How Spring Health frees up marketing to be marketing

Spring Health is a comprehensive medical health solution for employers and health plans. The Spring Health marketing team supports a wide range of stakeholders with customized content. In fact, the marketers co-brand roughly 75% of their brand assets. Their need for a DAM and customization capabilities was key to ensuring governance, data quality, consistency, and adherence to brand guidelines. Erik Mohn, Customer Success Team Lead at Frontify, recently caught up with Connie Bravo, Senior Manager, Marketing Technology and Analytics at Spring Health, to discuss her experience with Frontify and how the teams use DAM to scale (beyond) their co-branding content. Note that the interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Erik Mohn: Onboarding a new SaaS tool can be a source of fear and discomfort for companies. I'm sure everyone has heard stories about complex, long, and frustrating onboarding processes. You've talked about how smooth the process was with Frontify. What should people look for in a good onboarding experience and ongoing support post-launch?

Connie Bravo: Oh, absolutely. Implementation and managing change management are never easy tasks. There’s always going to be something that requires attention, dedication, and repetition. Some of the things that we've done that have worked for us are having a very detailed playbook and linking that everywhere. So, linking it in our access invitations on the access request site, in our brand guidelines section within Frontify, as well as just pinning it in various Slack channels. We also held live and recorded training sessions. We work with our stakeholder departments and ask to be featured and attend one of their calls just to kind of remind them that we have Frontify office hours and dedicated Slack channels. And let me tell you, that Slack channel is not one of those that you set up once, and then you have to say, “This is never getting used; let's delete it.” It is a very high-traffic channel for us, where we collaborate directly with our end users, and they'll ask questions, make suggestions, and even ask for new pieces of content. “Hey, I'd like to see this in Frontify as well.”

Some additional learnings: I'd recommend having as many templates live as possible. Because of the tight time frame, we weren't able to get all of our templates loaded by October [the launch date of the Spring Health brand portal], and it was just a little bit of re-education that we had to do once we had a bigger library. One of my favorite things — within the brand guidelines themselves and in the template section on the frontend of Frontify — is leveraging those annotations and the notes when you set up and add your template to those pages. You know, when you have frequently asked questions, and you feel like you're answering the same thing over and over again, or if you notice that there's an extra level of customization that needs to happen, that's a great resource to kind of add that “Don't forget!” right before they create the design. Lastly, find your super users. When you find those people who you know are in there, they're using it, they get excited about it, work with them, let them be your advocates because they will definitely help spread the word to the point where you're getting Frontify questions — “I want access!”, “Let's add it to our team!”, or “How can we use it?” — from all types of directions.

Erik: You've used Frontify to create hundreds of templates to streamline your content production. Can you walk us through some of the guardrails you have in place for the templates to help you maintain consistency across all of your different stakeholders?

Connie: We kind of live by our approval process. It's one of those things that saved us from sending out something without a logo or with the wrong QR code. So, we really, really rely on that approval process. We have a team of approvers. That way, it's not just left to one individual. And we maintain a very tight SLA [service-level agreement]. Our external-facing SLA, which is to our partners, is usually between 24 hours to 48 hours. We've kept it very tight. And so we usually keep it within less than 24 hours. And because we're very in the momentum, we've got the process down pat. So, we usually look at our queue at the beginning and at the end of the day — depending on time zones, we'll rotate — and we usually get them done the same day.

Erik: What's the process for adding new templates to Frontify?

Connie: Oh, I love that question! Because it's one of those things that once people started — “Hey, I like this! I'm gonna get this in Frontify. How can I do it?” — we kind of didn't have the process. We're like, maybe just add it to the Slack channel. That wasn't working for us. So, we added it to our formal intake process. We use a task-management tool. And we've created it as its own request type, and it's really become a lot easier because one of the frequently asked questions we were getting is, “How can I get this into Frontify?”

Erik: Amazing. Yeah, I think having an internal playbook — like you mentioned earlier — and including it already in the onboarding process is absolutely crucial and can save a lot of time on the backend once you go live. We help with the internal comms process. It's a collaborative process with all our clients.

Now, let’s look at the bigger picture. There are a lot of martech tools out there. It can be really overwhelming for people evaluating these tools. From your perspective, how does Frontify compare specifically to other templating tools?

Connie: We did our due diligence. Just looking back at the vendors we were looking at, there aren't that many platforms that do what Frontify does — it provided the level of customization that we needed while also being a fully self-service platform. We're in a time in marketing where prospects, customers, and everyone are demanding personalized experiences and tailored messaging, and we selected Frontify because we could directly support this need. I know that there are some creative platforms: If you think about maybe Canva or Figma, they're really just that — creative but not mass-customizable. They don't really serve as a DAM either or an external sharing platform where you can control access to target groups. And this is what Frontify does. This is what Frontify specializes in. For us, this is the best number one point of Frontify: having that flexibility and having that ability to execute content at scale.

Erik: You've mentioned that Frontify has generated significant time savings so your marketing team can focus on more strategic initiatives. What impact has that had on your larger business objectives so far?

Connie: We've enabled our marketers to really just focus on improving our marketing — improving our strategy, thinking about what's next, what we can try, how we can best support our customers, and really being thought leaders. So, one of the things that has made me happiest about this overall change is that it's freeing up marketing to be marketing — not just order takers, not just task executors, not just “Okay, yes, I will put this QR code in your design.” You know, it's more like, “We want to see better adoption with our CTAs on this content. How can we improve visibility into conversions to our website?” And so, you know, these are the areas where we're able to be a smarter marketing team, more data-driven, and less reactive.

Erik: What has been the broader feedback from your team and leadership since implementing Frontify?

Connie: Wow, I'm going to say everyone's been very receptive about it. Nobody questions why we have Frontify. We don't even get questions if it’s being adopted anymore. It's essentially just, you know, the proof is in the pudding. We see the time savings. We get mentioned in all-hands meetings. It gets mentioned in a lot of venues and high-level conversations that I'm not even a part of. So, we've had very strong support from our leadership, and it's one of those things where our ROI is so massive to figure out just because we have so many templates that we publish — it's in the millions of our savings. You have to take a look at all of the publications that we've approved on a monthly basis: It’s anywhere from 10 to 50 a day. If we're looking at 16 hours per template, that's well over covering the return and the cost of what the platform is.

Erik: Well, thank you so much, Connie! We appreciate your time.

Connie: Of course! Happy Frontifying, everyone!