💊 can your customer data be worth $225 Million?

The shopping experience goes like this:
Take the quiz
Get results and product tailored to your needs
Consume vitamins daily
Rinse and repeat every month

It’s about personalization, technology, and customer experience.

Part of their brand promise is to simplify the path to feeling better -- after completing the quiz, Care/of curates and deliver the necessary combination of vitamins and supplements based on personal need.

The quiz gathers the information about the individual, and

Supplements are a $40 billion industry in the United States. Before the direct to consumer brands simplified the education and purchase process, purchasing vitamins was not a pleasurable experience. And it’s this opportunity that Care/of and others in the space have

But until recently, no progress had been made to improve the struggle of identifying and shopping for vitamins. Enter Care/of...

On Quiz and Personalization

In 2018, it was noted that more than 1.5 million people have taken Care/of’s quiz.

Care/of’s vision is to build a company that sells personalized health and wellness products.

They already have gathered proprietary personal data of every person who’s taken the quiz. From there, it becomes far easier to personalize the product around the individual’s needs, but also segment their audience to know which customer needs what product.

This is a strong competitive advantage that Care/of built.

Why Is the quiz so long?

““In our beta, we initially had a short, uber-efficient on-boarding quiz as that's what U/X logic told us. But the more we tested, the more we learned that customers are willing to put in the time to get a truly personalized recommendation,” Elbert noted.

This is interesting, and reinforces the foundation of user experience: customers are willing to share personal data if there is an equal exchange of value.

This data from the quiz is what Bayer found appealing in the acquisition.

As stated in the announcement: “The acquisition furthers Bayer’s strategic business objectives by strengthening the company’s presence in the high-growth area of personalized nutritionals. The partnership supports Bayer’s commitment to self-care and accelerates its understanding of personalized nutrition and advanced digital capabilities.””

Where the Quiz Adds Unique Value

Think about how the Care/of builds a relationship with consumers vs a traditional brick and mortar like Vitamin Shoppe or GNC. As retailers diversified revenue to both in-person and online sales, collecting just an email does not leave the DTC brands a large advantage over brick-and-mortar.

But the nuanced zero-party data gathered from the quiz is a unique advantage.

As Modern Retail writes: “When retailers were still primarily selling offline, DTC startups’ ability to collect emails and addresses for every customer put them at a huge advantage. But now, as many brick-and-mortar retailers have become better at e-commerce, some of the data that DTC startups are able to collect is no longer unique to just them.

Because Care/of asks users to take a quiz before signing up for its subscription service, it’s still able to get access to valuable data like customer behavior that incumbents still aren’t able to get access to easily.”

✏️ What You Can Replicate from Care/of’s Quiz

Personalize with Recall

One simple yet effective way to create an awesome customer experience: use the customer’s responses to personalize their experience.

For example, capture the customer’s name. Then use it, throughout the quiz, and in the final product recommendation:

Ask what customers their challenges and goals are. Then create segments so you send campaigns and messaging only around those issues. Improve relevance immediately!

4. Give Personalized Recommendations

This is the big payoff -- a product that is “made for me”.

There is something magical about seeing your name on the recommendation page (there’s that recall)--and even cooler when you have an individually packaged set of vitamins for your needs.

Note that the recommended vitamins are for bones and fitness, which were two goals I answered in the quiz.

🎙️ How To Actually Get Data-Driven Insights (by Asking Less Stupid Questions) with Steen Rasmussen

There are 4 parts to effective analytics, according to Steen Rasmussen: Data, Action, Analytics, and Reporting.

But there is a misalignment -- today many make the mistake of not using data to pull actionable insights.

Steen recommends 5 rules for approaching data analysis and strategy with the right mindset:
- Understand the strategic goals of the company
- Ask open-ended questions
- Understand the timeframe: focus on short-term or long term results?
- Think outside the dataset
- Understand the Underlying KPIs

Steen Rasmussen is co-Founder at IIH Nordic, a digital agency focused on driving results through data-driven analysis.

This is a conversation about how to understand and analyze data to “activate” it and make decisions that impact revenue growth.

In an environment that is in constant flux for digital marketers, Steen offers a thoughtful framework to getting more from your data to actually drive growth.

👟 How Nike is using DTC and data to expand its empire

Excellent read here on how one of the most iconic brands is shifting it's business towards a direct-to-consumer model to own more of the brand experience.

And customer data.

They're just scratching the surface of personalization.

“The result of Nike's data-heavy focus is that not only is merchandise personalized to certain stores, but the online experience of individual consumers is unique as well.

"When you open up the Nike app on your phone, it's not just, 'Here's a bunch of Nike stuff that we're excited to sell today.' It's literally a vending machine of the product that is most likely to sell to you"