Marketing Nutraceuticals Online With The Right Sales Page

Marketing nutraceuticals, functional foods, and other health and wellness products online is a delicate balancing act.

Because, traditionally marketers are taught to focus on benefits over features. A feature might be that your probiotic contains certain strains of the Lactobacillus family. But the functional benefit is that it can help you lose weight and belly fat.

However, when selling the benefits of your dietary supplements, you must be careful not to go beyond what can be proven scientifically.

So claiming that your supplement can help with losing weight needs to be backed up with proof. This might sounds something like this. In one study, eating yogurt with Lactobacillus reduced body fat by 3–4% over a 6-week period.

But that’s just the start. The dietary supplement buying audience is very skeptical. The reason being, because there’s so much misinformation and confusion out there. So, even if you stick strictly to the research, customers may still be hesitant to believe you. Trust is a critical part of the balance when it comes to selling to this market. It’s not as simple as just selling benefits over features like it is for other products. People buy supplements differently because the way they think about the product is different.

And there are many subtle differences. For one, the health market is very mature. The average customer sees and hears hundreds of health marketing messages every day. Many of which make extraordinary and indefensible claims about their dietary supplement products.

Some might argue they are putting a little too much embellishment and weight on the benefits. But unlike other products, the benefits and even the features is not where supplement marketing nutraceuticals should start.

In order to transform awareness into sales, you must first convince customers that you are trustworthy.

And if you want customers to believe your claims, you first have to make claims that are believable. Tapping into the trust and belief of your prospects is key to selling health products direct to consumer online.

In fact, even more trust than normal is needed to buy a health supplement product from a site they don’t know. A low level of trust combined with a higher level of marketplace awareness and sophistication, means the typical AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) model does not work well for marketing nutraceuticals online.

Marketing Nutraceuticals Is Different

Supplement buyers do more research and spend more time in the consideration stage before buying. In order to convert a new visitor straight away the typical framework starts with an interesting / curiosity driven hook.

Typically a strong hook or big idea, is done through an interesting angle. It has to have just the right amount of sensational hype, while layering on hope of a future state.

This hook is the AID (attention, interest, desire) part of the AIDA framework. When designed right, it draws the visitor into wanting to know more. It elicits a response and interaction between the visitor and the marketing message. That interaction can simply be reading more and or intensifying the desire to want to know more.

But that’s where it leaves the AIDA model behind. Remember, at this point the product has not yet been introduced. The hook is simply selling the reader on well… reading, or watching, or paying attention, nothing more.

The next step to come into the marketing nutraceuticals sequence after the hook is typically, the story. People are story driven creatures…

We create meaning and stories out of events and experiences. (That typically have no meaning at all.) People do this in order to make sense of the world and what happens to us in it. But we’re also attracted to stories, it’s fundamentally how our minds think about things. And it is through story that we can more easily tap into emotion.

Using emotion in your sales story helps prospects to make buying decisions, since people buy based on emotions and then support their decisions with facts.

Why Should I Buy From You?

Next comes credibility. People don’t buy from websites, people buy from people. This goes back to trust and how people buy health product differently online than other products.

Because there is no face to face, establishing that “connection” between the buyer and seller is key to building trust online.

This section is often seen as an interruption in the flow of a sales letter. It’s better known as a pattern interrupt. It typically starts with introducing yourself, like this…. “Hi, I’m First Name Last Name.” And then goes on to tell the reader about your credentials and your mission.

Crossing The Bridge

A bridge connects the product to the solution in the mind of the prospect. This is a very tricky section for a supplement product. You can’t literally say your supplement “cures” anything. That’s actually illegal. But the bridge is where the reader creates and takes that leap in their own mind without you actually saying it directly. This is typically done in 3 acts and if you want to learn more, here’s an article that explains the concept of selling supplements in 3 acts.

Can You Prove It?

Proof is like a little nudge that eases buying anxiety. If the proof is missing however, the visitor’s anxiety level goes up and they get scared out of buying.

Proof can take many forms. One common one is scientific references that support claims. This is one area that is required for marketing nutraceuticals, but how it’s done can be amplified over the typical way of simply adding a list of references at the bottom of a page.

If you want to know more about how you can use proof to sell supplements online, check out this video presentation that walks you through 30 different examples of proof.

A Little Nudge

Just because you helped the prospect cross the bridge and provided proof, that does not mean the selling is over.

There are an endless number of things that could derail the purchase. Anything from procrastination to distraction on the prospects part.

Sometimes a little nudge to buy can make all the difference.

One common nudge, often used in direct response marketing are premiums. Sometimes known as bonuses. These can be anything added onto the offer that are extras, which you typically can’t get anywhere else.

A common example is a digital eBooks or a short guide that supports or enhances the product benefits. If you’re selling a sleep supplement you could add a silk sleep mask as a premium.

Another little nudge can be a strong guarantee that reduces the risk for the customer.

Guarantees work best when a prospect is a bit skeptical about the claims your supplement implies. (which is the typical situation with any new visitor.)

Ask For The Sale

So many non traditional marketers who market nutraceuticals online are afraid to ask for the sale. Well maybe not afraid. But certainly timid when it comes to selling online.

Many people would have no issue being a bit more aggressive, when it comes to selling, if they were talking to a loved one that could really benefit greatly from taking a supplement. In the end you’re really just trying to help them. If you have a solution that will truly help, and they need the help, people are usually a bit more persistent than normal.

But online it comes across as pushy for some people. When it simply needs to be the extension of the logical and emotional marketing argument leading up to these two very vital areas of your sales page.

Which is, the offer and the close…

The offer is where you simply express the terms of what they get and for how much. This includes summarizing everything, including premiums you’ve added on in the bonus section. For a complete look at how to present the value of an offer read this article.

The close is typically the section before and after the offer. Sometimes it’s expressed as a post script (P.S.) section. The close reiterates the reason why and nudges the prospect into buying mode.

As you can see it typically takes more effort and a tweak on the traditional AIDA framework when marketing nutraceuticals online.

Discover the 3 funnels that can help your health supplement business succeed.