#MarketingExcellenceAwards SG 2021 highlights: Herbal Pharm embraces eCommerce in multi-layered campaign

Home-grown health supplements company Herbal Pharm has built its business over the past 16 years with two core principles – delivering only premium quality products formulated with the best natural ingredients, and a relentless focus on the customer experience.

While Herbal Pharm has several physical retail outlets, the largest part of its recurring sales comes through its dedicated team of customer service operators and hotline where customers dial in to speak to an operator and place their orders.

Though the model has yielded success over the years, Herbal Pharm wanted to reach out to a wider audience. Hence, it decided to create a campaign that would tap into social media applications to obtain new customers.

With its “Herbal Pharm For A Better You” campaign, the brand impressed the judges and earned a spot as a finalist for Excellence in eCommerce Marketing at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2021. 

Challenge 

While Herbal Pharm has enjoyed success with its existing telesales model, the company wanted to grow its eCommerce model, which up until early 2021, was only a small part of the company’s sales. With a strong digital movement emerging in the pandemic, it needed to cut through the clutter and reach the right audience.

According to Herbal Pharm, it was a consistent advertiser with traditional channels such as TV and radio. While the company realised it had to tap into different mediums to obtain new consumers, it also understood this strategy came with its challenges.

For instance, it needed to gain an understanding on the use of programmatic marketing to reach new customers and grow its business while retaining its unique advantages such as a team of highly trained customer service responders. With these challenges in mind, it launched the “Herbal Pharm For a Better You” campaign. 

Strategy 

With the campaign, the team wanted to reach a new untapped audience and to convert these individuals into paying customers. All of which was aimed at growing the brand’s eCommerce business.

To achieve a campaign with clear and attributable results, Herbal Pharm and digital marketing company Damnzai opted for a programmatic approach. According to the brand, this approach was more advanced, with precise targeting options which allowed Herbal Pharm to segment its audiences more clearly.

It also allowed Herbal Pharm to tailor its creative assets towards the audiences’ different stages. 

Together with its agency Damnzai, Herbal Pharm segmented its targeting broadly into two categories – new and existing audiences. New audiences were categorised as “top of funnel” (TOF) and featured an assortment of product/benefit-specific creatives layered with demographics and interest-based targeting.

For instance, ads for a beauty supplement were targeted towards female consumers with a high affinity/interaction level with beauty or skincare-related content. At the same time, the brand also explicitly excluded anyone who had visited the Herbal Pharm website or interacted with its Facebook or Instagram in the last 30 days to ensure they were completely new audiences.

Meanwhile, existing customers of the brand were labelled as “middle of funnel” (MOF). For consumers under this category, the campaigns were designed to handle the next stage, converting interested prospects into real customers.

For instance, if a MOF customer clicked through to any of the campaigns under the TOF category, the user would be automatically removed from the pool and would instead be greeted with an assortment of ad messages in higher frequency and a variety of placements.

Some of the creatives available in the MOF pool included UGCs, influencer reposts, unboxing videos and bundle deal promotions, among others. The idea was to show a prospect a series of content designed to build trust and credibility to persuade a customer to make the first purchase.

Additionally, Herbal Pharm also created separate campaigns for customers with higher purchase intent. This applied to customers who had added items to the cart, but did not complete the check-out.

Execution 

In terms of the type of platforms to utilise, Herbal Pharm and Damnzai opted to use social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Shortly after, Herbal Pharm included the use of TikTok as well.

According to the Herbal Pharm and Damnzai teams, these platforms were more visually oriented, allowing the brand to use a variety of media effectively. Over the course of four months, Herbal Pharm ran a total of 15 campaigns for its products. 

For its TOF campaigns, Herbal Pharm opted for simple attention-grabbing creatives that addressed the benefits of the product. These were targeted with interest and demographics targeting, and refined with a/b testing.

Meanwhile, if a consumer was to click through the site, they would be channelled to the MOF segment, where a variety of ads would appear for the next seven days. 

Results 

Since the campaign, Herbal Pharm has managed to track directly attributable sales on its eCommerce site. Furthermore, there was more than five times more return on ad spend. According to Herbal Pharm, its other channels have also shown a marked increase in sales. For instance, its monthly sales on platforms such as Shopee and Lazada have doubled from when the campaign began.