OPPOrtunity

Can you make term life insurance sexy? Hell if I know.

Bestow was a Series B life insurance startup with single-digit daily sales. They suffered from a lack of positioning, an underwhelming purchasing experience, no understanding of their customers, and lackluster branding.

In less than a year, I built an internal team, contracted an agency for production work, launched new branding, re-skinned the website, built our growth content strategy from scratch, and crafted a brand narrative and unique voice that convinced millennials to trust an online insurance startup.

And it’s not not sexy.

WORK

First, we changed the vibe. No more cutesy start-up design cliches. We went bold like the big legacy carriers, but kept it a little edgy like our modern customers.

Then we tackled the website to cater to the way visitors were viewing it. They craved information, so we doubled down on education.

And in our first brand campaign, we asked the totally normal question, “What if everyone knew you didn’t have life insurance?” It also allowed us to position Bestow as the solution to get rid of guilt in minutes, all from your phone, without a doctor’s visit or mountains of paperwork. We brought it to life digitally through YouTube, CTV, display, social, and more to encourage people to visit Bestow before others know.

A brand needs internal buy-in, and startups love swag. So we branded the entire employee journey from interviewing to off-boarding and everything in between, including the architecture and design planning of both offices.

In just a few short years, Bestow built an end-to-end, direct-to-consumer service platform for life insurance - the only insurance that didn’t have a centralized SaaS provider. Once we perfected it, we took it to the carriers, many of whom had been struggling for a decade and hemorrhaging money in an effort to modernize. Suddenly all our internal systems needed to be branded for the external carriers. But first, we had to convince the industry we were the clear choice in a crowded field.

results

800% YOY policy sale growth in 2020-2021 alone, and 30x monthly policy sales total over 3 years

Grew agent and partner business organically to 10% of revenue in it’s first year

Grew retargeting (email and social) from 2 to 12% of sales

50% reduction in CAC through continuous funnel gap analysis and optimizations, testing, and growth strategy 

Bestow named CB Insights Top Fintech 250 for 3 years in a row

Launched enterprise marketing effort, secured 4 top 40 carriers in year one