How Optimizely Unlocked Self-Serve Brand Templates for 1,000+ Customers

Optimizely is one of the names most synonymous with A/B testing, a reputation it has carried since the early days of Web 2.0. Today it offers a broad suite of experimentation, personalization, and content marketing tools, serving more than 1,000 customers including Gap, StubHub, IBM, and The Wall Street Journal.

Inside Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform sits a brand template editor built on IMG.LY’s CE.SDK. Here’s how it came together, and what it changed for Optimizely’s sales motion and its customers.

The Challenge: Losing Deals on a Missing Feature

Optimizely had been a long-time IMG.LY customer, using PE.SDK for image editing inside its platform. But simple image editing no longer matched what the market was asking for. Prospects’ RFPs increasingly required support for templating, specifically brand designs such as banner ads, and Optimizely’s sales team started missing out on deals because the capability wasn’t there.

The competitive pressure was concrete. Rivals like Bynder shipped their own brand template editors, putting Optimizely at a disadvantage in exactly the deals it most wanted to win. The platform needed parity, fast, and it needed to reach customers who didn’t have design teams of their own.

One of the biggest things for us was that we wanted to enable our smaller customers to be able to build and use templates, people without expertise, people without design teams.

That framing mattered. The goal wasn’t a designer’s tool for designers. It was a way to put brand-safe creation in the hands of marketers and SMB customers who would never open a professional design application, while still satisfying the enterprise RFPs that demanded the feature exist at all.

Why They Chose CE.SDK

The build-versus-buy calculation was shaped by two constraints: time and budget. Optimizely needed a professional brand template editor quickly, and reaching parity with competitors through a ground-up internal build would have consumed engineering capacity the team didn’t have to spare.

Having already worked with IMG.LY on image editing, Optimizely understood the alternative. Rather than commit to building and then perpetually maintaining a creative engine, the team could embed CE.SDK and direct its own engineers at the part that was uniquely Optimizely’s: weaving the editor into the platform’s collaboration model, asset library, and workflow.

The decisive fit was structural. Optimizely’s CMP is built around collaboration, teams ideate together, assign workflow steps, leave annotations and comments, and layer in AI assistance, and once a brand template is finalized and approved, it lands in Optimizely’s DAM as a reusable, brand-approved asset. CE.SDK’s placeholder-and-constraint model slotted into that workflow rather than fighting it.

How They Implemented CE.SDK

The core of the integration was mapping Optimizely’s existing roles-and-permissions concept directly onto CE.SDK placeholders and constraints. That gave fine-grained control over exactly which elements of a template a given user could edit, so more stakeholders could collaborate on a design without anyone being able to compromise brand integrity.

In practice this surfaced through CE.SDK’s editor roles. “Creators” had access to advanced design features and could work without constraints, while “adopters” worked inside the boundaries creators defined, making smaller edits and filling placeholders with approved content. A brand-safe master design, defined once, could then be safely adapted by people who weren’t designers at all.

The project moved fast, which was the point.

I think it was one of the quickest projects we’ve worked on. Our engineers found the documentation super helpful, and anytime they needed support, they got the answers quickly. It was a super smooth process for us, and not all of our processes are super smooth.

Just as important as shipping the feature was making sure customers actually used it. Optimizely tightly integrated templates into the CMP so they couldn’t be missed: users encountered them inside the asset library and the task manager, which reinforced them as reusable design assets rather than one-off creatives. The task manager folded template work into the project planning module, assigning the design and approval steps, adapting a design, signing it off for publication, into the core workflow people already followed.

Optimizely also invested in adoption directly, pairing the rollout with an in-depth walk-through video and detailed documentation in its help center. Design editing can intimidate users who have never touched a design tool, and while CE.SDK is built to make that experience intuitive without training, the reassurance of a clear knowledge base, with product graphics and examples reflecting real tasks, smoothed the path for users who prefer a handbook to trial and error.

The Results

The brand template editor delivered against the metrics that had prompted the project in the first place. The closing rate of deals increased as the new feature satisfied the RFP requirements that had previously cost Optimizely opportunities, and customer retention rates went up alongside it.

For customers, the value compounded over time. Instead of commissioning a new asset for every campaign, teams now had a library of adaptable templates, making content more reusable and reducing the need to pull in a design team for routine work. The smaller customers Rob had set out to serve, the ones without design expertise, could finally build and reuse templates on their own.

The internal experience left a mark too. What Rob valued was not just the feature shipping, but that IMG.LY had helped make a capability real that he hadn’t been sure was achievable.

I really appreciated the collaboration in helping me get it signed off internally. I was very passionate about IMG.LY because it fulfilled a crucial part of the brief that I didn’t think would be feasible.

That sign-off was its own kind of result. A feature that started as a competitive liability became something Optimizely could champion internally, and then ship to a customer base of over a thousand.

Overall Impact

The less-visible win sits underneath the closing-rate numbers. By embedding CE.SDK rather than building a creative engine in-house, Optimizely kept its engineering team pointed at the parts of the product only Optimizely could build, the collaboration model, the workflow integration, the DAM, while the editor itself, and its ongoing maintenance, came from a partner whose entire focus is creative tooling.

This collaboration enabled us to integrate template creation into the platform, something I didn’t think was possible. It was great to work collaboratively with the IMG.LY team.

The shape of the outcome is a feature that closes deals, retains customers, and serves the long tail of users without design expertise, delivered fast, inside budget, and without committing Optimizely to maintaining a design tool of its own.