Selling food supplements is an interesting niche nowadays. However, mantaining good margins depends on scaling repetitive sales.
However, because of fierce competition, it is not so easy to stay in profit. Now more than ever it has become urgent to have a clear strategy and a comprehensive plan.
Client
Talija Ltd., for web pages Life.si (Slovenia), Life.hr (Croatia), and Life-harmony.net (Italy).
Online store life is specialized in selling food supplements in the Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian markets. They offer quality products and good customer service, at an affordable price.
D-Studio provided a complete Digital marketing solution, which covered: consulting, coaching services, paid advertising (Google and Facebook Ads), email marketing and community management.
Digital marketing specialists
Bogo@D-Studio Consulting (d strategist)
Matej@D-Studio Consulting (d CEO)
Challenge
In the first 4 years, we managed to optimize and scale sales for our client to a very profitable level, which enabled us to expand sales from Slovenian to also Croatian and Italian markets.
Optimization and scaling were done on a very comprehensive level, where the majority of sales depended only on paid advertising.
While expanding to new markets and growing, the client did not invest enough into building its own database and organic traffic sources, which made them dependent only on paid advertising.
Soon the food supplements market became very competitive and many companies started to abuse the big potential of this niche.
Google and Facebook had to adjust their Advertising policies, which made advertising for food supplements and their direct sales harder on these Ads platforms. Together with the client, we had to go back to the drawing board and prepare a new strategy.
What was the goal
Main objective: To achieve 10.000 EUR of sales in 12 months, only from repetitive sales of food supplements.
How was it done
We agreed on implementing different solutions, however before starting with execution we had to define what are the Key performance indicators (KPI) we will measure for the understanding of our success.
Defining KPIs
The KPI we decided to pursue was Revenue in EUR for existing clients.
Action plan
There were many solutions that would enable us to achieve the goal, however, we had to consider the specifics of the client’s business model and adjust our strategy accordingly. We agreed to implement a proposed action plan in 5 stages and at each of the stages measuring our performance.
Execution
- Customer Journey Analytics
With the help of Google Analytics and Lucky Orange, we analyzed the Customer Journey and decided to do a comprehensive optimization of user experience in order to improve the efficiency of the web page.
- Optimization of product categories
We grouped products according to health claims and at the same time, we optimized all product pages, product subcategories and categories in order for customers to maneuver through the web page easier and faster.
- Recurring payments
With the help of Paypal integration, we set up a subscription model that allowed customers to subscribe to repetitive and automatic purchases of chosen products.
Because we could calculate when each of the bottles with encapsulated food supplements would be finished, we defined when the next automatic order will be done, so the client won’t be without a chosen product.
- Retargeting
We defined and set up custom audience groups according to product categories and the purchase behaviour of the customer. When defining these groups we also calculated the timing of the next order and adjusted Google and Facebook ads accordingly.
- Follow up email
Just like the case for retargeting we prepared automatic follow up emails for all clients who already completed a purchase. Those emails were also adjusted to the product groups and when it is expected that a specific product should be used by the client.
Because we used an integrated solution with clients CRM, every follow-up email also included a unique code with a discount on the next order.
Result
With the same investment as the previous year, we managed to achieve 10.777,35 EUR of additional sales just from repetitive purchases of Food supplements. This figure continues to grow for 30% per year via active optimization of activities.
Conclusion
This specific case was optimized exactly for the Food supplement niche and for the business model of this specific client. The 5 step procedure we decided to implement could be used also in a different way and also for different types of online businesses. However, adjustments are always crucial in order to achieve the desired results.
We highly recommend using the above 5 steps together with the latest digital tools for continous optimization.