The dairy cooperative details how it personalized website content for visitors based on their behavior to keep them engaged, buying and coming back.
Land O’Lakes is scaling personalization — with roughly 300 different experiences — by grouping consumers into 447 affinity audiences, Steve Rude, Senior Manager of Digital Experience, told attendees at Contentstack’s ContentCon conference in Chicago in October.
“If we know something about that one visitor, chances are we’re personalizing to them,” Rude said.
Land O’Lakes has a deep content library on its websites to help identify consumers and their interests to better personalize content for them. Its goal is to provide fresh, relevant content to make engagement and conversion as easy as possible, Rude said.
Personalization is especially important to the dairy cooperative because it serves many different industries beyond retail, such as agricultural plants, animal feed and food service. The Fortune 500 company generated $16 billion in net sales in 2025 and operates other brands, including Purina and WinField United.
Land O’Lakes decided to measure whether its personalization efforts were working by tracking whether page views per visit increased compared with the average visitor who is not viewing personalized content.
After the company implemented affinity audiences within Contentstack’s content management system, its page views per visit did increase by triple digits — 245% across all its sites — compared with consumers without personalized content. By specific website:
Landolakes.com — 431% engagement lift
Winfieldunited.com — 247% lift
Landolakesfoodservice.com — 183% lift
Croplan.com — 140% lift
Purinamills.com — 294% lift
Land O’Lakes Tests Audience Personalization With Purina
But to get to these metrics, Land O’Lakes first did a test with one of its brands, Purina, to focus on getting consumers who owned a horse to sign up for a feed trial. The brand went into the customer data platform Lytics, which Contentstack acquired in 2025, to identify consumers who looked at three or more pages related to horses.
“Lytics scans through all of our websites and calls out repeating topics across each of these pages,” Rude said. “You can get more granular, you can get more specific, but for where we were starting, horse was it. We needed to know how many people were coming to the site and looking at horse content so we could build this affinity audience.”
For consumers who are in the audience, Land O’Lakes would then have a slide-in module, similar to a pop-up box, that suggested the consumer sign up for a feed trial. The modules worked, earning a 29% click-through rate and a whopping 91% conversion rate among consumers who clicked.
“Nine out of 10 are signing up for a horse feed trial,” he said. “I don’t know what more you could ask other than that one person who’s holding out for some reason, but we’ll get them eventually.”
Land O’Lakes Goes for Always-On Personalization
With these positive results, Land O’Lakes had all of its business units come up with an audience they could target for a certain goal. For example, it has a lot of recipe content that it can segment into breakfast recipes or cookie recipes and then target consumers viewing that content with a newsletter subscription for more recipe content.
Rude also noted that the company could exclude consumers who already took the call to action, such as purchasing a feed trial. Plus, it could remove people from an audience if they stopped looking at that audience’s content, such as horse content, after a certain point.
“We refer to them as living audiences because as my behavior changes on the website, I may move in or out of several different audiences even during a visit,” Rude said.
Then, once consumers click on that personalized content, Land O’Lakes wants to continue to engage with them to keep them coming back. The brand will then put those consumers into a different audience with the next call to action, such as a supplemental subscription service or a newsletter sign-up.
“Once you get into content hierarchy, it really unlocks always-on personalization,” he said. “A person comes in, whether they’ve converted with one thing or they said no to this and we map them into something else, personalization is always on.”
This process is automated now, which is why Land O’Lakes has so many audiences.
Personalization Beyond Its Website
Rude is pleased with the personalization the company has achieved on its website. Next up is personalizing Land O’Lakes content on other channels where its consumers are, he said.
“What we’re not doing a good job of is taking these audiences and using them externally,” he said. “We are working on connecting to LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and any other channel that we’re on so we can not only share these audiences but then use them to create a consistent voice and a consistent personalized experience with our brands, no matter what channel our visitors are in.”
