From immunity-boosting drops to nutritional supplements, how Hustler Marketing has helped Dietary Supplement stores grow over 30% with email marketing

129%

Average increase in
email revenue (YoY)

29%

Average share of email revenue

(June 1 ‘21 – May 31st ‘22)

22x

Average ROI from Hustler Marketing

Defination

Dietary supplement stores cover the broad range of ecommerce stores that sell health and lifestyle improving products such as vitamins, minerals, nutritional supplements, and body enhancing supplements.

Growth of health supplements ecommerce

There’s never been a better time for being health
conscious than now. With over 15,000 brick and mortal health supplement stores in the US, it’s clear that self-care and a healthy lifestyle are here to stay. Covid19 further accelerated the need for leading a healthy lifestyle on one end, and accelerated the demand for shopping for health product online on the other.

According to a study, online supplement sales are expected to grow from $5 billion in 2019 to more than $10 billion in 2022 (reaching 19.6% of all supplement sales).

Challenges to be solved for Dietary supplement stores

1. Communicating Product Knowledge

2. Using customer specific information to send hyper-personalised emails

3. Builing a loyal and sticky customer base

4. Building trust

5. Following compliance & regulations

Case for email marketing for dietary supplements

Health Supplement stores are unique businesses in the sense that their products are almost always multi-use and need a customer to keep coming back to refill their products. This makes the case for the role of a robust email marketing program to make the retention marketing funnel stronger. As email marketing is able to drive high repeat purchases through automations that are specific to customer behaviours, profiles as well as create constant product recall through campaigns, retention marketing for health supplement stores is a no brainer.
In this report, we will highlight how we at Hustler Marketing helped 6 of our health supplement store clients harness the most of email marketing and even SMS marketing to grow their business several times over in a short period of time.

Solutions

How did we achieve great results for supplement stores through a strategic approach to email marketing?

1

Leverage customer information for hyper personalized emails

Different customers require different products based on their personalised data like age, gender, lifestyle, preexisting conditions, allergies and other information. Gathering this data is a priority for dietary supplements to help target the right segments and have relevant emails for all. Some ways the stores can gather this data is by building custom popups, using quiz popups using a third party app like Octane.ai, past purchase data or simply by conducting a survey in a previous campaign.

For Nutrachamps, we send survey emails like these ever so often.

2

Educate, nurture and convert

It’s very important to educate your customer about the product as the world of supplements can be vast, technically confusing or simply not enough credible information may exist. For most of our clients, we rely on creating emails with deeply researched information about a certain range or a particular product. This helps educate the customer and helps them decide whether a particular supplement is right for them. For stores like Nature’s Finest, selling hundreds of products with multiple use cases, precautions and how-tos’ don’t perform so well for spinning sales, at least at the first instance, but they work on warming up/ nurturing the audience.

How Sun Warrior sold out their LEAST Selling product with a single campaign!

For this Dietary supplement brand, we created an informative yet fun and engaging campaign about nothing else but Beetroot Powder – a product that usually doesn’t sell well for this client. One hour after the campaign went out, Sunwarrior sold out all their beetroot powder tubs! Not only that, the client was overwhelmed by the volume of messages they started receiving demanding for this product to be back in stock.

3

Drive higher revenue and extend CLV through crosssell & upsell flows and exciting campaigns

Most supplement stores sell a variety of products and many of these are complementary products and this fact needs to be baked in when designing flows for dietary supplement stores. For example, a customer that buys anti-anxiety soothing pills may also be interested in anti-anxiety gummy bears and so on.

1. Upsell Flows

For store Dao Drops, we built 3 such flows to create such upsells.

2. “Frequently Bought together” nudge

Another softer version of an upsell is where we added a block about “Frequently Bought Together” nudge next to a category of products within a campaign email.

3. Exciting offers and promo arcs

We sent out a strategic number of campaigns at a frequency that drove the most results. Some of the campaign hooks we focussed on were:
1. Buy 1, get 2 free Promo
2. Curation of Gifts based on occasion
3. Share your experience contest

4

Drive repeat purchases through automated subscription and replenish email flows

For an industry like dietary supplements, replenishment is the key. Once a customer buys a product, they typically need to keep buying it at a regular cadence. That’s where subscription and replenishment flows come in handy to automatically remind the customers to refill their product at a certain cadence taking into account factors like who uses the product, how often they have been using it, how long before it typically runs out.

5

Following compliance while ensuring effective messaging

The world of Dietary supplements usually comes under FDA regulations and marketers need to strictly follow compliance. We ensure that all emails that we work on for supplement stores are FDA-compliant and taboo words like “cure” are avoided.

Having copywriters with a legal background who’re on top of such nuances (as we do) helps keep our emails above board, and yet effective.

That said, where traditional online advertising falls short for advertising supplements, emails do allow some leeway in using content that’d be otherwise gated on other platforms. This is where we use our storytelling skills and use of customer testimonials to be able to communicate certain attributes which would be under the radar on another platform.

6

Building trust

With the growth in supplement stores all over the internet, some of which are admittedly spurious, it’s more crucial than ever for a supplement store to establish trust and credibility.

We help our clients build and retain this trust through 2 pillars of: 1. Honesty 2. Not overpromising 3. Displaying genuine customer testimonials.

Results in numbers

The stores were evaluated based on the following 7 criteria

Average Email Revenue %
Yearly growth of store vs email revenue
ROI from spends on email marketing
Email revenue before and after Hustler Marketing
Flow and campaign revenue
Repeat purchase rate growth
SMS marketing revenue

28.9%

Average Email Revenue

Between the 7 stores, the average email revenue % of the total store revenue was 28.9% since they joined us. Point to note is that for one of the stores, Nature’s Finest, the email revenue was 7% , but that is because a huge chunk of the client store revenue comes from ads and hence the email % is lower in comparison. However, this client drives an upward of 7 figure revenue from email.

125%

growth in annual email revenue

While the stores grew an average of 31% between June ‘20-May 2021 and June ‘21 to May ‘22, the email revenue in this period grew at an average of 125% meaning the growth of email revenue far exceeded the overall store revenue growth trajectory.

Dao Drops, a supplement store grew 445% from email marketing in just 3 months of HM’s coming onboard.

21.6x

ROI from email marketing on their spend with Hustler Marketing

Average email marketing ROI for the 6 stores calculated for a year from 1st June 2021 until May 31 2022 was 21.65x

Sunwarrior achieved an email ROI of 38x with email in an average of 6 months while Nature’s finest achieved an email ROI of over 57x!

12%

Email growth within 3 months after Hustler Marketing

We always look at a store’s email revenue 3 months before we joined them and 3 months after we joined them to come up with a reasonable “before and after” story. For the 6 stores studied for this case study, the stores email grew by an average of 12% in the 3rd month of HM joining them

65%

campaign revenue

Campaigns contributed an average of 65% of the overall email revenue across the 6 stores and all the stores saw more campaign revenue than flows.

One of the stores achieved 80% of email revenue, and 31% of store revenue from campaigns alone

45%

Growth in Repeat Purchase Rate

The repeat purchase across the 6 stores grew by an average of 45% in a period of 6-12 months since HM taking over email.

16.8%

SMS Revenue

Only one store – Sun Warrior – out of the 6 we studied for the case study opted in for SMS marketing and the SMS revenue for this store was 16.8% within 5 months. (Jan -May 2022)

Client Testimonial

After 2 months our content not just enriched but it escalated into great areas with such a great creativity. Parting from great content on email marketing our sales followed tremendously and increase above planned expectations and looking forward how much it can grow in 11 different markets. We are extremely satisfied with work of (like to call them) “email hackers”:). They are always ready also to brainstorm and participate into brainstormings for general campaings. They are always there to make extra mile to make your business bigger! We are very happy to have oursorced email marketing channel and found longterm trusted partner that will help us to grow behind expectations and provide quality to company. Thank you Hustlermarketing for all your work, dedication, profesionalism and effort already done and keep going.

-Haris Begic, Commercial Director at Nutrachamps and Bebe’s

If you represent a DTC brand or ecommerce store that sells health, nutrition and dietary supplements and want to achieve healthy returns on your marketing budget, we can be the right retention marketing partner for you.