Winona uses Mixpanel & Twilio Segment to make personalized healthcare accessible

Women have a right to access treatment, information, and empowerment at any stage of their menopause journey. That’s the mission that drives Winona, which since 2020 has been connecting women to physicians, FDA-approved prescription treatments, and educational resources to help them understand their personal menopause experience. Over 6,000 women in 31 states are members of the Winona community.

Key learnings

• How Winona builds personalized patient experiences that better serve healthcare needs
• How Winona’s Head of Product uses rapid iteration to optimize content and messaging, driving down CAC and boosting LTV
• How Mixpanel and Twilio Segment combine to provide Winona product analytics while protecting sensitive healthcare data

The Winona team knew that to provide a personalized patient-treatment matching service, they needed a holistic understanding of patient healthcare needs and concerns while protecting individual data privacy. With a small but mighty engineering team, the company needed a solution that was secure, quick to implement, and could scale without requiring hours of engineering time.

The Winona team leverages the Twilio Segment customer data platform and warehousing features to unify their data across web, mobile, app, and cloud data streams. This information feeds securely into Mixpanel, allowing the team to perform analysis and reporting at scale. The team can access powerful insights into product usage across patient segments without writing a line of SQL.

• Increase in conversion rate for treatment purchases
• Higher engagement with blog content and landing pages
• 1,000 engineering hours saved since company inception
• Scalable data infrastructure allowed business to grow by 300%

For Winona’s customer base, accessing medical treatment for menopause symptoms can be a frustrating experience. Women going through menopause report receiving confusing recommendations or dismissive comments. As Susan Dominus called out in her article “Women Have Been Misled About Menopause,” some women report menopause-related questions being “waved off as hardly worth discussing.”

Winona’s mission is to ensure that women can connect with the right treatments—be that specialists medical staff or prescription medicine—in a seamless, comfortable process. To do so, the Winona team needs a comprehensive understanding of how patients interact with the product across platforms, from customer support chats to app events and content engagement. 

“How do we make healthcare more accessible? That’s what we’re all talking about here,” says Gray Dorsett, Head of Product at Winona. “Through iterative testing and understanding the user, we’re able to make the path from ‘having initial symptoms’ to ‘talking to a specialist who’s there to help you’ as easy as possible.” 

Winona has been able to realize this mission at scale, using Mixpanel and Twilio Segment to open up personalized healthcare access while protecting patient data. On top of that, the scalable data infrastructure provided by Mixpanel and Twilio Segment has allowed Winona to grow their business by 300%.

Personalizing patient experiences

Patients today want one-on-one health provider engagement that speaks to their personal needs. But data silos and companies’ increasingly fragmented tech stacks make it harder to create those personalized experiences.

Winona solves that problem by using Twilio Segment and Mixpanel together. The product team can create a unified view of users based on clean, secure data. These user profiles are updated in real-time using Twilio Segment’s segmentation features. Then, the data feeds into comprehensive Mixpanel reports available to Winona’s product, engineering, and marketing teams. 

The information goes beyond product usage data. Winona collects both data from within the product, and from supplementary data sources such as surveys, creating richer Mixpanel reports. “It’s more than just a product analytics stack for us,” says Gray Dorsett. “It’s survey analytics, it’s messaging, it’s everything”

For Dorsett, one of the biggest benefits of combining Mixpanel and Twilio Segment comes when deploying and iterating on new features, especially around conversion funnels. “Say we make a change to onboarding. We can then go into the funnel, look at conversion rates, and compare how many checkout purchases we get. From there, we can start making tiny adjustments to start driving the needle up.”

Personalization doesn’t stop at aligning conversion funnels to user segments. Winona describes itself as a ‘content-forward company’ and produces its own journal to increase patient access to science-backed information and education. Dorsett uses Mixpanel to understand what content resonates best with different user segments, identifying areas of drop-off and conversion to better prioritize marketing and messaging efforts.  

Ashlie Beiter, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing at Winona, also uses Mixpanel to better align the customer support team to patient needs. Data from Intercom is funneled through Twilio Segment and into Mixpanel reports, which Beiter uses to understand what questions are being asked. The team then uses this information to allow for better customization of all kinds of messaging. This, she says, has the effect of helping Winona “increase conversion through anticipating customer needs.”

“It’s necessary infrastructure to allow a company to grow,” says Dorsett. “Twilio Segment allows us to create that full, unified view of the customer, and then Mixpanel allows us to understand how to engage them best, and offer the most personalized experience we can.”

The Twilio Segment-Mixpanel implementation has led to improved customer satisfaction among Winona users, driving customer LTV higher and CAC lower.

Protecting patient data and reducing operational risk

Of course, the personal nature of medical communication requires Winona to secure patient data. “Our users’ security is paramount to us,” says Dorsett. “We never would have chosen Twilio Segment and Mixpanel if we weren’t absolutely confident that whatever data runs through them is secure and compliant with regulations.” 

To avoid non-compliant patient communication and data storage, Winona combines custom patient IDs with external APIs. “Twilio Segment makes that easy, so we can focus on ensuring that we have a robust, secure, and agile data infrastructure that allows us to scale.”

The security provided by the Twilio Segment-Mixpanel pairing has also helped Winona reduce operational risk through a period of fast growth. Dorsett points out that everyone in the company needs to be able to work off the same data and be confident in its compliance. “Having a single source of truth helps align the organization, and that’s one of the greatest things we get out of the combination of Twilio Segment and Mixpanel.”

Scaling growth through simplified data infrastructure

Engaging users and protecting their first-party data is table stakes. But it’s not enough to drive growth. To do that, Dorsett needed to reduce technical complexity in Winona’s data infrastructure to allow engineers to focus on growing their business, not maintaining the tech stack. 

“Today the average company has over a dozen data tools in their stack,” explains Dorsett. “And there’s about a thousand different user touch points feeding into that stack. All of these things must be combined into a single view of the customer and kept in sync. There’s no good way to do that without a customer data platform.”

Dorsett knew he couldn’t spare engineering resources to refactor and manage a data warehouse on an ongoing basis. Mixpanel and Twilio Segment provide a plug-and-play solution that allows Winona to build the infrastructure once and trust that the data remains completely in sync.

“We’re moving fast, trying out new tools on the data stack, migrating them downstream, adding new data sources in and out…My team is able to do all of this incredibly fast because of Mixpanel and Twilio Segment.” 

Dorsett estimates that the implementation of Twilio Segment and Mixpanel has resulted in more than a thousand total hours of saved engineering development time, and an overall reduction in terms of busy work. “Twilio Segment and Mixpanel allow us to have great infrastructure and scale without compromising on service quality. It’s led to decreased time-to-market and more rapid expansion. They make things easy so we can focus on showing patients value.” 

Want to learn more? Watch this on-demand webinar to hear how Winona drove growth during economic uncertainty, partnering with Twilio Segment and Mixpanel to enable data-driven personalization.