RWJBarnabas Site Relaunches with Tremendous Growth Thanks to Project Vision and Guiding Principles

// By Melanie Graham //

Anyone who has worked in healthcare communications and digital marketing understands that a website relaunch project can be a daunting task. But one that involves merging 24 existing websites across two separate health systems sounds downright intimidating.

In early 2017, that’s exactly what the RWJBarnabas Health web team was facing. They were on the hook for creating a new web experience that consolidated content from two dozen websites and represented the vision and branding of the newly merged Robert Wood Johnson Health and Saint Barnabas Health systems.

Evelyn Meneghin, assistant vice president of interactive services, RWJBarnabas Health

“It felt like going into a storm,” says Evelyn Meneghin, assistant vice president of interactive services at RWJBarnabas. “We wanted to create a simplistic experience from a customer standpoint, but we had to figure out how to do that when there were so many areas to represent.”

Meneghin’s team worked alongside Scorpion Healthcare — a healthcare internet marketing and technology agency that specializes in designing and building hospital websites, digital advertising, and content and social media marketing — to help them execute on the redesign, a 12-month project that launched in January 2018.

Within the first year of launching the new site, RWJBarnabas saw:

• 40 percent increase in organic traffic
• 40 percent jump in online appointment requests
• 161 percent increase in organic search impression share
• 35 percent average bounce rate

That success, Meneghin says, can be attributed to two key areas: achieving buy-in from leadership based on analytics and market research, and establishing a set of principles that would guide every step of the project.

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