How Health Nutrition Uses AdRoll to Grow their Shopify Plus Stores and Help People Live Healthier Lives

Today’s health and fitness consumers are well-informed and value-conscious. They’ve done their research and they set their goals strategically to improve their health and well-being. From increasing muscle mass to getting the right vitamins and minerals to improve their daily lives, every individual’s health goals are unique and personalized to them.

From Overwhelmed to Two Streamlined Platforms that Work Better Together

I first came to Health Nutrition almost 10 years ago, focusing on influencer and organic social media marketing. I took another job to master paid advertising, and two years later I came back to Health Nutrition as their digital marketing manager. This time, my focus was on paid advertising and digital marketplaces.

With just 15 employees, Health Nutrition’s team is lean and agile. Historically, we’d been able to mobilize products quickly, but working with over a dozen brands across multiple advertising and social networks, juggling passwords and logins, and dealing with billing and account information was creating a lot of overhead. Our challenges went beyond administrative issues. We had difficulties reaching consumers who had abandoned items in their shopping carts and targeting them with the right message to bring them back to our sites.

We’d recently migrated all our sites to the Shopify Plus ecommerce platform. We were extremely happy with its integrations and streamlined checkout and cart functionalities, including multi-currency and Shopify Pay support. Using Shopify Plus also reduced our development time because it’s so easy to customize, and we were no longer using different stacks and platforms for our various brands.

In addition to onboarding Shopify Plus, we wanted an all-in-one solution to streamline our paid campaigns and target hard-to-reach consumers. We found it in AdRoll.

Streamlining Campaign Management

Our marketing team had known about AdRoll for some time, and after we adopted Shopify Plus, the AdRoll team reached out. Because the two platforms integrate seamlessly with each other, the AdRoll team felt confident they could help us grow our brands. We decided to give AdRoll a try for several reasons: One, some of our competitors were using them; two, we needed to consolidate ad platforms; and three, we wanted greater control over our paid media campaigns.

As promised, AdRoll worked right out of the box with our Shopify Plus stores. The AdRoll pixel integration automatically built audiences based on how often they visited our Shopify stores or looked at our products. We could add and remove any of our brands from the platform with a single click. It synched up all of our campaigns and allowed us to perform A/B tests to find the best way to distribute our ad spend.

Compared to Taboola, AdRoll is more intuitive, yielding insights faster.

We initially wanted to work directly with ad networks, but working with AdRoll is a much better option because of their account management services. We’re not a big fish, so companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon don’t provide us with the support we need. By contrast, our AdRoll customer success manager is very responsive and supportive. We get help when we need it — from an actual human — including information about new features, updates on account activity, and advice on running effective campaigns.

We adopted AdRoll in the summer of 2023, just in time for our autumn campaigns.

We’re Saving Time and Collecting Better Data

Our fall campaigns require a lot of coordination between our CRM and email teams, who sort through our customer lists to determine which customers get what messaging and when. During these fall promotions, we offer discounts to frequent customers and unlock free products based on our loyalty offers, among other initiatives. So, it’s important to segment our campaigns instead of sending out the same promotional offer to 100,000 people.

Because of the manual overhead, we’d run smaller campaigns in the past, which were never supported by paid advertising. With AdRoll, we started using paid advertising to retarget consumers during our Halloween promotion, boosting our year-over-year campaign sales by 30%. When we saw these results, we decided to push harder and doubled our Black Friday budget. The impact was near instant: a 52% year-over-year increase in campaign sales.

Working with AdRoll saves me roughly three hours a day on a regular work day, and almost half of a day during busier times of the year like Black Friday when we’re running a ton of different promotions. Leadership teams don’t have time for the minutiae. They want to know one thing: What was our profit?

Instead of logging into a dozen platforms to calculate ROAS from various networks, AdRoll aggregates everything and calculates our overall return for me. Having that number at my fingertips facilitates conversations about ad spend and the effectiveness of our campaigns. After all, time is money, and AdRoll saves a lot of time.

When I do need specifics, AdRoll allows me to share performance data about any of our brands with Health Nutrition’s leadership team. One of our critical KPIs is the number of return visitors, and we were pleasantly surprised to see a 132% month-over-month increase for one of our smaller brands during the 2023 holiday season. This brand caters to consumers focused on losing weight, and we never imagined they’d show so much interest during the holiday season. We use AdRoll to personalize offers to return visitors — like new pop-ups and product features — which foster a better repeat journey.

AdRoll gives us plenty of options to retarget people who have visited specific pages, seen particular offers, or abandoned their shopping carts. We can run A/B tests to see which tactics yield the highest returns and adjust our campaigns accordingly. Our eventual goal is to create evergreen campaigns that can run in the background with little to no human intervention. We’d like to cast a net wide enough to catch everyone we’re looking for, and AdRoll provides the data to do just that.

Helping People Lead Better Lives

Health Nutrition is focused on growth. Beyond increasing our customer base for existing brands, we are expanding our product offering through acquisitions. We expect to increase our 2024 paid marketing budget, given our success in 2023.

We typically see a massive jump in organic traffic every January as people make New Year’s resolutions to lead healthier and more active lives. In 2024, we plan to convert these prospects into return visitors with more purchase intent and higher ROAS for our ongoing and seasonal campaigns, including Valentine’s Day, Easter, and summer holidays promotions. Our paid team will be collaborating with AdRoll as well as our email and SMS teams to learn from our Black Friday and Halloween campaigns and replicate those successes throughout the year.

As a company that helps people lead better lives, Health Nutrition strives to provide the right product to the right person at the right price. AdRoll is helping us find and retain customers who want to improve or maintain their health, optimize performance, and enjoy life.

Discover How AdRoll Can Help You Grow Your Shopify Plus Store

AdRoll is the marketing and advertising platform that helps merchants grow their Shopify Plus store — regardless of team size. Ready to learn how AdRoll can help you become more efficient? Get in touch now.