Doubling Engagement With Virtual Therapy (10% → 21%)

Nearly half of medical professionals report burnout, yet few seek therapy to prevent or treat it. How do we change that? Marvin, a virtual therapy platform available through employer benefits, partnered with Irrational Labs to tackle this challenge. Through behavioral design strategies targeting trust, motivation, and understanding, we increased Marvin’s enrollment from 10% to 21%. These results show promise for addressing the burnout crisis in healthcare, with downstream benefits for provider wellbeing, retention, and patient care.

The Challenge

In 2023, burnout affected nearly half of American healthcare providers—48% of physicians and 56% of nurses. Their chronic job stress leads to emotional exhaustion, detachment, and depersonalization. When medical professionals take leave or quit due to burnout, the annual estimated cost to the American healthcare system is $4.6 billion.

Therapy can help people develop strategies to manage workplace stress, yet medical professionals face unique barriers accessing mental health support. Marvin Mental Health was created to address this gap, offering virtual therapy exclusively for medical professionals. Their therapists average 10+ years of healthcare system experience, enabling them to understand their clients’ context. To reduce access barriers, they offer night and weekend appointments, keep most copays under $30, and provide some free sessions.

Marvin asked Irrational Labs to improve their landing page using behavioral design.

Our Approach

Behavioral Diagnosis

The first phase in Irrational Labs’ 3B framework is about understanding the behavior people need to take and the barriers they face in doing so.

We started with a deep dive on Marvin’s enrollment flow. We explored their marketing & email campaigns, scoured the landing page, completed their intake & insurance process, and even attended a handful of therapy appointments. We noted every action, decision, or information input that was required. At each step, we identified the psychological principles that might be causing drop-off and layered on analytic insights from Marvin’s existing data. The result: a behavioral map.

One key barrier stood out for Marvin: Medical professionals can often be suspicious of therapy, and the landing page did not challenge this mental model to explain how Marvin could benefit them.

Marvin needed to reset people’s expectations about virtual therapy and build trust in their service.

The Solution

Behavioral Design

We redesigned the landing page to make Marvin’s unique benefits more concrete and salient.

From virtual product → human service:

Marvin’s landing page left room for misinterpretation. Visitors could reasonably have taken Marvin to be an AI therapy bot or a tool for finding local in-person providers.

To correct this mental model, our redesign focused on humanizing Marvin. We used the therapist’s voice throughout and added a subset of therapist photos and mini-bios to the website. Now users could start forming a human connection from their first website visit and be reassured that any preferences for a therapist from a particular background could be met.

Building trust through deep expertise & sacrifice

Each Marvin therapist has deep prior experience working with health professionals and undergoes additional training when they join the team. Humanizing Marvin by bringing the therapists front and center allowed their credentials and many years of experience with health professionals to shine.

In addition to this expertise, we highlighted an amazing but previously hidden benefit: a 24/7 staffed hotline that a health professional who needed to urgently process something difficult with a therapist could call – even if that individual wasn’t a Marvin member. This sacrifice by Marvin reaffirms their commitment to mental health and helps build trust.

De-stigmatizing therapy with social proof

In addition to a continuing stigma around therapy, medical professionals may fear professional consequences if they engage in therapy.

To help ease some of these concerns, we added multiple levels of social proof to the Marvin landing page. To normalize mental health across the entire population, we listed all the health systems that have adopted Marvin as a mental health benefits provider – especially the high status, aspirational ones.

To normalize therapy, we also suggested that Marvin add testimonials & endorsements from specific local authorities or “champions” in a given hospital system. This localized social proof also helps reassure site visitors that their health system employer supports mental health and would not penalize them if they received therapy.

The Impact

Marvin’s enrollment more than doubled after they implemented these behaviorally-informed changes on their landing page: from 10% to 21%.

Lessons Learned

The collaboration between Marvin and Irrational Labs provided valuable insights into how to increase conversion, especially for niche offerings:

• Emphasize emotional benefits (be human): Lead with benefits, not features. A virtual therapy option for doctors is amazing not only because of how easy and convenient the platform is, but also because it connects people in need. Stand out by emphasizing the emotional benefits your product or service offers.
• Show your work: No need for jargon; keep your website copy simple, but don’t be afraid to show off your expertise & credentials. Make sure special offerings, especially any salient examples of institutional sacrifice that build trust, get used & appreciated by the people who need them.
• Stack social proof: Encouraging behavior by showing how “everybody is doing it” works best when the target admires or fits in with that group, so having multiple layers of social proof, from general to specific, can be an effective way to display social proof.

By incorporating these lessons, Marvin has brought mental healthcare to more hospital workers. The insights gained from this partnership highlight the power of behavioral science in creating more effective healthcare solutions.

Interested in leveling up your own solutions with behavioral science? Reach out to us: [email protected]