How to Use Digital Engagement to Build a Brand and Customer Loyalty

By Carrie Horn, Content Manager, and Tonya Goos, Customer Experience Manager

When Wellabe launched its new brand in June 2023, we introduced more to the world than a new logo. Up to that point, we had been an insurance company that mostly interacted with policyholders through agents. But we knew to fully develop the Wellabe brand, we needed to build a direct connection to our customers.

The quickest and most effective way to develop a customer relationship is through digital engagement with website content, social media, and email. We wondered whether our target audience — age 50 plus, but mostly ages 60-75 — would be ready to engage on the digital stage. But in less than 1.5 years, we’ve experienced success that exceeds industry standards.

Website content

We kicked off our digital transformation by consolidating four old brand websites into Wellabe.com.

Objectives

Our key objectives were to:

• Develop a website to engage current customers and consumer prospects ages 50 and older, potential employees, and potential agents
• Maintain 80% of cumulative website traffic, compared year of year (YoY), in the first 3 months post-launch. (Any time a website is relaunched or rebuilt, search engine optimization (SEO) takes a hit. We wanted to mitigate this dip in organic traffic and regain momentum quickly.)
• Achieve 100% of cumulative website traffic, compared YoY, by 6 months post-launch
• Generate sales leads
• Build trust with educational blog content
• Learn about consumers by the types of content they view and where they visit from
• Collect email addresses for free content tools

Tactics

To achieve these objectives, we created a strategic, digital experience that users would appreciate and ensured the technical transition from four websites into one went smoothly by:

• Surveying stakeholders and performing extensive competitive research to identify requirements
• Collaborating with a user experience agency to create the site’s structure and design
• Auditing our four websites and implementing a transition plan for the content
• Partnering with our development team to follow technical best practices for redirecting and sunsetting the old websites
• Launching digital advertising and social media programs to build awareness and to generate online form submissions and phone calls
• Creating content for our Be informed blog to generate organic traffic and to educate prospects about our products
• Publishing detailed pages to tell our brand story and to entice prospective candidates to apply for open positions

Results

Wellabe.com was launched successfully in June 2023. Through Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager, its results showed:

• In the first 3 months, total website traffic was at 88.89% compared to Quarter 3, 2022, exceeding the goal of 80%. During the same period, pageviews were up 162.8% year over year.
• In Quarter 4, 2023, website traffic was 114.4% compared to the previous year, exceeding the 6-month 100% goal.
• Through September 2024, the website continues to perform better than the four discontinued sites YoY:
  • Site traffic is up 50%.
  • Be informed blog is up 11%.
  • Quote requests are up 43%.
  • Phone calls are up 116%.
• com also took third place for best website of the year at the Iowa American Marketing Association NOVA awards in July 2024.

Social

With multiple brands, we lacked a social media presence that was able to target new customers and build a community. We hired a social media specialist to create a strategy and launch Wellabe on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Objectives

Our goals were to:

• Meet our customers where they are
• Build engaged audiences
• Increase brand awareness
• Promote products and services
• Increase website traffic
• Create metrics to identify growth

Tactics

To achieve these objectives, we:

• Grew our following using like and share campaigns
• Used data to choose platforms and create a content strategy
• Collaborated with designers to create engaging graphics
• Launched social ads to build awareness and to generate form submissions and phone calls
• Introduced our first influencer

Results

• We have watched our accounts grow quickly. In less than 1.5 years, we have:
  • Facebook: 10,000 followers
  • LinkedIn: 3,111 followers
  • YouTube: 450 subscribers
  • Instagram: 217 followers
• On our YouTube channel, we published brand videos that highlight employees, a Tiny Mic series, product videos, and narratives that show a human side to the insurance industry.
• New employees have said our LinkedIn profile and employee spotlight videos on YouTube enticed them to apply.
• 15-25% of the website’s monthly blog traffic comes from social media.
• Agents that sell Wellabe business used social media graphics on their personal pages growing our brand presence further.

Consumer e-newsletter

In January 2024, we launched a monthly consumer newsletter that helps our readers protect their health and financial well-being in retirement. It highlights blog content and tools from wellabe.com.

Objectives

Our goals were to:

• Build a trusted, engaged subscriber audience
• Boost brand recognition
• Cultivate customer engagement
• Drive traffic to our website, making us more independent of SEO and paid ads
• Turn subscribers into customers
• Gain valuable insights into our customers

Tactics

• Use first-party data for registrations
• Provide valuable, relevant content on a consistent schedule to develop trust
• Boost customer engagement with a variety of calls to action
• Deliver value to cultivate customer loyalty
• Highlight our brand’s personality to foster a strong emotional connection
• Review A/B testing and analytics regularly to understand behaviors, needs, and pain points
• Promote newsletter archive page on social media to entice users to subscribe

Results

The newsletter has been receiving strong reader engagement since day 1. Generally, when an open rate is 21-27% and the click-through rate is 1-2%, a marketing email campaign is considered a success.*

• Open rates on Wellabe’s consumer newsletters have been 66-71%.
• Click-through rates have been 10-28%.
• The subscription list is growing monthly. It grew 65% in Quarter 3, and we’ve only had 4 unsubscribes throughout the entire year.
• Our ratio of consumers vs. customers switched in Quarter 2. Our subscribers are now 67% customers.

To learn more about Wellabe and its vision to be the most trusted provider of health and wealth solutions in an increasingly connected world, visit wellabe.com or subscribe to its newsletter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube.

*The average click rate for an email tells the rate of contacts who clicked a link in the email out of all the contacts who received it. If a contact clicks more than one link in the email, or clicks on the same link multiple times, they’re only counted once.