The Vitamin Shoppe gets healthy results with Emplifi

How Emplifi Ratings & Review’s syndication capability supercharges customer-generated content

Founded in 1977, The Vitamin Shoppe first launched as a company that focused on—you guessed it—selling vitamins and other nutritional supplements.

Since then, the company has leaned into the blossoming wellness sector by expanding its catalog to include items like vitamins, minerals, specialty supplements, herbs, sports nutrition, homeopathic remedies, green living products and beauty aids.

Today, The Vitamin Shoppe offers its customers access to their expansive online catalog produced by over 700 brands—all of these items are designed to let its customers lead healthier, happier lives.

The challenge

The Vitamin Shoppe wanted to bulk up its collection of ratings & reviews to help shoppers better compare products and zero in on the items they were looking for.

Unfortunately, the company felt that its existing ratings & reviews product was overly complicated. It also didn’t allow customers to submit product reviews directly from within an email, a sticking point with the company.

“We were looking for a solutions provider that could be more than just a vendor—someone who could help us grow the business and be a true strategic partner. Emplifi really appealed to us because they built a relationship and then gave us the tools to do just that.” — Tamara Pircz, Senior Director of eCommerce

The solutions

Syndication

The company’s main goal was simple—collect more ratings and reviews for its online products. Luckily, the answer was equally simple.

The Vitamin Shoppe’s ability to increase its content collection was supercharged thanks to Emplifi’s review syndication feature. With Emplifi Syndication, The Vitamin Shoppe was able to collect and display product reviews that had been gathered by its brand partners on their own sites.

The Vitamin Shoppe’s brand partners faced no fees from Emplifi, even if they used another platform to collect and manage their Customer-Generated Content. All the brands needed to do was give Emplifi permission to syndicate their reviews to retailers into its network.

This syndication proved to be a highly effective way for The Vitamin Shoppe to increase its catalog’s coverage rate—the percentage of products on its site that had a review. With review syndication, brands could share their Customer-Generated Content for display on The Vitamin Shoppe’s online store. As a result, more than 60% of the company’s expansive online catalog featured a review.

In their first full year with Emplifi Ratings & Reviews, The Vitamin Shoppe saw the number of total reviews (native reviews plus syndicated reviews) shoot up by more than 150%.

Research shows how getting more reviews for products can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. In fact, a study from Northwestern University’s Spiegel Center found that a product with just five reviews was 270% more likely to be purchased than a product with no reviews.

Ratings & Reviews

In addition to the positive results from our syndication capabilities, The Vitamin Shoppe was also able to collect more native reviews thanks to Emplifi Ratings & Reviews broad collection features. How? Through a set of features that’s been proven to deliver better results.

Customers who submitted reviews to The Vitamin Shoppe were asked to “Do More,” a feature that incorporates their purchase history and asks them to write additional reviews. Do More is designed to make a request of shoppers when they’re already primed to write Customer-Generated Content—these personalized requests can increase product review submissions for Emplifi’s clients by 20% to 30%.

Thanks to features like Do More, the average number of native reviews collected monthly by The Vitamin Shoppe increased by 58% after adopting Emplifi’s Ratings & Reviews product.

Inbox Submission

In addition, The Vitamin Shoppe took full advantage of Emplifi Ratings & Reviews inbox submission feature, which lets shoppers submit product reviews directly from the body of an email.

The inbox submission feature was built with a mobile-first approach, making it particularly effective at gathering Customer-Generated Content from those on mobile devices.

The feature yielded dividends immediately. Over the year-long period following The Vitamin Shoppe’s implementation of Emplifi’s Ratings & Reviews, the company found that 62% of its Ratings & Reviews submissions were made on a mobile device.

“Our mobile review submission rate skyrocketed after we implemented Emplifi. It became a key element of strengthening our product review collection strategy right out of the gate.”

Top-notch customer service

One of the most important characteristics the company needed in a Ratings & Reviews vendor was the ability to navigate the complex regulations surrounding the collection and display of Customer-Generated Content about vitamins and other products sold by The Vitamin Shoppe.

Emplifi made sure that The Vitamin Shoppe received the individual attention it needed to stay on the right side of regulatory rules.

The bottom line

With a very high number of SKUs to manage on their online store, The Vitamin Shoppe was in search of a Customer-Generated Content product that would help it get more reviews and increase its coverage rate. Thanks to Emplifi’s Ratings & Reviews, the company was able to increase its natively collected reviews by 58% by using features like Inbox Submission and “Do More.”

But the company really saw an explosion in collection rates after Emplifi’s review syndication capabilities kicked into gear. Reviews shot up by 150% when powered by syndication, helping to give The Vitamin Shoppe an enviable coverage rate.