If you’re in the health and wellness space, the New Year is essentially another Q4. New Year’s Resolutions have everyone reactivating a gym membership, eating healthy, meditating. It also has people buying stuff - everything from yoga pants to every supplement under the sun that could potentially bring truth to the statement “This is going to be my year.”
There are so many ways for you to improve your overall sales, new customer acquisition, and profitability during this market opportunity, but we’re going to focus on two tactics.
The first is how to deploy high-converting advertorials to get a flood of new traffic in the door and quickly nurture and convert them into customers.
Then, we’re going to show you an optimal post-purchase upsell strategy to maximize the revenue per order. For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to focus on supplement brands specifically, but anyone in the health and wellness space (and really most ecommerce brands in general) can take advantage of everything we’re covering here.
This isn’t your average “you should run advertorials” blog post either. We’re going to walk you through how to do it, including giving you a free template in Replo for the design and layout AND a ChatGPT prompt to help you write the copy specifically tuned to our template.
Are you ready to make this year the “best year ever” for your brand? If so, let’s get started.
ADVERTORIALS: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW TO MAKE THEM GREAT
The first step to building a great advertorial is understanding what it is. As the name suggests, it’s an advertisement in the format of an editorial - aka a standard magazine-style article. Like a listicle (ex. 5 Reasons Why X…), an advertorial is a pre-sale page. It is designed to quickly present a problem, showcase a broad solution, and then introduce your product as the specific solution.
Unlike a listicle, an advertorial is long form, and uniquely designed to subtly promote a product until a clear pitch is made. The best-performing advertorials are educational articles, and provide meaningful value, while still setting up your sales pitch.
As we previously mentioned, we’re going to be giving you all the templates for a great advertorial funnel. The ones we’re sharing are Onnit’s Alpha Brain advertorial and offer page, which heavily features Joe Rogan (a principal brand ambassador and investor).
Onnit drives tens of millions in revenue, and this advertorial has consistently been one of the main drivers of that revenue. It highlights how Joe Rogan “gets fired up on all cylinders,” introduces the BIG IDEA of the solution which is achieving a “flow state,” and then goes into great detail on how one can get into the flow state with the specific active ingredients/supplements.
At the end, it perfectly sets up the Alpha Brain product as the product that has it all and further hooks in the consumer even more with an offer to “unlock 30% off.” Bing, bang, boom.
Long-form copy, written in a persuasive but education tone, leading into a punchy sales close to get the click.
Remember, an advertorial is supposed to effectively warm up cold traffic, in order to increase conversion rates. The actual sale happens on the long-form offer page, which is the next step of the funnel.
The reason why advertorials have been such an effective method for selling supplements, well before the invention of the internet (the original advertorials were in magazines and print mailings after all), is that the supplement sales process typically has to call a pain or suboptimal state of being, agitate that pain, offer a solution, explain the unique benefits and features of that solution, before you can even think about closing a prospect.
Supplements rarely are impulse buys without the proper warming. Few people wake up wanting to take another pill, gummy, or greens powder. Most people want to wave a magic wand and feel better without the trial and error and sacrifice required to get to that improved state. There are so many supplements to choose from, so helping educate a customer on your specific type of supplement first, then calling out why your specific supplement is superior to the competition helps you build trust and close more sales faster and easier than folks trying to directly sell someone on a new product.
Again, these are the reasons why an advertorial funnel works so well for supplements. It educates, nurtures, builds trust, and primes people to buy. By the time they land on your long form offer page, all they should want to do is give you their money in exchange for your amazing product!
We’re not going to break down what makes a great offer page in this article. You can always take people to your product page if you don’t have a killer offer page built already, but we do encourage you to update your product page with a great offer (learn more on making a great offer by reading Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers).
If you’re totally new to the format of advertorials, that’s okay. Replo has you covered. Skip down to the Templates and Tutorials section for all the goodies, including the templates for both funnel steps as well as a ChatGPT copy prompt that makes it easy for you to get advertorial copy just by pasting in information about your brand.
For now, let’s jam on what you need to do after someone makes a purchase in this funnel.
POST PURCHASE UPSELLS
Every great marketer, from David Ogilvy to Dan Kennedy, Russell Brunson to Gary Halbert, will tell you that the best time to sell someone something… is immediately after they just bought something! This may seem counterintuitive to some, but think about your own experiences.
How many times have you gone to the mall to buy “just one thing” and ended up walking away with two hands worth of bags filled with purchases? There is a reason why the term “retail therapy” exists - consumers get dopamine hits after buying something, so if you sell them more of things they want and need right after they buy, many people will buy! Let’s break down the art of post-purchase upsells for health and wellness companies.
Post-purchase upsells involve offering customers additional products after they've completed a purchase, enhancing the value of their cart. This can include offering a premium version of the purchased product, a larger volume, or even complementary products. These strategies help boost average order value (AOV) without significant additional investment - you already did the hard work and spent the money to get the customer, this is your chance to make more per customer. To enhance the effectiveness of upsells:
- Instill Urgency: Create a sense of urgency, like a limited-time offer, to drive conversions.
- Relevance: Ensure the upsell offer is highly relevant to the customer’s original purchase.
- One-Click Upsells: Make the process effortless with one-click upsells, reducing pressure and simplifying the customer’s decision.
Everything listed above should be true for all post-purchase upsells. But how should post-purchase upsells be structured for supplement businesses? Keep reading, because the answer might surprise you.
The first best series of upsells to have for your supplement business is selling more of the product that you just sold to your customers. That’s right. Just sell more of the same stuff.
This seems counterintuitive to most, and believe us when we say it broke our brains when we first learned it, but we’ve reviewed the data and tested this ourselves enough to know that this works.
If a customer purchased 1 unit of your nootropic formula, give them the option to “upgrade their order” and get 3, 6, 9, or even 12 bottles, with a discount applied. To improve the value to the customer, you can even tier your discounts, so the larger quantities result in bigger discounts. One of the most common rebuttals we hear at this point is “Why would someone buy more of a product they’ve never tried before?”
That’s a great question, and the answer lies in how well you were able to identify your customers’ needs and goals, agitate the pains, present a solution, and frame your product as the best solution. If someone goes through your funnel, makes an initial purchase, and genuinely feels like they can’t live without your product because of the solutions it provides, you’ve created mountains of trust in the mind of your buyers and this trust is the basis for giving them an even better deal than they just got. Therefore, the quality of your advertorial has a direct impact on the effectiveness of your upsell.
The second type of post-purchase upsell is much simpler. Customer buys a product, and you upsell them into a subscription!
The key to executing a post-purchase subscription offer is by making a better deal than the one you made to get the customer in the first place. This means being able to give out a better discount, more offer gifts, and really build up the benefits of never running out of your supplement. Tie into the benefits your product provides, the solutions to the problems it contains, and make sure to call out and agitate the original problems in the first place again.
Lastly, you can always cross-sell other products in your catalog that complement your main product or offer during your post-purchase flow. For example, if you sell protein, you might try adding in a greens powder or a pre-workout. You can offer a shaker bottle or a digital fitness guides that complements your core offer.
By activating a post-purchase offer flow, you automatically increase your order profitability and total revenue generated. It could be the difference between a funnel that loses money, or one that absolutely prints new customers and allows you to scale to 5-figure days and beyond.
TEMPLATES, TOOLS, AND TUTORIALS
As promised above, we’re giving you everything you need to get started building advertorial funnels and high-converting post-purchase flows.
At Replo, we’re making it easier than ever to launch landing pages with ease. If you aren’t currently using Replo on your Shopify store, install our app for free here.
Here’s the link to the Onnit Advertorial Page - Step 1 in the Funnel: https://www.dashboard.replo.app/?templateId=88912348-59e2-428a-adcd-1aac190ff362
Here’s the link to the Onnit Offer Page - Step 2 in the Funnel: https://www.dashboard.replo.app/?templateId=d3bea3ef-2b38-4dac-ba63-051c685edfb6
Here’s the link to the ChatGPT copy prompt that will allow you to make advertorial copy for your brand quickly: https://chat.openai.com/share/9e6b7424-fefd-45d6-ae89-bcdb5e9ec110
Here is a list of Post-purchase upsell tools we’ve used in the past! This is not sponsored and not exhaustive; find what tool works best for your business.
- Rebuy: www.rebuyengine.com
- Aftersell: https://www.aftersell.com/
- Zipify OCU (One-Click Upsell): https://zipify.com/apps/ocu
By integrating these strategies, tactics, and tools, supplement companies can effectively engage customers, enhance their shopping experience, and significantly boost sales during the critical New Year's Resolution period. This is your year. Go make it count by getting more new customers ever before, more profitably and sustainably than ever before.