.

The team is also pioneering progressive profiling, using short, in-context micro-surveys to capture preferences directly from users and fuel even more relevant, adaptive experiences.

“We’re learning directly from our audiences in real time,” Landsburg said. “That’s how we’ll keep every experience relevant and every connection meaningful.”