How do you balance the demands of retail and e-commerce in the world of CPG? On this 114th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Kevin Land, Director of E-Commerce for Health-Ade Kombucha. Stocked by over 40,000 stores nationwide, this California-based company is growing fast, and Kevin has been along for the ride for nearly a decade.

In this episode, Kevin will discuss how Health-Ade bolsters brand awareness through digital marketing, and weighs in on the unique challenges of convincing new customers to try an unfamiliar product. If you’re interested in learning how a successful CPG brand leverages its online presence to improve customer loyalty, don’t miss this episode!

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Andrew Maff and Kevin Land

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Kevin Land

Living in the bay area after college, I was hired for a weekend by Health-Ade in 2014. Riding the kombucha wave, I started in Field Marketing and worked my way over to broader marketing functions. We built an e-comm feature that is now making up between 1 and 2 % of Health-Ade's annual topline revenue, bolstered by a strong subscribe-and-save program, new product lines, and our commitment to customer service.

Transcript: 

00:03

We are trying to lead with flavor lead with taste make it obvious that this is something that's going to taste good regardless of the benefits like that's that's like an added reason or like maybe that's why it's more expensive than a regular soda

00:22

I want to show damn good show. Good awesome Yes. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host Andrew Maff. And today I am joined by the amazing Kevin Land who is the director of E commerce over at Health-Ade Kevin, how you doing? Right? We're good show.

01:18

Yeah, so far, so good.

01:20

Beautiful. Appreciate you joining us. I am super excited to have you on the show. Because I'm also a customer, I have like three bottles of health aid in my refrigerator right now. Which is perfect. So obviously big fan of the brand. But I would love to pretend that no one knows anything about you. And tell us a little bit about your background, obviously about health aid, and we can take it from there.

01:39

Sure. And you know, you could have more than three bottles in your fridge because we're 40% off for Black Friday, Cyber Monday for a couple more days. Nice. Yeah, you like that? Yeah, my name is Kevin, I was hired for a weekend by health aid in 2014. To do production assistant work at a small event when the company was just barely sold in three states. I thought Ken Bucha was kind of weird at the time had only tried it through like an ex girlfriend once or twice. And never liked it. But the event was super cool. It was a music festival met all the founders, I found them to be just like super positive and encouraging people and really excited at a time when I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And we hit it off. And they offered me work. And I was moving to LA where the companies based that event had been at NSF, where I was living at the time. And yeah, just kind of started doing some more part time work for them and then got slotted into full time work through Field Marketing, which was a big part of health aids kind of like rise to success. I think I alluded to it briefly but like the taste of kombucha hasn't been such a big learning curve for people and help a tasting so good, has made it a lot more accessible to folks. And then we just kind of built e commerce as a as almost like a marketing gimmick in 2017, I think and it was local only to LA. And then we just sort of built it out from there. And and then we started to look at it as like a real channel as the pandemic set in and people were buying everything online and I was able to find some value, you know, kind of taking the helm. So here we are.

03:13

Nice. Well, so you've been with them for a while now. Did you have experience in like E commerce and marketing field or anything prior to that?

03:22

No, I was coming from like the event production world. So you know, the health aid event really was just like, from people I had met doing like Festival productions and I was an AV. I had a business background. So like, you know, had studied, studied a lot out of out of college. I was only I think I was only two years out of college at the time. So you know, I had a I was comfortable with networking and just trying on different things. But no, yeah, I mean, we've really built it, built it from the ground up, and there's not a lot of come Bucha e commerce still to this day. So we're still kind of like pioneering. But you know, that's the tough thing with shipping beverages to people's homes is it's not the most appealing business model for some.

04:02

Yeah, so that was definitely one of the things I really wanted to touch on was like CPG brands in general are difficult. Beverage brands are traditionally typically even harder simply because of cost and shipping and all that then you tack on that you're I believe you're cold shipped and your glass Correct.

04:24

Yes and no. We have We are glass that is true. But we actually were able to stop cold shipping earlier this year. So we still cold store everything. But after like extensive testing with r&d, commercialization, we were able to prove that the product stays safe for usually a few days longer than any of our longest shipping lanes would require so that was a big win when we were able to show that was safe. Because not it's like not just the ice packs themselves are expensive and heavy to ship. But when you when you need an ice pack it it changes A required shipping carton that you need to get the back of Bucha out. Right. So we've got a lot more options now for how we pack and ship it. And it's both lighter and less expensive. But more importantly, like we're just breaking fewer bottles in the shipping process, which is better for customers, of course.

05:18

So you mentioned that in the beginning, a lot of the focus was on the field marketing side, have you continued to scale in that direction? Are you kind of pivoting more into a digital side? Like what's been the strategy there? Yeah,

05:31

I mean, health aid, you know, at that time, kombucha was much smaller, healthy, it was much smaller. And the change from Field Marketing is now you know, that's kind of years behind us. We continued after, like, after we kind of calmed down on the events. Because like, when I started, I was running five events a weekend and just LA and we had like, 10 field marketing people in the country. So it was nonstop for a couple years, farmers markets, festivals, vegan food, festivals, whatever you name it. And all the while we were also doing in store demos, and those, those tend to be like the Holy Grail of Field Marketing, because it's like, try this, it's on the shelf right there, go buy it. And it works, you know, you know you're on especially if you're on sale for $1 off or something like you'll you'll like move cases of kombucha through a whole foods. So we continued and might even still be continuing actually on the demo front. As I have like, our ecommerce interesting and healthy, like I sit on the marketing team, but we are a sales channel. So I'm still like closely tied to marketing folks in a way that maybe other sales leads might not be. So you know, trade marketing, who runs more of our demo program, and even the field marketing stuff that we do continue to do, which tends to be like more VIP product placement, as opposed to like, you know, liquid to lips aggressive sampling, because we're you know, we're we're closer and closer to being a household name for the second largest computer brand. And the company, besides, you know, a 30 year old giant, so it just Yeah, it's it's less, it's less important to get all that field marketing done as it was when we were still building brand awareness and household penetration. But in general, like retail is the vast majority of our focus. But ecommerce is still you know, out of top line, it's between two and 3% of the company's revenue. So it's significant in that sense, we're a small team. But you know, the digital marketing focus tends to be more now on on brand awareness in general, and we're just like, always going to provide that option for E commerce. But, you know, if we get someone to go to the store and buy one bottle, that's still a win, and it's a little bit harder of a sell to be like buy 12 now. So yeah, we just, we it's kind of a something that we deem as necessary and valuable. And it's, it's the only sales channel where we can have a direct line of communication to these loyal customers that are willing to buy a 12 pack or subscribe even like, our most you know, our most loyal consumers are buying a 12 pack that ships every month or every three weeks or whatever. And we can talk to them anytime. They can ask us questions. And that's really like an even more valuable aspect of continuing to do e commerce even though it is a relatively small portion of this business.

08:12

Do you find that the most of the E commerce purchases are retaining customers like people that have purchased maybe in store tried it and then just wanted to buy it in bulk? Or do you think it's mostly net new people?

08:25

Um, I mean, it's, it's probably people that have tried it before. Like, I don't think a ton of folks are like, let me try kombucha and start with a 12 pack. And I think a good way to sort of prove that out is over like August and September, there was a tick tock trend around kombucha and like dieting that really blew up and you know, health aid has never pushed diet culture or said you know, like, you got to drink this to lose weight or anything like that. It's really not our ecos are more about like the health it takes to be happy and like, you know, enjoy your life and eat the nachos if you want to. It's fine. Yes, have some kombucha it'll help anything. But this trend really took off and we saw our retail sales reach record highs, right. And it didn't really have a huge impact on ecommerce, even though like they were right there on the videos were on Tik Tok. They could literally click over to our profile and buy it there. But I think just because if you're going to try it for the first time, it's a lot easier to buy a bottle or two than 12. So yeah, I'd say typically, we're getting people who know what they're getting into. And they really liked it and they're ready to commit because it's fridge space, too, right? Like, like we started with talking about cold. And we're on sale right now. And we're like our Black Friday sale is going great. It's been live in some capacity since the 17. Today's 29 And you know, you could be the biggest superfan ever but if you don't have room in your fridge for 36 bottles, it's hard to stack up too so there's that element. But yeah, returning customer rate when we're not doing a big sale tends to say had between 40 and 50%. On Shopify, anyways, you know, and you can take those those data with a grain of salt sometimes. But yeah, it seems like we have that loyal base, but we're always bringing in new folks. And my assumption is that the majority if at least tried the product before we're trying to come Bucha. Before it was.

10:20

There, you'd mentioned, you know, the Field Marketing, then you mentioned the Tick Tock thing. So really, like, it sounds like a lot of words of mouth is really what kind of caters to this. So I imagine is there a strong like influencer marketing approach or like affiliate marketing, you're doing anything in that direction?

10:37

Totally. We have. You know, we've been working with the same PR firm as a company for five or six years. And then we kind of handed them the keys to EECOM affiliate marketing this in the last year, so we're on impact network, and we're always finding people that want to create content and link out to e commerce. So that's yeah, that's an alive and active channel for us. Certainly,

10:58

yeah, I find that with CPG brands, especially in the beverage space, like no one wants to be, not only does no one want to be like the first person to ingest something. So new product launches, or even just newer brands like that can be a big struggle getting it moving. And then the other side of it to your point is like, no one wants to pay shipping for a single bottle of something they want, they typically have to do some kind of sizable pack. And if they haven't tried it before, it's not very justifiable. So when you're doing your brand awareness, and you know, you've got your different campaigns that you're running, are you staying focused in the certain areas that you're currently available? Or are you trying to do nationwide? And then hoping to get into retail because of that brand awareness? Yeah, I'd say

11:52

like we are, we double down in areas that were successful. I remember years ago, we had, we call them like, super target cities. And it's like, you know, LA and New York, San Francisco. Some of these, like major metro areas, just love from Bucha. So we want to make sure that we're showing up for those folks. But you know, health aid sold in over 40,000 stores already. So like we have nationwide reach is still going to be valuable, kind of wherever we run. Yeah.

12:16

If you're, if your digital marketing aspects are focused on a brand new awareness side, and so you know, you can easily tie ecommerce sales to that, but it's obviously very difficult to tie retail sales to that, how are you factoring in like customer acquisition costs? How do you decipher like, what's working and what's not so that you know, how to push and pull if really, your main target is simply just reach? Yeah,

12:43

and that's, that's an ongoing battle. And like, like, this year, especially we built, we built the EECOM forecasts around like a very specific return on adspend for E commerce. And, you know, we were, we were sort of like approved to lose even a certain amount of money on this advertising, because, you know, to get to get to pay ourselves back, if we're going to advertise for E commerce, specifically, we need to get like a crazy return because our product is so expensive to fill, right. And we've just found that it's very difficult to reach those numbers. And we're almost better off like, pulling the brakes on E commerce specific advertising and making sure it pays for itself, which is the direction we're more moving in next year, which again, will still remain like two or 3% section of the company, but rather than trying to aggressively grow and put a lot of pressure on the advertising, to to return aggressively. You know, we can focus more on just the reach, which is a little harder to measure. There are places like Instacart, Amazon Fresh, where there's like online, buy online platforms where you can actually get a measure on those results. And you know, if you see the ad is working, they're on those websites, and you're using similar creative elsewhere, and it's getting a lot of impressions, a lot of click through then, you know, you can kind of like, make some assumptions. And then of course, if it's a geographical target, if you run a campaign in Miami for three weeks, and suddenly sales are higher, like you can draw those conclusions, but you know, that's like ever a game right? So like, even as we were approved to like lose this money on ecommerce advertising, it's all still awareness. Like, yeah, you want to target bottom and lower and upper funnel differently. But like if my bottom of funnel ads turned into zero ecommerce conversions, that's still people who are going to recognize this when they go and store. Yeah, but you know, luckily, we do convert a bit of a.

14:35

So you'd mentioned that was actually my next question. You mentioned the Instacart AmazonFresh and stuff. Are you also available on the other marketplaces like, do you also have the product from an E commerce perspective, like available on Amazon or Walmart or any of those other places?

14:50

Yep, we through Shopify, we're running on Walmart. Amazon Tik Tok et Cie even has like a connector now I don't know had any sales on there yet. I just set that one up. But yeah, there's even a couple of wholesale channels, there's one called fair when we eat at the end. So we've just done sales on there. And then we have our own, like custom wholesale platform. So you know, if you're a small retailer, liquor store, whatever and you don't want to meet the MOQ of a local DSD, we can set you up on EECOM for a while and you'll get a discounted wholesale price so yeah, I mean, between among all those channels, like the number one and to our website, our subscribers and when Amazon but yeah, we want to be on all those channels. And that's just through Shopify with an omni channel we're on Amazon Fresh. We're on go puff we're on Thrive Market imperfect foods aka misfits market so yeah, there's there's a handful of like online channels that we are doing pretty well in. But there's it's just like renal route to market wise, there's so much more oversight required for for like the day to day on ecommerce just because, you know, we're dealing with third party logistics. And it's not to our, you know, if you're gopath AmazonFresh, you're buying from our biggest distributors. So there's not a ton of like, handholding that needs to be done. We like had some meetings, set our marketing budget and go from there. versus you know, monitoring inventory like a hawk and making sure customers that are reaching out are happy. It's just a very different world. Yeah.

16:25

So you mentioned the subscriber side, I want to ask you about that, too. So obviously, having some kind of you know, Subscribe and Save option makes a lot of sense, because you have to, more or less stay refrigerated at least most of the time. So you can only bulk up if your refrigerator can hold so much. So it seems like a very logical thing for some of your top customers to do. How are you? How is the Subscribe and Save doing? How did you start promoting it? Like, tell me a little bit about that?

16:53

Yeah, I mean, I think we just built it in because it was so easy. Like Shopify makes everything so easy to do, right. And then we just watched, like, people were signing up for it. And whether that's because it was 10 or 15% off, I think we're doing 15. Now, I think we started at TED few years ago, but we just saw it growing. So we started like running more promotions to draw people in, like, Hey, your first subscription will actually be 25% off, and then it'll revert to 15. You know, there's like old old school tricks. Like, when you're on the website, you have the radio button for subscription as the default option for the one time purchase. So if people will consider it. And, you know, when it comes to like, the Black Friday sale, or any of our big promotions will like reach out to those customer cohorts First, give them like early access or, you know, extra loyalty points if they buy on a certain weekend. So, you know, just any anything we can do to show them that like we're grateful because yeah, having that like recurring revenue, predictable event at times is really valuable to us and we want to show them that we're here to support

18:03

do you do anything in store to try to you know, use that as a channel to get them into the Econ ideally and to Subscribe and Save or vice versa? Or do you try to get people from econ and be like, Hey, this is your closest store like what's what's your approach like?

18:18

I'd say like the most like direct link that I we just built so this is like a very very recent live like a week or two where I think we might not have even published it yet. Maybe I was just looking at the figma file but like will be part of our loyalty program which is you know, the loyalty program really exists to support econ purchasing you know you get points I'm sure you've done it on any number of you know, brands you've shopped online. But we have a show your receipt for points option so you know normally you get get points if you follow us on Instagram or buy this many cases on EECOM or what have you. Now we'll have an option where you upload a receipt from an in store purchase you can get points towards an E commerce purchase. So that's like a very direct example of like hey keep buying and store and you can benefit on E commerce. And then on the flip side, you know every ecommerce customer for the most part is going to wind up receiving our marketing messaging so if we are like launching a new flavor at Sprouts, or at Whole Foods, or Kroger like we can communicate that to you but you know over the years I remember like I like helped build health aides customer experience channel as it exists today. I was literally the guy in Zendesk for about a year in 2019. And we often wind up shipping coupons to people for this or that you know, mix up the store or broken bottle and you calm what have you. And one thing that has been almost impossible to find and I still don't think we have a good one is a digitally generated coupon that you can use in store for like a free bottle I mean for a discount they exist by It just it just risky, right? Because, you know, as soon as someone figures out how to print it yourself, you know, it's just a lot harder to manage. So yeah, I'd say the receipt program and then just, you know, communicating with our customers that are around and available.

20:16

Do you, you know, we talked about, like the marketing side and the brand awareness side, Kombucha is very interesting, right? Because it's you, you have people that drink it are big fans, and then you have people that are like, and they kind of are weary on the taste, which I know that's a big side of health aid is it's not, it doesn't taste like most kombucha. Right? What would do you? Is most of your marketing focused on educating the consumer on the benefits of kombucha or you going after people that are already kombucha fans? And you're just trying to steal market share? Or would you say it's like a little bit of both?

20:54

This is the million dollar question, right? And we've gotten we've gotten different ways over the years, right, like last year, in the year before, we were really focused on being gut health champions. So all of our messaging was like gut health forward, probiotics, education, all of these things. But as we've done more and more consumer research, which is something you know, we've only been able to afford in the last year or two. It's just not as important to customers as taste so like we are trying to, like lead with flavor lead with taste, make it obvious that this is something that's going to taste good. Regardless of the benefits. Like that's, that's like an added reason or like maybe that's why it's more expensive than a regular soda, because it has these health benefits but ultimately, like it's a really tasty drink that you know can go just about anything so it's gone back and forth over the years but I'd say at the moment, we are like thinking flavor. And we even we're launching some some exciting new stuff meaning of next year, which will be available on EComm in February or late January. And that especially we're like looking for the we call them healthyish like you know people who would prefer to eat healthy but they're not like necessarily going to like drastically impacted their life to buy organic every single time. Those are kind of like the new customers we're looking for and then yeah, you have are like super dedicated always healthy taking shots at Apple Cider Vinegar crew that Yeah.

22:29

Yeah. Because that's that's a originally what had got my wife had turned me on to a she's a big kombucha fan across the board, but I would try some of these other brands and I'd be like, this is this is rough. And then she was like try it and she got health aide she got a camera which source you got to have, she brought it over and she's like, just try this one. It's very different. I was like, Okay, this is this makes a lot more sense in a direction to go in. There's a lot more line. So I loved it. I was like, Oh, this is great. So now that's the only thing we buy because it's the only one I'll actually drink. But I can see how the education side for someone to to learn like Oh, Kombucha is good for you if they've even tried it before, but it wasn't health aid, and they didn't like the taste. It's gonna be tough to get them to try it again. Usually it takes a while for them to be like, Oh, let me come and try it again.

23:17

Try a different one. Exactly. Yeah, like i i Even when I got hired for that event way back when it's like, it was free. So I was like, Okay, I'll try it. You know, but I hadn't bought a bottle yet. So yeah, it takes some convincing for sure. But the taste goes a long way. Yeah, I

23:35

agree. Kevin, thank you so much for your time I don't want to take up too much more of it. I know you're super busy over there. But I'd love to give you an opportunity to tell everyone more about where they can find you and of course more about healthy

23:48

awesome yeah healthy still making the best tasting and highest quality kombucha you can buy we're based in Southern California so you know you'll see us here more than anywhere else and you can find us on Instagram at health aide Twitter at drink healthy facebook.com/healthaide. By all means reach out you can send us a message on any of these channels you can ask for me directly if you have thoughts on this show or you know questions about anything that came up with Android me today. Yeah, and you know, that's pretty much it happy happy to join you for this conversation and share a little bit more about the health aid background and econ specifically and hope to connect again soon.

24:34

Perfect, appreciate Bye. Thanks for being on the show. Everyone who tuned in of course thank you as well please make sure you do the usual rate review subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer or head over to theecommshow.com and check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, I will see you all next time.

24:51

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