Insurance Marketing Organization Delights Agents With A New Membership Portal On HubSpot CMS
AWARD WINNER HubSpot 2023 | Product Excellence
This category recognizes partners who are providing value to clients starting with a single product, demonstrating their expertise in delivering a single hub solution to their customer.
Senior Market Sales also uses HubSpot's CRM platform to connect their data.
OVERVIEW Advanced CMS with Member Portal & Custom Okta Integration
Senior Market Sales (SMS) is a full-service insurance marketing organization (IMO) dedicated to helping independent insurance agents leverage time, make more money, and put their business in a position of distinction. In their commitment to their agents, they wanted to provide an amazing website that had tools and resources to help them make meaningful gains in their own businesses.
They came to Instrumental Group for a ground-up, strategic website redesign, including a robust membership portal for their agents. The new site needed to elevate their brand, drive new business, and provide their team maximum usability and ease of use in managing their content on a day-to-day basis—and it needed to be built on HubSpot CMS, the best CMS on the market.
CHALLENGE Senior Market Sales needed Instrumental to re-platform their website and develop an integrated agent portal.
GOALS Project goals included a laundry list of desired outcomes.
- Reinvent the website and membership portal
- Reduce or eliminate maintenance costs
- Improve brand congruency and standards
- Streamline the user experience
- De-clutter content and navigation
- Implement strong conversion paths
- Sync data with HubSpot CRM
- Integrate member portal with Okta
- Prioritize security and accessibility
- Improve site performance and usability
SOLUTIONS Agent-focused, team-enabling, built for scale
Streamlined messaging that clearly conveys value
We began by going deep on discovery to understand all aspects of the business, its internal processes, and its customers. Together, we developed defined personas and mapped these individuals through a holistic customer journey that started at unawareness, through solutions search, decision, and post-close toward evangelism. By understanding their users, we could identify what was most important to them and how we could seamlessly connect them with the content they were seeking with the fewest clicks possible.
Conversion path implementation
We defined primary and secondary conversions throughout the site through a collaborative redesign strategy. This allowed us to monitor the specific performance metrics and optimize over time.
Membership portal
By leveraging HubSpot's CMS Enterprise membership functionality, we created a gated area of the website for agents to access premium resources and content at their fingertips. Through CRM integration with individual contact records and list associations, we could provide various access levels depending on the type of agent and current membership level.
Okta Single Sign On (SSO) integration
- When a new user registers, we had to check if the user already existed in the client database. Additionally, we had to determine if the contact was part of a specific group in Okta, or if it was in a particular list in HubSpot.
- If the contact existed in Okta but was not part of a specific group, they had to be added to one depending on their user type.
- If the user existed in HubSpot, they had to be added to a specific HubSpot list in Okta.
- If the user existed in neither Okta nor HubSpot, they had to be added to a specific group and list in each platform.
- If the user was correctly added to the specific group in Okta and the specific list in HubSpot, they had to be redirected to a custom dashboard with specific content assigned to that group.
- Since we were using two domains (sms and mysms) and the registration took place in mysms, we had to store credentials to identify the user in the main domain.
HubDB & centralized content management
Leveraging HubSpot's database functionality, we created various HubDB tables to centrally manage different types of content. This made it easy to make one update and cascade it dynamically across the website.
Resource migration (from Okta) is now managed in HubDB, including:
- Resources
- Events
- Carriers
- Tech Tools
SEO cleanup & optimization
While SEO is a major focus of any project, it was essential that we improved metrics and optimized for maximum ranking potential. This included metadata optimizations site-wide, adding redirects for all previous 404s, and cleaning up all redirect loops.
We also went through an exercise of removing all duplicate content by minimizing the number of site pages, adding canonical URLs to mitigate previous www vs. non-www, and trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash issues.
As a result, site health increased by 32%, increasing from 52 to 84. The data was also more trustworthy due to the elimination of non-canonicalized URLs.
RESULTS Increase in the most meaningful metrics
site health immediately post launch up 24%
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site health after 3 months of being live 30%
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Right after launch, we saw an immediate improvement of +24% in site health, which quickly grew to 32%. Most important, however, was that we had more accurate data, which allowed us to make better decisions moving forward.
Since launch, we have continuously improved the website by reducing minor on-page errors and warnings such as length of page titles, adding relevant alt text, and more. 100% of the site is secured under HTTPS now, and overall site performance is at 91%.
Although we now have over 500 pages indexed, we are still pushing for full site indexing. We anticipate the numbers to improve further as the site indexes fully.
Increase in traffic & engagement
Since our launch in August, we've seen a steady increase of traffic increasing 50% from previous yearly high in just one month post launch. But the results don't stop there.
Not only was traffic up, but overall pageviews were up as well. 25% more than the previous years high. This indicates that not only are more users reaching the site, but once there, they are able to find the information they're looking for easily. Because of this, we're seeing an overall increase in site engagement.
To further drive this point home, we can see an immediate increase in the number of page views per session. So not only are more users viewing pages, but individual users are touching pages within their given session. Further illustrating the improved user experience and increased engagement on the new site.
Increase in total site users
When looking at the last month YoY, we can see a 118% increase in overall users with a 125% increase in new users. The website is definitely being well received and our goals of driving meaningful change for Senior Market Sales seems to be on the right track.
Meaningful improvements and impact from the micro to the macro
Some meaningful metrics to us were regarding engaged sessions. That is the number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had 2 or more page views.
- Engaged sessions (56,562) up 59% year-over-year
- Average session duration (3:51) up 11% yoy
- Events per session (9.18) up 62% yoy
- Engagement rate (82%) up 68% yoy
Looking at bottom line ROI, it appears our strategy was sound.
- SQLs in the 90 days after the site launched were up 40.4% over SQLs the 90 days before the site launched (1,157 to 818).
- We had 1,739 users register for the new website in the first 90 days after launch, and 11,236 user logins.
IMPACT We create impact beyond just the metrics.
"Feedback has been well-received. Our employees really like the new look, and the integration with the Marketing and Sales hubs. Agents (our user base) like it, too. We are getting more sales-qualified leads than we have in the past.
Having the entire Creative team involved with managing the website adds hours back into
my day. Gone are the days when team members would have to request reports, update content, or fix issues. Now they can just do it themselves."