What would I do if I were building an online direct response supplement company today?
That’s the question a recent client asked me.
I often spend time thinking about that question. I would not start a health supplement company, but the industry is very interesting to me. Which is why I’ve niched down my conversion rate optimization agency to only work with direct response health supplement companies.
Not only is it a challenging problem of sales, because there’s so much psychology involved, but the supplement products themselves help you to optimize yourself both physically and mentally. You can’t get much better than that for an optimizer at heart.
But regardless of all that, it’s an interesting question. How would I build a health supplement company from scratch at this point in time?
The marketplace is different today. There’s a tremendous amount of competition in the online dietary supplement market in 2019. Just do a quick search on Amazon and you’ll get over 70,000 results for “vitamins and supplements”.
It has become easier to create a supplement product today. White labeling a generic supplement like turmeric or fish oil has become common.
Distribution and having your supplement available for sale online is also a piece of cake. Getting set up with an e-commerce site is practically turnkey, or you can do FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) and let them do all the shipping, and bring the traffic of eager buyers.
Yet, it’s tougher than ever to grow a successful online supplement company.
Amazon marketers are all racing to the bottom with the lowest price.
If you’re too successful on their platform, Amazon will wipe you out with their own Amazon Elements brand of supplements.
Buying traffic to a direct response supplement funnel is also getting harder because of all of the limitations being imposed by Google and Facebook when it comes to this industry.
Yet in-spite of all of the challenges, it is still one of the best companies to start for the long-term in this day and age.
Working with so many different direct response supplement companies not only allows me to see all of these challenges up close, but also gives me insight into so many more underling business obstacles that are unique to the supplement industry.
So… with all of that insight, how would I build a health supplement business from scratch?
I may be somewhat biased, since I’m thinking about it from a marketing and conversion point of view, but…
…if I were building an online direct response supplement company today, I’d use the 5×1 METHOD as my foundation.
The 5 x 1 Method For Building a Successful Supplement Company
The 5×1 method reduces your focus to a handful of things. Just five.
By minimizing your focus along with a minimum viable approach to each, you’re more likely to succeed. You’re spending more time getting each one of the five items working before moving on to the next item. Then moving on to improving the performance of each one systematically.
So many health CEOs I work with try to do too many things at once, and as a result dilute their focus. This inevitably, ends up weakening the company as a whole, putting them in a constant state of struggle.
Instead they should put 100% of focus on just five things…
- One Product
- One Offer
- One Funnel
- One Traffic Source
- One Follow Up Sequence
Those are the five ones, in that order. When it comes to sales, they are the most impactful things any supplement company can do.
Once those five are working, only then does it make sense to scale the business on top of one funnel. Once you start to scale a funnel many things will break and if you haven’t gotten all five of your items working it’s going to be very difficult to patch the cracks as you scale up.
Let’s look at each of the five ones in more detail…
One Product
For a dietary supplement product the most important thing to focus on is the formulation. It needs to work. Your customers need to feel it working, ideally right away.
For a skin care product they need to see the difference. For an indigestible dietary product like a drink, it not only has to work but it also needs to taste good.
Beyond effectiveness and taste. The market desire for your product needs to already exist. Desire can’t be created, only channeled and amplified.
One way to tap into desire is to use SEO tools, like Google Trends, to see what products and/or ingredients people are already searching for. Look for which ones have volume trending up.
Next you’ll want to look at the competition and see how well they might be selling based on how much traffic volume they are sending to their site. You can use tools like whatrunswhere.com and similarweb.com to see this information.
Once you’ve decided which product will be used in your front-end, based on demand and the desire of the marketplace, you’re ready to move onto the next one…
One Offer
Now that you have your first of five ones you can focus on the second, your offer.
The offer is by far the most important element to get right. It’s even more important than the copy. But for your minimum viable approach you shouldn’t stress it too much. Remember you’re going to be optimizing and improving the offer before you can scale.
There are two things to consider when thinking about an offer. First is the Market. Even if you have a brand new product with a special blend of ingredients that no one else has, you’re still in an already existing category with other products. So there are always competitors and alternatives to the solution your health product supports. Crafting your offer should start with looking at what else is out there. Including what bonuses you get and what else might be missing that you can add.
Second is the Economics. This goes back to one of the four growth frameworks we use with all of our dietary supplement clients. Namely, the Economic Framework. In a nut shell, the price and cost of your offer needs to back out to an affordable spend to acquire a customer. Which is an integral part of making an offer work.
One Funnel
Now that you have your one front-end product and your best offer to start with, you’re ready to move to your one funnel.
At this stage you’ll be deciding what other products will go in your funnel and what those offers will be.
For a minimum viable funnel I wouldn’t spend to much effort on upsells. To start, I would include one upsell and one downsell.
This would allow me to concentrate all or most of my energy on the front-end sales copy.
If however, I only had one product and had nothing to sell in the funnel. I would create an information product as an add-on at the checkout page or as the upsell. You can also use complementary affiliate products in the funnel and on the backend (after the sale) through email follow up sequences. (We’ll get to that one later.)
What works very well for the first upsell, for a dietary supplement funnel, is more bottles of the same product at a discount. If you only have one product and one upsell, I’d shoot pretty high and offer them 12 more bottles at a good discount. As far as a downsell, again if you only had one product, simply half the amount of bottles in the first upsell. So if they didn’t take the 12 bottle offer the downsell would be for 6 more bottles.
One Traffic Source
When starting out, you just want to get your product out to as many people as possible. Be cautious, taking a shotgun approach with traffic is an urge that must be resisted.
By focusing on just one traffic source you’ll not only get really good at buying that traffic. You will learn all of the little nuances of bidding, targeting and just how to use the ad platform interface. Your numbers will also be really clean, probably the cleanest your business will ever be. What that means is your conversions won’t be diluted or hidden across different traffic sources. The reality is that each traffic source will convert differently. By focusing on just one, you’ll eliminate all of the noise, and fully understand how that one traffic source converts.
If I had to choose one traffic source it would be tough. Google has the majority of high intent traffic, Bing is more lenient when it comes to what’s acceptable to advertise for a dietary supplement, but Facebook has better targeting and you can support that with building a community since social is built right in. One side note, just because you’re focusing on one traffic source does not mean I would wait to build up a following in social media. That’s a slow grind, so you might as well get started on social media from day one.
One Follow Up Sequence
The real money in any funnel or health business for that matter is in the backend. In fact, one of the main goals of that front end funnel is to bring in buyers at a loss or at breakeven. That’s the life blood of the business that you need to continuously pump in to keep it going.
The profitability comes in what you sell to those buyers later. That is known as the backend of the business. At first you may not have additional products to sell them. In which case you can offer them other products that you’re an affiliate for until you have more to offer. Or you can create additional products once you have your five one’s working.
This fifth one, the email follow up sequence, is a series of emails that you’ll send to everyone that buys. Later on you can segment out this list. But for now this is too complex. At some point when you scale, you’ll want to send different emails to people based on what they bought or how much they spent or if they didn’t buy at all.
The series of emails that go out to buyers generally fall into two categories, promotional sales emails and educational content. You’ll want to warm up your buyer with some educational content to onboard them to actually take your supplement. After all if they don’t take it they won’t buy again or continue to buy, if they are on a subscription. But shortly after that you’ll want to transition them to a promotional series of emails. Ascending them to higher a lifetime value for your business over the next several months.
Again, just like the other pillars in the five by one strategy, just get a minimum viable version out there and then work on improving it over time.
Building a Successful Online Supplement Company
You can’t go wrong with this core foundational approach to building a supplement company.
The 5 x 1 Method not only forces you to focus on the most important things but also limits the scope to the minimum viable version which keeps you from getting caught up in the weeds so you can iterate on each of the five focus areas.
Product, offer, funnel, traffic source, email follow up sequence, from which you can build on top of to scale your online health supplement business.
This is where a conversion rate optimization agency can really help.
Especially for entrepreneurs who chase shiny objects or who want to stay at the high level and avoid the details.
Look at any health supplement CEO’s Kolbe score or DISC profile and you’ll see the pattern. They are all great starters but horrible finishers, and really bad at processes. Once they have something up they can’t resist the urge to jump to the next thing.
Which is typically create new product or even start another business. It’s the nature of entrepreneurs.
They are not systematized or methodical. This is where a great CRO person can help add rocket fuel to the entrepreneur, if they give them the reigns.
Three Funnels Every Health Supplement Business Needs To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire
Through our work in the online health space, we’ve optimized many dietary supplement businesses. In that time, we’ve uncovered the three critical funnels for success.
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