The Business
Z Natural Foods is a leading nutritional food that serves as both a B2C to hundreds of thousands of retail customers and B2B for suppliers of major food brands. In business since 2008, it stocks over 400 specialty products, many of which cannot easily be found elsewhere.
The business brings together the diverse talents of Sam Hirschberg, Jonathan Parker, and DeShaun Levy. They combined their various areas of expertise to launch an eCommerce site focused on products for wellness in 2008.
Hirschberg, who has an MBA, has served as Director of Business Development for the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA) and as the Vice President of Marketing and Advertising for the Fitness Together Franchise Corporation and Elements Therapeutic Massage. His focus is sales, marketing, and business development opportunities, ranging from customer messaging to building email systems.
Levy also has an MBA, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He drew on that his undergraduate education early on in his career as a pharmacy store manager. Considered “a wizard with words,” he came into Z Natural Foods with experience as a Marketing and eCommerce Director and Director of Social Media Marketing and Online Sales for other brands.
Parker is a lifelong athlete and nutrition expert with extensive experience in health and nutrition. Among his accomplishments is the development of a number of his own herbal supplements that are patent-pending. Drawing on the skills built up over a long career in IT, website management and optimizing the online customer’s buying experience, he now serves as Managing Director LeanFactor.com, the sister company to Z Natural Foods that promotes anti-aging and vibrant health.
The Challenge
The business confronts challenges typical of eCommerce that include balancing customer privacy with campaigns that are data-driven. In addition, each one of the partners has his own challenge in building up his part of the business.
For example, Hirschberg is working on taking the B2B aspect of the business to the next level. Levy has to keep a pulse on exactly what customers want, identifying segments and delivering accordingly to optimize email campaigns. Parker is responsible for making sure that customers get the highest quality experience, not just with respect to the product itself but also with its delivery, tracking and marketing communication.
They had been using a number of solutions to try to pull together their marketing needs. They had primarily used SendGrid for email campaigns and also tried MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, Vertical Response, among others. While these solutions have tools for transactional and promotional emails, they were limited in ease and quantity of the automation campaigns.
None of the solutions could deliver the level of eCommerce integration that they were looking for. When they looked for a solution that did, they also took the following factors into consideration:
- Data Security
- Customer privacy
- A track record of success from the email provider
- Enough solutions in order to make the change from an existing provider worth the risk of transitioning
- Smoothness of initial testing to justify the costs/ benefits
- Time and staff investment to set up the campaigns
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The Solution
They found all the features they sought in Remarkety’s solution. They were also very impressed by the high level of service is delivered.
“Remarkety’s team was responsive to our initial inquiries and showed they cared about working with us even before we got started,” they recall.
They got them up and running to reap the benefits of automation right away:
“Remarkety did a great job getting us set up initially with automated campaigns supported by a calendar of regular customer support sessions that focused on the highest value campaigns first, followed by the other supporting campaigns.”
That wasn’t just about winning them over at the beginning. Now that they’ve been with Remarkety for 3 years, they see that it has been consistent in responding to feedback and always striving for improvement:
“Our account manager Nikita Dhillon has done an excellent job regularly staying in touch and reviewing our initial campaigns that now have some data and locating areas that could be improved compared to other email senders — helping us improve our weak metrics.”
The Results
The promotional emails now enjoy a much higher open rate than the industry standard below 10%. Thanks to Remarkety’s automation and AI-powered segmentation, they can see open rates of 50% or even better!
In general, they are reaping the benefits of Remarkety’s abandoned cart and browser campaigns. They also are able to better segment their messaging, thanks to the built-in integration and customer history.
It all adds up to saving, ultimately delivering a better experience for customers and increasing sales and revenue for the business. The solution has worked so well for Z Natural that they are now applying it to LeanFactor to give it the advantage of better customer segmentation and automated emails powered by AI.
Just as their products build up the body for better health, Remarkety’s builds up the business through easy-to-use tools that deliver targeted communication at scale thanks to the power of AI-informed automation.
