A Guide to Health and Wellness Email Marketing Backed by Research

The Global Wellness Economy is valued at $3.7 trillion, based on research documented in Shopify’s Health and Wellness Industry Report.It includes a breakdown of the categories in this industry, including Beauty and Anti-Aging, Nutrition and Weight Loss, Wellness Tourism, Fitness and Mind-Body, Personalized Medicine, and Other.

The sheer size of this industry is staggering, and it’s growing every year as the barriers to launching a business (especially online) continue to diminish.So how do you stay relevant in such a thriving industry? How do you compete with the hundreds of other businesses just like yours vying for your customer’s attention?To help you cut through the noise and prioritize your marketing budget, I’ve found some interesting research about Health and Wellness marketing. See that research below, followed by a series of best-practice email marketing examples - arguably the most cost-effective channel for this sector.

Best Practices for Health and Wellness Marketing

Omnisend published an in-depth study analyzing the marketing tactics used by Health and Wellness businesses. Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Engagement rate, purchase rate, and retention rate more than doubled when brands used three or more channels to connect with customers compared to a single channel.
• The open rate, click-through rate, and order rate for segmented campaigns were dramatically higher than for non-segmented campaigns.

• “Cart Recovery” was the most effective automated workflow in this sector based on open rates and orders.
• The best times to send emails in the Health and Wellness industry are 8am, 1pm, and 5pm on the 3rd, 6th, and 14th of the month.
• Interestingly, the combination of “Email + Phone” had a better sign up rate when compared to “Email + First name” and “Email + Birthday” form combinations.

Are these statistics simply interesting or do they provide valuable insights you can apply to your marketing strategy?While you should apply them with caution and appropriate testing with your audience, the insights from this study are a great starting point.Yes, email marketing will be a key focus, but don’t underestimate the importance of a multi-channel strategy. Take the time to set up automated workflows that re-engage with prospects, segment your database, and optimize the delivery time of your campaigns.That’s the helicopter view… Now, what should your emails actually look like to get optimal results? Let’s check out some best practice email marketing examples from Health and Wellness brands.

Ritual Multivitamins

Ritual is an innovative multivitamin brand promising to deliver only the best ingredients and none of the nasties you may get with other products.Much of its marketing efforts are centered around the mission of “knowing what goes in your body.” They want to be perceived as the “clean” brand of the vitamin industry. So that’s what all of their emails aim to achieve.The best way I could describe Ritual’s email marketing is to “educate and dazzle.”For starters, they are always trying to educate their audience about the healthy process that goes into sourcing and producing their vitamins. This email, for example, uses intriguing diagrams and text to uncover what’s inside their product:

But information fails to educate if it isn’t partnered with beautiful graphics and sensory visuals. Ritual has an eye-popping yellow color in its logo that features in all email campaigns. This catches the reader’s attention. They also use clean, high-definition photos with lots of empty (or yellow) space around them. The product is the hero, which portrays a clean and trustworthy image. Look at this email header as an example:

What can other Health and Wellness brands learn from Ritual?Don’t underestimate how vital consumer education is in this industry. Use high-quality eye-catching visuals to educate and entertain your audience, leaving them with the precise feeling you want them to have about your brand.

Strava

Strava is an app for runners and cyclists that uses GPS data to track workouts, provide insights into your performance, and allows you to connect with like-minded fitness enthusiasts around the world.The thing that ties together Strava’s community of users is data. Whether it’s personalized data about speed, distance, and performance. Or visualized data mapping out popular running or cycling tracks. Data is at the heart of everything they do. Tracking and improving fitness performance backed by real numbers is why this app is so addictive and successful.Strava’s email marketing strategy emphasizes the importance of data to its community. For example, as a Strava user, you receive a monthly status update to show how active you’ve been:

It also gamifies the user experience by creating leaderboards for popular tracks and breaking them down into segments - so anyone can compete:

Sure, you may not have access to the same level of data that Strava does. But you can learn from its user engagement strategy and apply it to your Health and Wellness brand. Ask yourself what your users really care about? What keeps them interested in your brand? How can you gamify the experience to keep bringing them back and increase brand recall?

Headspace

Headspace is a mindfulness app that helps its users meditate, sleep, focus and more.I featured Headspace in my article about Health and Wellness Instagram marketing and how everything about its brand aims to be positive and calming. This extends into its email marketing.The colors Headspace uses in its emails align with its brand and create a calm emotional experience for the person reading them. This is the entire purpose of the Headspace app.

They also provide helpful tips and recommended listening to reduce work stress, get better sleep, and other common challenges.How do you use color and branding signals to portray emotion in your emails? Don’t underestimate how this will influence the actions of your audience.

Zumba

Zumba is a fitness program that combines Latin-inspired dance and cardio. As well as classes and training videos, Zumba has an eCommerce store where they sell branded activewear.It’s not your average activewear, though. Zumba has created an iconic brand with vibes from the electric 80s and 90s fitness trends. Think “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John.This time in fitness history is remembered for its bright (albeit soft) purple, green, yellow, and pink colors. But it's not only the Zumba products in these colors with an old-school theme - its emails take a similar approach. In this email, they’ve even included love hearts that look like they’re straight out of a 90s arcade game to add to the flavor!

In addition to your color, logos, and mission, consider a theme for your brand that can be reverberated throughout all marketing material. It makes it more memorable. A consistent theme can heighten the emotional connection someone has to your brand.

Conclusion

As the Health and Wellness industry continues to expand and competition grows, you need to have your finger on the pulse of the latest marketing trends and tactics.You also need to turn up every day and deliver an exceptional experience for customers using tried and tested tactics like email marketing.In saying that, email marketing evolves year on year. Database segmentation, personalization, gamification, interactive experiences, and beautiful visuals are now a mainstay in this space.Are you maximizing your email marketing efforts? If not, draw inspiration from the statistics and examples above to go to the next level.