Sterling Health Plans Website Design
Overview
Located in Bellingham, WA, Sterling Life Insurance Company provides insurance solutions for members in all 50 states. Sterling offers a variety of group and individual Medicare insurance plans including Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement and Medicare Prescription Drug plans. Sterling came to MedTouch at the start of 2010 with an ambitious goal: to completely redesign its website in four months, moving a large number of business transactions online.
The Problem
Sterling's website redesign was motivated by the need for online and offline brand consistency and Sterling’s desire to develop a consumer-centric web presence. Advanced site functionality allows visitors to search, compare and sign up for health plans online, streamlining member transactions. The site’s engaging design and presentation establishes trust and aligns with Sterling’s excellent offline reputation—paramount for health insurance. The new content-driven site also now reflects the high level quality of service otherwise experienced by members and partners. This was both a functional and visual failing on the part of the old site and creates dissonance between the operational quality of the web and its obvious counterpart, the call center. Sterling's new site is more visually engaging, more in line with the "brand," or more contemporary with other peers in the insurance space.
The Solution
- Rebuild the entire site with new design, content and functionality
- Partner with internal developers to create an external web service that dynamically presents plan data
- Dynamically present two completely different versions of the site based on “year”
- Offer plan selection and sign up transactions online
- Reuse content in multiple locations and plan offerings to simplify site maintenance
- Manage content assets, including 100’s of PDFs stored with a new Content Management System platform Sitecore
- Develop new site on a four-month timeline!
The Results
- Using the Sitecore CMS platform, Sterling now has the capability to store and access vast amounts of data online
- Sterling developers can integrate into internal systems to sync data
- After 21 days, organic search traffic is already up by 24%
- Bounce rate decreased 20% in the first month since launch
- Depth of visits increased by 65%