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Health, wellness, and fitness has become increasingly important across the world. As the demand for related products and services booms, the global wellness market is forecasted to reach a staggering $8.5 trillion USD by 2027.
With 44% of consumers actively seeking products promoting a healthy lifestyle, it’s no surprise competition is becoming intense.
Whether you’re an eCommerce, DTC, or multichannel retailer, your brand needs to become a beacon of health.
Developing a successful eCommerce strategy involves a carefully curated approach that places the customer at the center of it all. By incorporating real-time customer insights, you’ll have the key to unlocking customer loyalty in the long race of Health, Wellness, and Fitness eCommerce.
So, let’s lace up our shoes and start the journey toward building a successful eCommerce strategy!
People are taking their health and wellness into their own hands.
Between hitting the gym, taking supplements, eating healthily, and tracking progress with fitness apps, individuals are on a mission to improve their physical and mental well-being. As this health-conscious mindset becomes more common, the demand for Health, Wellness, and Fitness products and services has skyrocketed.
In fact, consumers now see these products and services as essential expenses, with global spending reaching a staggering $8 trillion annually to prevent disease and maintain well-being. Despite financial struggles, 80% of shoppers plan to maintain or increase their Health, Wellness, and Fitness spending.
But what exactly does wellness mean today? It goes beyond plain old physical fitness.
The journey for better health has led to a rise in vitamins, supplements, and other health-related product sales.
Vitamins and supplements have become essential items for many, even as the cost-of-living crisis bites and incomes are squeezed.
From the very first lockdown, health systems were overwhelmed with challenges. This prompted people to take their health into their own hands as best as possible.
Generally, people became motivated to bolster their health and immune systems themselves. This included buying vitamins and supplements, home exercise equipment, partaking in YouTube yoga videos from their living rooms, and going “From Couch to 5k” for regular exercise.
As people abided by the lockdown restrictions, eCommerce became the primary touchpoint for many. In some cases, it was the only option available.
Today, while physical stores are open and footfall is high, the reliance on online shopping continues to grow. This shift towards digital-based services has compelled all generations to adapt to the digital evolution of Health, Wellness, and Fitness.
Businesses such as gyms have further capitalized on this by recommending mobile apps as an extension of their offering. With more time and privacy, users can track their daily calories/macros, claim discounts from partner vendors, find recipes, purchase meal kits, and participate in physical activity from their own homes.
It’s why the UK digital fitness and wellbeing apps market is projected to reach $584.20m (USD) in 2025 and $774.10m by 2029, indicating that this trend in digital health and wellness is here to stay.
Let’s take a moment to think about our lives as consumers. Generally, there are certain products and services that customers typically only have one of, such as a preferred pharmacy, gym, and bank. Every brand wants to be “the one” for their customers. But building this kind of loyalty entails delivering exceptional customer experiences consistently at every touchpoint.
It’s important to compare yourself against competitors. But it’s just as important to benchmark against brands outside your vertical. In fact, this is typically what customers often do too.
Four out of five consumers would leave a brand they were previously loyal to after three or sometimes fewer poor customer experiences. Many businesses typically fail to meet these customer expectations mainly because they had not properly set and managed them.
Without this clarity, even reasonable delays, such as a later prescription pick-up due to overwhelming winter demand, can become strike one against your brand. Get to three strikes, and you’re out!
Instead of relying on the “surprise and delight” approach, focus on the basics of setting, managing, and meeting customer expectations for better control. To set these correctly, you need to understand a customer’s general expectations of eCommerce brands.
Putting customers at the center of your marketing is key to meeting their needs and expectations on the right channel at the right time.
A customer-centric approach helps you tailor customer experiences effectively. You can better understand your customers and make the right decisions based on their needs, preferences, and behaviors, rather than relying on gut-feel and instincts.
But it’s not as straightforward as you perhaps pictured it. As the number of channels, brands, and touchpoints grows, the customer journey becomes more complex.
Consumers expect brands to meet them where they are.
Let’s say your target buyer’s requirements are good-quality products, at a reasonable price. This widens the customer journey map. Consumers are presented with multiple digital channels, content, and ads, compelling them to explore and compare different brands and products. This prolongs the browsing and researching stages of the journey, delaying the buyer’s decision.
Between product searches and alternating between eCommerce stores, socials & marketplaces while incorporating video platforms such as YouTube, shoppers bounce between multiple channels several times until the buyer decision has been made. This is what Google calls a modern “zig-zag customer journey.”
Mobile is powerful because it instantly connects you with your consumers.
People are constantly glued to their mobile devices to consume content, engage in social apps, and manage their lives. Most importantly, it’s a critical touchpoint for online shopping – in fact, 73% of consumers are omnichannel mobile shoppers.
While mobile phones are most likely why the linear customer journey has reformed into a zig-zag path, brands and advertisers see the golden opportunity of appearing on relevant channels as customers research products and services and purchase. Some methods include QR codes, SMS alerts, in-app messages and offers, and more.
Even as consumers increase their mobile usage, don’t overlook the power of brick-and-mortar stores.
While ordering products online in just a few clicks and having it delivered in a couple of days shows convenience, brick-and-mortar stores have something that online stores do not: instant access to stock.
Brick-and-mortar stores are becoming more weaved into customers’ omnichannel journeys. In fact, thanks to features like Local Inventory Ads (LIAs), which show online users if the products they want are in stock at their closest store, they also help online users convert into footfall traffic.
Additionally, more brands use QR codes to facilitate in-store shoppers to capture and gather vital user data and contact information, to help weave together an exceptional omnichannel experience.
With 74% of customers using multiple channels to start and complete an interaction, brands must provide a seamless omnichannel experience by connecting online and offline touchpoints.
Each channel should tie together to create positive experiences across the customer journey, ranging from brick-and-mortar locations to mobile devices and online stores. But many brands have data and tools spread across various systems, platforms, and departments. These are referred to as data siloes and limits them to a fragmented view.
Consequently, this results in fragmented marketing campaigns and poor customer experiences. Fortunately, this can be solved by unifying your data siloes and tools using Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).
Whether you’re focusing on growing your customer base or identifying churned or inactive customers, you need to nurture them by providing a personalized customer experience. Consumers that have made one purchase are 27% more likely to return, and if they return again for a second or third purchase, this figure jumps to 54%.
Insight-led marketing can be the key differentiator in the market to help you create compelling customer experiences. With the right technology by your side, you can become more productive, focused on revenue-driving decisions, strategic in your approach, and more mature as you get more comfortable with complexities.
Insight-led marketing uses intelligent insights to identify your target audiences and understand which campaigns will resonate with them. It combines your data, marketing tools, and processes to help you unearth actionable insights from all your available information. This helps you to gain a 360-degree view of your customers, including their buying preferences, digital habits, and more.
Once you’re able to learn more about your customers, you can identify actionable insights to meet their needs and optimize your customer experience strategy. Essentially, you’ll be moving away from the traditional marketing process of:
First-party data forms the basis of insight-led marketing to give you a “real-time” advantage. This edge enables you to identify vulnerabilities in the customer journey and react to optimize your marketing across your channels and digital touchpoints.
Now that you know the methodology like the back of your hand, how do you put it into practice? You need to base it on a central source of data. Unfortunately, many marketers are working with siloed data and tools to try and piece together insights. This only creates gaps and inconsistencies between departments and tools, resulting in fragmented marketing. Here’s where Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) initiate your insight-led marketing.
CDPs are marketing software that unifies, collects, and stores your customer data from various data sources to create a complete 360-degree single customer view. It uses your data (mainly first-party and zero-party data) to create customer profiles to enable a deep understanding of characteristics, interactions, and behavior throughout the customer journey.
Just as insights should sit at the core of your strategy, CDPs need to sit at the core of your tech stack to help you draw customer insights, activate them with marketing automation, and monitor your performance with analytics.
CDPs unify and store data from the above models or straight from the data source itself to centralize, structure, and use your data to create customer profiles.
These platforms enrich customer profiles with zero-party and first-party data from your multiple touchpoints. For eCommerce and retail businesses, CDPs can help bridge the online and offline data gap to help you get a full omnichannel view of the customer journey.
And as your customer data pours into the CDP from these many different sources, you can structure and manage this information efficiently for your daily use with dashboards for different departments that work on the same data. This enables your business to work on reliable and consistent data while each department focuses on their key metrics, insights, and trends.
A Customer Data Platform is essential for unifying and structuring customer data to extract actionable insights. But you need to act on it with marketing automation.
CDPs can integrate with standalone marketing automation tools, but it’s often frictional. Instead, CDPs with built-in marketing automation are effective because they consolidate your MarTech stack. These are often “easy-to-use,” “timesaving” and “marketer-friendly” solutions, which help you activate your data, create personalized content, and orchestrate cross-channel customer experiences. This enables you to build highly personalized marketing campaigns relevant to your customers through your website, email, mobile, SMS, and more channels.
CDPs + marketing automation solutions helps you tailor your message content and the customer’s overall experience of receiving/interacting with communications. Your customer data helps you piece together the personalization puzzle to learn the who, what, when, where, and how of your interactions.
Let’s return to our scenario and look at how to activate your insights using marketing automation.
Having reviewed your insights, you’ve nailed down the KPIs you
want to focus on in your six-month campaign:
Conversions, Improved AOV, New Customer Acquisition, Repeat Purchases
You’ve chosen the key target groups you want to focus on:
Valuable Churning Customers, Never Purchased Customers, Loyal Customers
Due to the high engagement amongst your target groups, you choose to focus your personalized communications channels on:
Email, Web, SMS
Now, you don’t want to create thousands of endless workflows that may or may not work. Instead, you need to define the most profitable scenarios on which you’re building these workflows. In this example, the chosen scenarios are:
Cart Abandonment, Churn Recovery, Repeat Purchases
So, what’s next? Taking action using marketing automation to assemble these puzzle pieces together and build out your automated cross-channel communication workflows using our personalization puzzle.
Your campaigns are live, and you’re seeing great engagement and conversions in the first two months of your campaign. But it’s important to steer away from the “set-and-forget” mentality. After all, how do you think we identified these segments in the first place? With customer intelligence and analytics!
Insights aren’t only for generating ideas. They’re used to help you maintain performance, understand changes, and adjust existing campaigns.
Every new or long-term campaign adjustment should always be monitored and tweaked in response to fluctuations in customer behavior, marketing trends, supply disruption, etc.
It’s important to be reactive to these fluctuations and adapt quickly to capitalize and maintain revenue. This is where your CDP + Marketing Automation solution needs customer intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and analytical capabilities to help you identify campaign opportunities and monitor campaign performance, alongside customer behavior.
RFM modeling is a feature often used to analyze customer behavior and segment them accordingly. It stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary.
Based on this metric, it assigns a score to each customer: the higher the score, the higher the customer value is.
By segmenting customers into different groups based on their scores, you can tailor your campaign better to target each group’s specific needs and behaviors. This leads to increased customer engagement, retention, and, revenue for your business.
You’re using Mapp Marketing Cloud to monitor your performance (along with its marketing automation and CDP capabilities). The first two months of the campaign have been a great success. But suddenly, there’s a huge drop in performance in the segment “Valuable Churning Hayfever Sufferers.” You’re notified with Smart Alerts (these detect anomalies and notify you instantly) and now need to investigate.
You dig into the overall campaign and how each segment is performing. There’s a behavior change in two of your customer segments: “Valuable Churning” customers and “Loyal” customers. Compared to last year, this year has shifted how the average consumer has behaved on your website for both segments.
The positive here is that at least you are notified early enough to act. After changing the metrics based on what Artificial Intelligence suggests, here’s where you use your insights to either adjust campaigns, move them to a different campaign, or create a new one. And the cycle continues!
“DATA DATA DATA! I CAN’T MAKE BRICKS WITHOUT CLAY”
This Sherlock Holmes quote still rings true today, especially when it comes to personalizing your customer experiences.
Without the proper data and insights, it’s impossible to create effective marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience.
In the world of Health, Wellness, and Fitness, insight-led marketing can help you stand out from a crowded and saturated market. Ensure your MarTech stack can support your insight-led marketing efforts with the tools to gather and analyze data, create personalized content, and deliver a positive customer experience.
Just as a healthy lifestyle requires a holistic approach that considers both physical and mental well-being, effective marketing requires a holistic approach that considers all customer journey touchpoints.
So, lace up your marketing sneakers and get ready to run the extra mile towards success!
Download the full eGuide for future reference and to access all the sources and statistics in one place.
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