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The nutritional supplement market is a cutthroat industry with some of the smartest competitors on the planet. If you want an edge over these players, then you can’t sell supplements as if it was 1999. You need supplement marketing strategies that are working right now. The same ones today’s fastest growing supplement brands rely on to win despite all odds….
That’s why in this article, I’m going to take you behind-the-scenes with supplement marketing strategies from the world’s fastest growing supplement brands. This includes the exact acquisition and retention tactics they use to turn random site visitors into true fans who buy over and over again. Plus, I’ll also show you exactly what we do to help our supplement clients grow in record time.
Let’s get started…
The supplement industry is exploding.
According to Grand View Research, the global dietary supplement industry will grow to $272.4 Billion by 2028, with an annual compound growth rate of 8.6%. And of all supplement categories, proteins and amino acids will lead the way with the fastest compound growth rate of 13.3%.
Why is the future so bright for supplements?
On top of all of this, both ecommerce and Amazon are growing at breakneck speed.
In other words, if you sell supplements, there is a ton of opportunity for growth both in the short and long-term. In addition, there needs to be a big focus in your online store as more customers are looking to buy supplements online than ever before.
Growing a supplement brand is hard, but simple.
At the end of the day, it’s about math and how you manipulate the different variables to stack the odds in your favor.
The 2 most important supplement marketing variables to control?
1/ CAC
2/ LTV
If you decrease the cost to acquire a customer and increase the lifetime value of that same customer, you’ll always be able to grow. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling plant based protein powder or you’re selling melatonin gummies, this will always work. The problem most supplements brands face is they confuse what actually lowers CAC and increases LTV.
Based on our experience, here are the best tactics…
There are no sales if there is no traffic and there’s no backend profits if there’s no front-end sales. That’s why it’s important to start with getting as many new customers as you can acquire. The trick is to do so while staying profitable and while diversifying your traffic sources so your business can weather any storm that comes its way.
Not surprisingly, paid traffic is the lifeblood of most supplement brands. Supplements are both some of the highest margin and highest AOV products in CPG, which is the best possible combination you can ask for if you’re running paid ads. They’re also extremely social media friendly due to fitness and nutrition being a very visual category.
With that said, your first step when running social media ads is to nail your offer.
You want to advertise an offer people want to buy and allow you to afford the best customers at scale. This is why we advise you to start by testing your best selling supplement, your highest margin supplement, and a high AOV bundle. With that said, remember that offers aren’t just products. They also include price, guarantees, free bonuses, and payment terms. From there, you can see which one leads to the highest LTV and triple down on that offer so you can scale.
Along with your offer, you need thumb-stopping, high converting ad creative.
The dietary supplement market is filled with some of the most sophisticated buyers out there, so you want to have a well-positioned supplement with a strong USP. Your ad creative then would be promoting that USP and other angles in a ton of ways with fast-paced and exciting visuals. We also advise you to prioritize “proof ads” which include things like product demonstration, as seen on logos, customer reviews, scientific data, influencer endorsements, and comparisons.
Lastly, we can’t forget about your ad account structure.
According to Facebook, you need at least 50 conversions per week so they can accurately optimize your ads. This means you need to “consolidate” or combine both your prospecting and retargeting campaigns so that enough of your ad budget is going into each of your ads. From there, if you separate your campaigns based on SKUs, angles, and audiences, you’ll be able to continually find winning ads that can scale your brand to the next level.
In a perfect world, you’d generate 50% all of your sales from organic traffic with SEO making up a huge bulk of that. Why? Because it will make your supplement brand more profitable, sustainable, and crisis proof (iOS14!). Luckily, while supplement keywords are competitive and subject to Google Updates, they’re very popular and are high intent.
That’s why we suggest you focus first on branded search.
Branded search is when customers type in your brand name into Google search. While low volume compared to other keywords, this is also the highest intent and least competitive keyword to rank for because customers are specifically looking for your brand. Branded search is mostly affected by what you do outside of SEO, but you can make sure you have backlinks and internal links pointed to the homepage and your metadata is optimized for your name.
Unlike regular SEO though, ecommerce SEO is about optimizing BOFU pages.
BOFU is short for “bottom of funnel”. In ecommerce, this means you want to build your SEO strategy around ranking your collection pages and product pages. If you rank these pages, you will see a massive increase in organic sales because customers will be typing in google looking for your exact product. You will want both backlinks and internal links pointed to these pages. You’ll also want to make sure your keyword research is solid so you can rank for them.
Once your pages are set up, you can now focus on ranking articles.
More specifically, you want to work up the content funnel by targeting the middle of the funnel (MOFU) articles first, then top of the funnel (TOFU) articles to round out your SEO strategy. For MOFU articles, focus on high intent, commercial keywords such as “best supplement for X” and “X vs Y”. For TOFU articles, focus on problem-solution articles such as “how much protein should you eat if you’re skinny”, use case articles such as “how to make protein pancakes”, or even recipes using your supplement (we recommend the same SEO marketing strategy for food and beverage brands).
Sales come from both traffic and conversion. So if you want to reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA) with paid ads and drive the most revenue possible from your organic traffic, then you need to optimize the page customers land on to buy your products. This is even more important in highly saturated markets, like most supplement brands are in. And since all your supplement marketing efforts will eventually touch your product pages, this should be a priority for you.
The first step is to figure out your positioning.
You can’t just say you’re the “best” and expect people to buy. Instead, your landing page needs to answer the question, “Why should I buy your supplement over your competitors?” so that it stands out. Maybe you sell the world’s best tasting greens, maybe you were the first to sell pea protein powder, or maybe you use the cleanest manufacturing process. In all cases, you need to avoid competition. Figure out your USP, then build your landing page around it.
The second step is to answer all important objections.
The primary use of a landing page is to answer objections. The best way to do this is with the “OCP” framework, which is short for “Objection, Claim, Proof”. In other words, start by collecting the primary objections your customers may have about your product. Order them in terms of importance. Then directly answer those objections with a claim (no Q&A!). And then back up those claims with lots of proof. Do this and your product pages will be extremely persuasive.
Lastly, I’d consider using dedicated landing pages for paid ads.
Online stores can get messy. There are tons of buttons, the product pages are typically set a certain way, and you may not want to be changing it all the time. However, by sending visitors to a dedicated landing page that removes all of the fluff, you’ll have the opportunity to boost your conversion rate, which will lower your CAC. So if you want to test a unique value prop, then make a landing page for it and send a portion of your paid traffic to that landing page.
Trying to scale a supplement brand without optimizing your average order value is the fastest way to flush your money down the drain. Ecommerce is a game of math and we’ve found that unless you optimize that math as much as you can in your favor, you’ll be on the losing end, especially if you’re at scale.
There are a lot of ways to increase your average order value, but if we’re talking about what’s the easiest, fastest, and most “foolproof” way to get all of your customers to spend more with you every time they buy something from you, then there’s nothing like just raising your prices.
Hence why we think all supplements brands should raise their price by 5% today.
Let’s say you’re selling a $40 tub of protein powder. You decide to raise the price by 5%, which would make your tub $42. Chances are that price increase would do very little to decrease your conversion rate. At the same time, those extra $2 would be a huge boost to both your revenue and profit margins without having to do anything. This is free money, which is why I recommend you do the same for your product line.
If you want to take it a step further, price your supplements based on target margin.
Margin is one of the main indicators for success in the supplement space. The higher your margin, the higher your chances of success, especially if you want to scale with paid advertising. Ideally, you want a gross margin of 75% or higher. So if you’re not at that stage, I’d consider raising your prices until you are. Maybe not every single SKU will get to 75%, but the closer you can get to that tier, the better.
You can also price your supplements based on positioning.
Generally speaking, the only two price points that give supplement brands useful marketing hooks is to either be the lowest priced or the highest priced brand. And while being the lowest priced typically means you own your own supplement manufacturer, being the highest priced is more about positioning. So if you’re trying to become a premium priced supplement brand, it’s worth looking into also becoming the highest priced brand to back up your premium claim.
Another easy, fast, and foolproof strategy to get customers to pay more during every purchase is to sell more bundles. These bundles can be made up of the same product or multiple different types of products. If you’re a supplement brand, this is also one of the most natural ways to increase average order value as it works even if you only have one product.
The best way to start? Look at selling multi-month bundles.
Multi-month supplies are when you pick one supplement and sell multiple orders of that specific supplement to cover a certain amount of time. For example, weight loss programs are always correlated with 90 day timelines. So if you’re selling a plant-based protein powder, it makes sense to sell 3 in one package. From there, you sell it as a “90 day supply”. You can also offer based on different timelines such as 1 month, 3 month, and 6 month supply (1/3/6 bundle).
Next, I would suggest looking into sample bundles.
Sample bundles are when you sell multiple different types of supplements, so you bundle a few of them together into one order so customers can try them out before deciding the one they want. This typically makes most sense when there are superficial differences between supplements such as flavors or medium. With that said, as long as the samples make sense to position it as a sample bundle, then you can try it.
Lastly, every supplement brand needs a routine-based bundle.
Similar to sample bundles, routine based bundles are when you piece together different supplements to give customers everything they need to follow your recommended routine. For example, you may have supplements meant to be taken before and after your workout. So it would make sense to put them into one bundle because they need them both for best results.
These will typically become your highest AOV bundles since they can have so many products.
One of the best times to sell more products to a customer is during the purchasing phase. By this, I mean right at the point of sale or immediately right after it. Why? Because intent is extremely high and they already have their wallets out. All a customer needs is to be presented with the right offer and they’ll have no problem adding another product to their order.
The most proven way to do this is with an upsell.
By definition, upsells are when you sell more of what a customer just bought. For example, if your customer bought 1 tub of greens, then your upsell would be to sell them 3 more for a discount. Now, this might sound counterintuitive since they just bought the same product a few seconds ago. However, upsells convert like crazy because your customers have already said they like that product enough to buy.
The second way to do this is with cross-sells.
Cross-sells are when you sell a product that compliments what they just bought. For example, if your customer bought pre-workout, then it would make sense to follow that up immediately with protein powder since someone who buys pre-workout will likely also need and want protein powder. The key here is to be as relevant as possible. Don’t cross-sell melatonin to someone who bought an energy drink. The idea is to add to the benefit they’ve chosen.
The last way to do this is with bump offers.
Bump offers are when you offer additional products right on the product page. Typically, you’ll see this right under the buy button on most supplement stores on Shopify. Another way to think about bump offers as “people who bought X also buy Y” offers. Bump offers work because they are usually highly relevant add-ons to what they already want to buy. With bump offers, you can sell individual units and end up seeing cashing in on bundle sales.
The business that can afford the most to acquire a customer, wins. This is where retention channels like email marketing and SMS shine because you can literally sell to the same customer for years. For supplement brands in particular, you should strive to generate 30%+ of your total revenue from email and SMS. Of all the supplement marketing channels you can invest in, email and SMS is usually the least funded. Don’t make that mistake as a supplement brand!
The closest supplement brands can get to “passive income” is with a collection of well-planned, and well-executed flows. In fact, it should be your goal to make half of all your email revenue from email flows. Because of how iffy ad platforms like Facebook can be with supplements, it’s important you optimize every inch of your email flows.
The most important flow to optimize first is your welcome flow.
Welcome flows are the first automated emails your customer will receive after they’ve signed up to your email opt-in. We recommend your welcome flow to be 4-6 emails long and organized based on stage of awareness. Email #1 should deliver on your initial promise from your email opt-in. Email #2 should focus on your USP. Email #3 should share your testimonials. Email #4 should promote your best sellers. Email #5 and #6 should focus on urgency and scarcity.
The next most important flows to setup are your abandonment flows.
By abandonment flows, I’m referring to all of them, including your site abandonment, browse abandonment, cart abandonment, and checkout abandonment flows. These will be some of your most profitable flows because they are sent when your customer has their highest purchasing intent. They are also some of the easiest to set up as each flow only needs 3-4 emails. For even better results, use conditions to have product-specific abandonment flows.
After those, I highly recommend you set up a post-purchase flow.
While post-purchase flows usually won’t be your highest earning flow, they are the ones that every customer sees. You want to properly onboard new customers so they come back again later. In this flow, you only need 3 or 4 emails to get the job done. Email #1 should have a discount allowing the customer to immediately buy something else. Email #2 should teach customers how to use their product. Emails 3 & 4 should promote ambassador activities.
While many supplement brands are hesitant about sending a ton of email campaigns, the truth is that campaigns are the key to huge paydays. In fact, the other half of your email revenue should come from your email campaigns. The most successful supplement brands also happen to use some of the most advanced email campaign strategies.
Before sending emails though, you need to be great at calendaring.
We’ve found that when you send your emails is the biggest factor to email campaign success. For example, if you send a 15% off discount in the middle of July and during Black Friday, you’ll always do better on Black Friday. The trick is to create more Black Friday-like sales events throughout the year. The best way? Creating email calendars where you schedule holiday campaigns, product launches, cultural moments and other events 3 months ahead of schedule.
Once your “big moments” are planned, you need to be sending 2-3 emails per week.
For our clients, we’ve found the more emails you send, the more profitable you are. For most supplement brands, this means 2-3 emails per week. And if there’s a big holiday or product launch, we’ll sometimes send 10 emails in a single week. No need for any advanced segmentation. We also highly recommend you send 2-3 email resends per week to subscribers who’ve received the original email, but did not open, click, or register as “active on site”.
Finally, we can’t talk about email marketing without talking about messaging.
I say messaging rather than email creative because the goal should be to promote a compelling message rather than a piece of creative. This means you should focus less on how pretty your email looks and instead focus on selling a great offer while using a strong sales hook. While this is a huge topic, the gist is if you give your customer a reason to buy, they will. Your email copy and design should amplify this reason simply and clearly.
While aggressive email marketing is key to increasing repeat purchase rate, it’s actually the offer you’re promoting that affects LTV the most. More specifically, we’ve found that getting as many customers into a paid subscription plan is the #1 way of increasing LTV. Of course, it’s easier said than done. That’s where your email marketing comes in.
With that said, the first step is to sell memberships rather than subscriptions.
Functionally speaking, there’s no difference between a subscription and a membership. You can include the same perks in a subscription as you can a membership. However, memberships typically convert better because they sound like a value add rather than an expense. You can also have both subscription offers and a membership with the main difference being that your membership is your primary subscription offer with the most benefits.
Once you have your membership, it’s time to promote it in your flows.
We’ve found it’s very difficult to sell subscriptions to non-customers. That’s why the best move is to wait until a customer has bought twice before they receive an email flow specific to your subscription offer. With that said, you should sprinkle in subscription offers in your non-customer and 1X buyer flows so that customers know that it exists in the first place. Besides, you never know if a customer will just decide to go for the subscription earlier than expected.
Finally, you want to also use campaigns to sell subscriptions.
The best way to use campaigns to sell subscriptions is to actually make as many non-customers into 1st time purchasers so you can sell them a subscription in the backend. With that said, there are also plenty of times to send campaigns selling your subscription upfront. By promoting subscriptions with discounts or free bonuses that end soon, especially during a holiday event, you can convert many customers earlier than expected.
If you sell protein, there are differences in how you should market your product. All of the above supplement marketing strategies still apply. However, because protein is one of the most competitive categories in the dietary supplement industry, you have to answer a few specific objections to get customers to buy your protein supplement.
“What type of protein is this?”
For a lot of customers, there is a massive difference between whey protein vs pea protein vs hemp protein vs cricket protein and more. The difference is usually based on your customer’s diets, but also because of the benefits of each type of protein. The type of protein you sell also determines your competition. The more common your type of protein it is (*cough* whey *cough*) the harder it will be to get people to buy protein over everyone else’s.
“Does your protein taste good?”
Go to every supplement store, review aggregator, or forum and you’ll see that the biggest rave reviews or the biggest complaints always come down to taste. If your protein tastes horrible, people will let others know and they will be hard to sell. This is why I recommend you actually look to be the best tasting brand in your particular category of protein. If you can do this, then you’ll instantly sell more. The better the taste, the bigger the word of mouth.
“Is your protein clean and free of all the bad stuff?”
The biggest trend in the protein supplement category is the “clean” category. More customers now want plant-based protein, organic ingredients, dairy-free products, soy-free alternatives, gluten-free options, and even brands who do all the above in one product. Customers now also expect transparency to make sure you are trustworthy. After decades of shady practices, modern supplement brands must now market themselves with radical transparency.
Like protein, vitamins are some of the most popular supplements out there. Not only because of how basic the product is compared to more advanced formulations, but because they have extremely high awareness levels, which makes it simpler to sell. With that said, while you should also follow the plan I laid out above, here are some specific things you need to keep in mind when marketing vitamins.
For most vitamins, you can rely on old research for bigger claims.
Most vitamins can be considered “traditional” vitamins with decades of research behind them. This means you can push a bit more with your claims than with other types of supplements. However, unless you have a compliance officer, the best thing to do is use this advantage to promote your positioning rather than have a full, benefit-driven sales pitch. For example, the benefits of Vitamin D are well documented, so I would stick to it being an “energy” supplement.
Be creative with your differentiation.
Because vitamins are much more basic in nature, you will want to be a bit more creative with how you differentiate your product. In an ideal world, you’d sell a vitamin that is low in supply, but high in demand. However, if you can’t do that, then it’s worth looking into the competitive landscape when it comes to medium (pill, powder, gummies…etc), flavors, high dosages, multiple vitamins in a serving, or other factors that can help give you the edge.
Transparency is absolutely key for trust building.
While transparency is incredibly important for all supplement brands, it’s even more important for vitamins because of how undifferentiated they can be. In fact, this is one of the biggest differences between old school and new school vitamin brands. So if you’re trying to sell vitamins online, you need to lean into it until it’s so radical, there’s no reason that customers should ever believe someone else’s vitamins are safer than yours. It’s also the hallmark of a premium vitamin brand.
If you want to grow your supplement brand as fast as possible, then you need to build your supplement sales funnel that allows for aggressive paid marketing budgets to convert into profit within weeks, rather than months. The trick is to set it up so that math works in your favor and you can afford the best customers even when your CAC goes up as you scale.
Every supplement sales funnel starts with a front-end strategy for new customers.
The goal of your front-end strategy is to acquire customers with the highest LTV, while also getting as close to breaking even as you can. You will need to test paid traffic to different offers to truly find the best offer. In fact, you’ll probably need 2-3 offers you can rely on at scale. With that said, it’s very common for most successful supplements to do well with a compelling bundle or some type of quiz flow. Combine that with great ad creative and you have a winner. Avoid “awareness funnels”. You want offers and ad creative that convert customers on day one.
Then there’s the backend strategy, which brings in the profit.
This is where email marketing and SMS becomes your biggest concern. You want to use email and SMS to drive as much revenue as possible within the first 60 days of a person becoming a paid customer. This is why most supplements have very aggressive email marketing programs with optimized flows and big campaigns. The biggest priority though? Get new customers into a paid subscription. This is the biggest driver of LTV for supplements brands. Supplement brands must get at least 30% of their total revenue from email & sms.
Supplements are one of the most highly regulated CPG products out there since you’re consuming substances with the promise of health benefits. Worst yet, the bigger you grow, the more scrutiny you’ll receive from the FTC and competitor’s who have no problem taking you down through the legal system (ask me how I know!).
So if you have the funds, hire a lawyer to review all of your marketing claims.
This is the only guaranteed way to make sure you’re following all laws.
With that said, while this is not legal advice, the easiest rule to follow is to make sure all your product’s labeling is accurate so you can stick to marketing what is in those labels rather than using traditional benefit-driven marketing claims.
In other words, if you’re selling a pea protein powder, it can technically help you build 10 pounds of muscle in the next 6 months. However, you can’t make that claim because you can’t change someone’s “state”. Instead, it’s much better if you focus on what is in your nutrition facts label such as how your supplement contains 20 grams of pea protein per serving.
Why?
Because you can prove that in court. It’s a falsifiable claim that can be measured, analyzed, and reported on. There’s no health benefit. You’re not curing or treating anything. You’re simply providing a specific amount of a macro nutrient in an easy to consume format, hence the term “supplement”.
If you want to be a bit more aggressive, you can also use general, decades old proven claims. For example, you can say protein powder helps you build an unspecified amount of muscle because it’s now mainstream after decades of research. However, you should stay away from any lesser known benefits, which might not have as much research behind them.
You can also get your own double blind studies done. While very expensive, it’s going to be the best option when it comes to dealing with research. It will also give you an advantage over other competitors as the study will be specific to your product.
Again, the best thing you can do is hire a lawyer who specializes in this stuff.
But generally speaking, the best course of action is to stay away from benefits as much as you can unless you have your own studies. Instead focus on features. This doesn’t lead to the strongest marketing possible, but it will keep you safe as you scale your supplement brand.
With the right agency though, you can still do great supplement marketing.
Yes, Shopify allows for any supplement brand to start a store on their platform. And yes, it’s worth it. Shopify is arguably the best platform for new and big supplement brands because it has everything you need to run a supplement business without having to deal with more complicated solutions. If you happen to be a bigger supplement brand, you can also opt to use Shopify Plus for even more advanced features.
Supplement marketing revolves around 3 main pillars. You need product-market fit, message-market fit, and channel-market fit. First, you need to understand exactly who your supplement is for. Second, you need to create a message that compels customers to buy by making sure you’re answering all of their objections. And lastly, you need to promote your product and message wherever your customers are, such as FB/IG or email marketing.
There are only two things you have to worry about when trying to increase your supplement sales. First, you want to reduce your customer acquisition cost by constantly testing fresh ad creative and launching higher converting landing pages. Second, you want to increase your earnings by increasing your average order value and your lifetime value within a 60 day payback window. By lowering your CAC and boosting your LTV, you can scale any supplement business. This supplement marketing strategy works for every type of supplement you sell.
The trick to supplement marketing is creating new categories. In some cases, this may mean using a new ingredient that other brands aren’t using. In other cases, this may mean being the most expensive supplement in your category. In either case, you stand out by researching your market and picking a category where there are few competitors, but potential for a lot of customers.
New Ingredient
Highest/Lowest Pricing
From specific location
Associated with person
…etc
You can advertise supplements wherever there is available ad space. With that said, the fastest growing supplements brands focus on three primary digital marketing strategies. First, they maximize their Facebook and Instagram advertising budgets. Second, they retain their customers with email marketing and SMS. Lastly, they invest heavily into either SEO or organic social media. As long as you stay compliant with all of your claims, you shouldn’t have a problem with advertising your supplements in the most important and profitable marketing channels.
The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes, but you have to be careful. Facebook sets rules so they are not liable for your claims. This means while you can advertise supplements on Facebook, you have to pay extra attention to the claims you make. Naturally, it also means any supplements that lean to the medical side of things probably won’t be allowed. However, since most supplement business owners sell basic products like protein powder, most people are fine.
The trick is to use both math and psychology to convert customers at a profit. Start by promoting your best selling supplement and offering it as a bundle. Then focus on optimizing with great ad creative so that Facebook can optimize your best customers for you. Make sure you stay compliant by sticking to provable facts about your supplement rather than grandiose claims.
Yes, you can advertise supplements on Google. However, like most ad platforms, liability is always an issue. That’s why you also have to watch out for your claims, especially if you’re selling supplements. With medical supplements, there are much harsher restrictions though. But if you’re selling regular dietary supplements like vitamins or protein, you’re fine.
Yes, like with Google, you can also advertise your supplements on Youtube. And just like with Google, you have to be careful with your claims. This is a reality for the supplement industry in pretty much every medium. With that said, Youtube is one of the most powerful places outside of Facebook to advertise your supplements due to its high intent, long-form video placements.
Our ecommerce email marketing agency, SupplyDrop, specializes in email marketing and SMS marketing for supplement brands who want to generate 30% or more of their revenue from their owned channels.
When you’re ready, hire us as your supplement marketing agency for email marketing!
