CASE STUDY
Winona

How Winona’s Strategic Partnership With Outliant Resulted in 300% Year-Over-Year Growth

Digital Identity
UI Design
UX Design
Web Development
Growth Marketing

Overview

Client
Winona
Solution
Contentful
Live Site
bywinona.com

Women in menopausal transition are largely underserved by the traditional health care industry: One in three women aged 40-65 in the U.S. have not received a formal menopause diagnosis by a health care provider, and 20% say it took over a year to receive a diagnosis.

Launched in 2021, Winona is a telehealth company that aims to empower, educate, and treat women throughout the entirety of their menopause journey. And the strategic partner they trust to enable their rapid growth is Outliant.

Year-over-year growth in just three years

300%

Monthly active subscribers

25,000

5-star reviews on Trustpilot

2,000+

Members in Winona’s highly engaged online community

16,000

Year-over-year growth in just three years

300%

Monthly active subscribers

25,000

5-star reviews on Trustpilot

2,000+

Members in Winona’s highly engaged online community

16,000

Testimonial

“Outliant is way more than a digital marketing agency. They’re an investor in our future and a true partner every step of the way. Competitors in our space have raised 100x more capital than we have and aren’t performing at the caliber we are. With Outliant at our side, we are growing at a rate we never thought possible.”

Ashlie Beiter
Co-founder & VP of Marketing at Winona
Before
After

About Winona

Because a high proportion of women in menopausal transition remain untreated, even when experiencing adverse symptoms, such as hot flashes and insomnia, Winona’s goal is to take the confusion out of menopause and help women get the solutions they need.

Winona offers doctor-prescribed, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that is backed by science and shipped directly to patients’ doors. The company currently serves 150,000 happy patients in 35 states and counting.

Winona’s innovative, research-driven approach—combined with Outliant’s marketing and brand development expertise—has been critical to achieving its mission of redefining menopause care.

Assembling the Team

To change the menopause landscape, Winona’s first objective was to build an A-list team.

As the company focused on bringing in medical expertise, including more than 20 board-certified physicians and a customer care team of women who understood menopause firsthand, Outliant took on the task of recruiting Winona’s technology and lifecycle marketing teams.

Remaining lean and agile as they scaled was critical, so rather than hire highly expensive and unvetted consultants, Outliant recruited a global staff from a pool across 30+ countries and brought on executive-level talent at a fractional share.

Now Winona’s resource management is self-sustaining: Tenured team members are promoted internally, and Outliant staffs their replacements—ensuring that every single team member is hand-selected for excellence.

Testimonial

“A company’s culture is paramount, so we at Winona needed a partner we could trust to scale our staff and take us to the next level. We wouldn’t have been able to hire the best talent from all around the world—at the best price—if it weren’t for Outliant.”

Gray Dorsett
Head of Product at Winona

Crafting a Digital Identity from Day One

Outliant led the charge on several key initiatives to create an impactful digital identity for Winona:

01
Market Research
Building a company’s brand from the ground up requires extensive and intense market research. Outliant led an in-depth focus group of over 200 women to better understand how Winona could facilitate a healthcare experience their patients needed and deserved so they can feel like themselves again.
02
Visual Design
One common theme among this focus group’s feedback was that women experiencing menopause prefer corporate branding that feels fun and youthful. Outliant transformed Winona’s color palette with bright and vibrant pastels that connote the beauty and trendiness of a luxury med spa or wellness retreat, not the sad fatigue of most doctor’s offices.
03
Brand Voice
Outliant also helped develop Winona’s brand voice and tone, with key messages on how the company speaks to its audience and approaches sensitive topics around aging and women’s healthcare. This focus on education, compassion, and positivity directly led to the growth of Winona’s online community of 16,000 engaged members.
04
Web Design
Outliant’s user research impacted every part of Winona’s website. The team applied various best practices, including heat maps and extensive A/B testing, for more effective conversion rate optimization. To cater to an audience aged 40+, web design was focused on readability and accessibility, as well as demonstrating social proof to guide users to take the right calls to action.
Before
After

Developing the Perfect Tech Stack

Many digital marketing agencies can give a brand a makeover, but Outliant’s touch at Winona was more than skin-deep. Outliant took on the responsibility of building the perfect tech stack from start to finish—from evaluating a host of solutions, recommending the right tools, and leading the implementation of each platform.

Notable selections included deploying Contentful’s headless content management system, Segment’s customer data platform, Optimizely’s A/B testing capabilities, and Intercom’s customer service solution.

By Outliant integrating this tech stack, Winona can take advantage of the most advanced technologies on the market and achieve their KPIs with the greatest return on investment.

Moreover, each component of this stack was developed to improve Winona’s customer experience and put patients first. Outliant’s web development and tech implementation made compliance easy, especially when managing protected health information (PHI).

A tech stack that improves the bottom line and keeps patients safe and secure is a win-win.

Turbocharging Winona’s Growth Marketing

Quality, care, and convenience are at the heart of Winona’s mission, so the team’s marketing and communication strategies needed to reflect that.

By advising and implementing Winona’s entire marketing tech stack, Outliant can ensure relevancy and engagement across all channels: email, SMS, social media, online community, and more.

This is reflected across both organic and paid channels. Because prospective patients rely heavily on research before making health care decisions, Outliant managed both onsite and offsite SEO to optimize Winona’s education-based, peer-reviewed content.

As for performance advertising, Outliant manages all of Winona’s ad campaigns, across leading platforms, such as Meta, Google, Taboola, and Pinterest. Everything is handled by the Outliant team, from building landing pages and designing ad creative to testing variants and reporting metrics.

Outliant has not only aggressively scaled to $1.5 million in monthly ad spend, but also maintained Winona’s profitability with an outstanding 3.2X return on ad spend. With Outliant leading the charge on Winona’s marketing efforts, the company’s growth has been exponential.

An Abandoned Checkout Campaign That Converts

One stellar example of Outliant’s growth marketing success was Winona’s abandoned checkout campaign. As a subscription service that handles sensitive, medical information, Winona’s checkout process is naturally more involved than the average e-commerce shopping experience.

To secure more signups and boost revenue, Outliant helped develop a personalized, cross-channel campaign across email and text, with key messages on how patients could meet physicians, alleviate their symptoms, and complete their onboarding.

The results of this abandoned checkout campaign speak for themselves. The Winona lifecycle marketing team was able to achieve up to 81% open rates and 10-13% conversion rates on average.

Most importantly, this campaign has improved Winona’s bottom line, contributing to the company’s growth of 25,000 monthly active subscribers.

Email Campaign

Symptom Relief Email

SMS Campaign

Testimonial

“Outliant’s industry knowledge and expertise allow us to stay on the cutting-edge of what’s next. Not only do our marketing campaigns hit our KPIs out of the ballpark, but more importantly, they make our patients feel heard and supported on their menopause journey.”

Ashlie Beiter
Co-founder & VP of Marketing at Winona

Summary

With their strategic partnership with Outliant, Winona is poised to rapidly accelerate its 300% year-over-year growth and expects to generate over 100 million in annual recurring revenue in the next year.

By remaining lean and agile as they scale and focusing on caring for their patients, Winona is set up for major success.

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