Developing A Healthy Online Business

In the $4 trillion health and wellness industry, the mind and body fitness segment is estimated to be worth more than $500 billion. The business of helping people look and feel their best is bigger than ever, and consumers young and old are now heading online to get their fitness fix.

To cater to this growing demand and capture digital consumers, merchants are rolling out features ranging from personalized suggestions and order histories to mobile payment acceptance and faster delivery. NutraClick is one such player delivering on changing consumer expectations, both online and in retail stores.

Launched in 2009, NutraClick began as a direct-to-consumer company with a single supplement offering. Just a few months into business, the company partnered with health and wellness retailer GNC — which now carries its products — and has grown into a technology-driven health and wellness company offering five supplements in more than 40,000 retail locations.

PYMNTS recently caught up with NutraClick’s Senior Software Engineer, Ben Brown, to talk about how technology is continuing to change the way consumers purchase the company’s products.

Building up Strength Online and in the Physical World

When NutraClick entered the health and wellness industry, it built its reputation by making omnichannel offerings integral to its strategy.

Rather than partnering with professional athletes and bodybuilders for ad campaigns in its early stages, the company developed a software solution to target the average consumer experience of finding and buying fitness supplements to fit their needs.

According to Brown, the focus was on helping customers to reach milestones in their fitness journey and to keep them motivated and coming back for more.

“We want people to know that we have high-quality products, obviously, but [products that are] really geared at helping people achieve their own health and wellness goals or helping them with specific problems,” Ben Brown said.

To ensure the company’s marketing reaches consumers most likely to make a purchase, Brown said the company tracks advertising campaigns leading to the most sales. Further ad campaigns are designed and planned using that data, building on lessons learned from other ads.

“We have a system that does a good job with measuring the traffic different campaigns generate and measuring the performance of those campaigns,” Brown said. “We collect a variety of data about different aspects of its performance and use that data to determine which ad campaigns to continue and support.”

The company is also using tools like email marketing campaigns — which studies show are reaching more consumers and driving more traffic than ever — and a content platform designed to deliver reliable health information to consumers to build NutraClick’s reputation.

The company’s digital marketing strategy and software were so successful that the brand’s popularity translated into measurable foot traffic at brick-and-mortar stores.

Keeping Pace with Changing Payments

Brown said that while NutraClick has leaned on many of the principles that guided the company at the beginning, nearly a decade since has brought many changes for him and his team.

With consumers now largely preferring to shop online instead of visiting brick-and-mortar stores, the most impactful change has been to consumers’ payment preferences.

While consumer adoption was slow at first, mobile wallets are starting to gain traction — a change that has led NutraClick to begin accepting Apple Pay on its platform.

“Apple Pay greatly simplifies the conversion process for customers,” said Brown. “With typical mobile credit card payments, the consumer has to manually enter their information, which is often challenging on devices with small keyboards. With Apple Pay, it is as simple as scanning your fingerprint. Better security, plus added convenience, made this particular payment option a no-brainer for us.”

Implementing the new payment option on NutraClick’s website, however, posed problems for Brown and his team. This led the company to partner with Vantiv, a leading credit card processor with mobile integration specialization.

Since Apple Wallet’s rollout on the NutraClick website earlier this year, the company is already observing an uptick in Apple Pay transaction volume. Seeing its success and a growing demand for other digital wallets, NutraClick is planning to increase payment types to support consumers, including new ways to process subscription service payments.

The company is also working with artificial intelligence to better target ads and improve efficiency. Brown said it’s all about better understanding and meeting the needs of health and wellness customers.

“We’re always working to expand our business,” said Brown. “We know that customers tend to hear about our products via those targeted ads, so we’re always looking to improve that [process] to better understand how our customers behave and see [which] factors drive them to make those purchases.”

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About the Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Developer Tracker, powered by Vantiv, provides the payments ecosystem with a view into how software developers are using new technologies to create innovative business opportunities and enable merchants to optimize the ways in which they engage with shoppers today. The developer community within the tracker is separated into three categories: Shopping and Payments, Operations and Marketing.