ABOUT THE BRAND

Naked Harvest is a lifestyle brand whose wellness products are reshaping standards for women’s active supplements

Naked Harvest is a women-focused consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand that sells wellness products and supplements. Recently, we spoke with Chantel Brayley, the brand’s Director of Marketing, and Mikayla Carter, the Head of Design, about the success story of their high-performing app.

Chantel, one of the Top 50 Voices in Ecommerce, has helped scale brands and launch mobile apps for other major fashion brands, including Petal & Pup. A self-described ecommerce addict, she is passionate about all things digital, which explains much of her professional success as an ecommerce marketer. In her words, what makes Naked Harvest so unique is its focus on products designed to enhance health and well-being with the promise of “no nasties”—meaning no gluten, no refined sugar, no dairy, and more.

Both Mikayla and Chantel are heavily involved in creating their brand's ultra-successful app. Together, they measure the platform's success through app sales, push subscriber numbers, and the percentage of total sales attributed to the app.

THE CHALLENGE

Naked Harvest needed great CX for its customers – without spending a fortune on a new website

Several years ago, Naked Harvest understood that its website was not where it needed to be and that it would take a hefty investment to transform it into the platform it wanted. That's when the idea of a mobile app (specifically, a low-lift, plug-and-play, owned platform with Tapcart’s solution) started making a lot of sense for the Naked Harvest team.

According to Chantel, a Tapcart mobile app is a fast and frustration-free way to achieve a great and personalized customer experience without a massive cash investment or a major headache.

It could also bring the brand closer to its community.

"An app would allow our community to access the brand more easily. We're a brand in the high-growth phase and the app helps us get more from our marketing dollars. With such an engaged community, driving retention is really important to us and a key strategy is to funnel our best customers over to the app, the less we need to spend in retargeting.”
‍Chantel Brayley, Director of Marketing at Naked Harvest

Mikayla agrees, noting that she sees the app as bringing little snippets of Naked Harvest’s platforms together. From email design to web design to social assets, Mikayla knew right away that a Tapcart app would be a seamless way to integrate all the brand elements – including education, community, and product – in one place.

“Every other platform has its area to shine,” Mikayla said. “And we bring all of that together on the app.”

Another reason Naked Harvest was interested in an app was to stand out from the competition. An app would allow Naked Harvest to capture customers early in their journey. After all, by capturing customers ASAP, Naked Harvest could strengthen those new bonds with great CX that prove the brand is different from its competition. This is absolutely critical, considering how crowded the health and wellness industry is.

THE SOLUTION

With an app, Naked Harvest maximizes retention and marketing dollars to nurture community

Naked Harvest sought a Tapcart app to boost customer experience without making a massive investment in its website. But there were many other reasons to invest in an app. One of these was that customers consume Naked Harvest products constantly. That means customer retention is truly important — after all, they buy daily supplements.

An app made repurchasing a breeze. In fact, customers' lifetime value is 45% higher in the app, and purchase frequency is around 30% higher.

But beyond revenue, Tapcart helped Naked Harvest build an app for community building and customer education.

Chantel explains that a content-driven app is super effective at educating customers about product benefits, emphasizing that the goal is promoting a healthy lifestyle. Naked Harvest's innovative strategy to use an app including an FAQ response system and a seamless customer experience through an app, effectively supports this health and wellness CPG brand.

Chantel emphasizes that a content-focused approach helps educate about product benefits, which is essential for improving health. Naked Harvest successfully uses this strategy by innovatively addressing customer FAQs and enhancing customer experience with an app, proving effective for their health and wellness CPG brand. According to her, “having a very content-led platform allows us to educate on the benefits of our products. And, ultimately, that's why we're here: to improve health. You're never going to educate with pretty imagery alone.”

The platform's focus on customer education has helped make the Naked Harvest app a top-notch retention tool.

"The more we can funnel engaged customers into this platform, the less we need to spend on retargeting. It allows us to maximize every marketing dollar we spend so that we can still have a very heavy acquisition strategy without worrying about how our media performs effectively. To us, this is just as important a player in our game as our email campaigns because we see just as much, if not more, engagement from app-only campaigns and app-only messaging.”
‍Chantel Brayley, Director of Marketing at Naked Harvest

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THE STRATEGY

Naked Harvest’s app always gets the most “preferential” marketing strategy

Naked Harvest does not just consider its app a channel or a tool. For Chantal, Mikayla, and the rest of the team, the app is the first place they start thinking about how to communicate with and incentivize app customers. They are very deliberate about this strategy because they want to incentivize as many people as possible to use the app.

“The app,” Chantel said, “will always get the most preferential treatment in our strategy.”

So how, exactly, does Naked Harvest get all of these customers to the app? Like many Tapcart customers, the brand relies on various tactics and incentives to get customers to download the app and subscribe to push notifications as soon as possible. Tactics include:

• Offering early access to sales and launches on the app, including Black Friday sales
• Offering app exclusives and limited edition flavors and accessories only on the app
• Promoting the app on social, email, and the Naked Harvest website
• Offering additional loyalty rewards for downloading or using the app — a tactic Naked Harvest incentivizes further when it is hungry for additional app downloads
• Leveraging the influencer status of the brand’s co-founder

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The app streamlines agile marketing management

The platform also allows the Naked Harvest team to be agile regarding marketing updates. For example, the brand appreciates that when it wants to create educational content — such as its Autumn Glow Guide — all the marketing department needs to do is get the information over to design and then place the asset in the app. There are no developers, other teams, or vendors involved. They simply drag and drop the content into the app.

Naked Harvest also creates tons of video content and could not be happier with how easy it is to drop that footage directly into the mobile platform. This seamlessness is Mikayla's favorite part of the app. After all, it gets the best content in front of the best customers on their ultra-important home screens.

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Plus, the app’s push notifications are a digital communication channel that offsets CAC

Additionally, Naked Harvest is a big believer in the power of push notifications. This is especially true because it sees its app as its chief retention channel. The website tests acquisition methods, but the app is all about retaining existing customers. This helps offset acquisition costs (CAC) and allows Naked Harvest to shape its website around the wants and needs of brand-new customers while tailoring the mobile app toward already established shoppers.

According to Chantel, Naked Harvest spends about 70 to 80% of its budget on acquisition rather than remarketing, allowing the company to grow at an unprecedented rate. This is largely because the app does so much of the retention heavy lifting. It's an engagement tool and a retention tool, and it makes really good use of Naked Harvest’s marketing dollars.

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Tapcart’s built-in features, including search functionality, means maximizing marketing dollars with better UX

Tapcart helps Naked Harvest achieve various other things for fewer marketing dollars, too. One example is the outstanding app customer experience, including customer support. 

Another is that Naked Harvest does not need to invest in expensive search integrations for its app. The Tapcart offering makes it easy for customers to filter and sift through its 43 different products. While brands with thousands of offerings would need a search integration, Naked Harvest is thrilled with the search functionality for its limited collection and is more than happy to take those marketing dollars and apply them elsewhere.

THE RESULTS

With LTV 45% higher in the app, Naked Harvest relies on its app to keep customers close (and never fears channel cannibalization)

Like many other community-focused brands, Naked Harvest sees push notifications as an opportunity to increase sales and engage with its community more than ever. Additionally, Naked Harvest's sister brand is a mindset and self-development brand. So Chantel and Mikayla have ensured that the push strategy includes lots of nice, little reminders about acts of kindness.

Chantel believes one of the critical reasons LTV and purchase frequency are so much higher on the app is that there are fewer lapses between purchases. And she is a big believer that one of the key reasons for this is because of these push notifications – even if they have nothing to do with shopping. She also believes that how easy it is to check out, including storing payment details or using Apple Pay and getting what you want in a single click, removes many of the barriers to purchase.

Here are the stats to prove it:

• 25% higher AOV on app vs. website
• 142% higher CVR on app vs. website
• 272% higher revenue per session on app vs. website

It's also worth mentioning that channel cannibalization has never been a concern for Chantel and Mikayla. After all, Naked Harvest saves a ton of money on remarketing thanks to leveraging the app as a retention channel. And, besides, there is nothing foolish about allowing customers to shop exactly how, where, and when they want.

"If we think about what's best for our customers, then we're giving our customers the option to choose in the way that best serves them, which aligns with our brand. We are just being present how they want – how our customers want to be serviced.”
‍Chantel Brayley, Director of Marketing at Naked Harvest