A Quiz-Powered Approach to Email Marketing

In this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn from an entrepreneur who built a custom quiz to learn more about her customers and grow her email list. Bethany McDaniel is the founder of Primally Pure: an all-natural, 100% non-toxic skincare line offering safe and effective products.

Quizzes range from not-so-fun classroom assessments to fun and frivolous distractions on social media.

For an ecommerce business, however, quizzes are a useful tool for recommending products to customers, understanding their tastes, and building your email list.

In this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn from an entrepreneur who built a custom quiz to learn more about her customers and grow her email list.

Bethany McDaniel is the founder of Primally Pure: an all-natural, 100% non-toxic skincare line offering safe and effective products.

You enter your email to see your results and it takes you to a landing page with your results. We also have an email sequence set up for each one.

Tune in to learn

• How to make sure your brand’s messaging is crystal clear
• What specific questions to ask when getting product feedback
• Why you want to find an influencer who has a blog instead of just a social media profile

Listen to the podcast below (or download it for later):

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Show Notes

• Store: Primally Pure
• Social Profiles: Facebook, Instagram
• Recommendations: Google Sheets, Interact Quiz Builder, Refersion (Shopfy App), Bold Recurring Orders (Shopify app), Ultimate Special Offers (Shopify app)

Transcript

Felix: Today I’m joined by Bethany McDaniel from Primally Pure. Primally Pure is an all natural, 100% non-toxic skincare line offering safe and effective products, started in 2012 and based Temecula, California. Welcome, Bethany.

Bethany: Hey, Felix. Thanks for having me on.

Felix: Yeah, excited to have you on. Tell us about where the idea behind this business came from?

Bethany: Yeah, it actually started a few years before I began the company and my husband and his family just out of nowhere started a natural beyond organic livestock farm. They were just trying to figure out how to raise chickens, cows, lamb, pork in the most healthful, humane, responsible way possible and they were reading all kinds of books and watching YouTube videos and just learning as much as they could. No one in their family has a farming background. They just did this on a whim and so along with that, our whole family, my husband has a really big family and we all got on this natural living kick.

We started cleaning up our diets and what we were eating and then the next step for me was looking at the products I was using and just evaluating whether or not I should continue using these just conventional products I used my entire life from the drugstore or if I should be looking into other options. I started just making super simple [swaps 00:02:21]. I was using coconut oil as a moisturizer. Instead of deodorant I was using coconut oil mixed with baking soda and I would put them in little honey jars like that you get from restaurants. I saved some of those and would put coconut oil in one, baking soda in one and I would just dab them on my armpits in the morning.

I was trying to get my husband to do the same thing and adapt the same method and he wasn’t crazy about the idea of touching his armpits and dabbing things on and all that. He’s like, “No, I’m not going to do that.” I decided I had to try to figure out how to put that in a stick form. That’s what got me going and why I started formulating products. It was just a fun hobby for me and I really wanted my husband to start using natural deodorant and I just thought I would give it a go.

Felix: What’s your background? How did you know how to create these kind of products?

Bethany: Oh man, I mean, I don’t have the background in chemistry or anything like that. I actually majored in communications and minored in creative writing in college. Got a job writing for a magazine shortly after I graduated and then another job working for Special Olympics after that. Pretty random. I didn’t have any background in this thing but the experience that I had in writing and communications and all of that has definitely helped with starting and growing a business.

Felix: What about the brand name? How did you guys come up with that?

Bethany: My husband’s farm name is Primal Pastures, so I still remember we’re all sitting around I think it was on Easter one year and we were brainstorming names for the farm all 20 of us. Just my brother-in-law was on GoDaddy searching to see if different domain names were available and we landed on Primal Pastures. Then when I started formulating these products, I was involved with our family farm at the time. Let me back up a little bit. When my family started that farm shortly after my husband and I got married and it was just a small hobby farm to begin with so Jeff and I had moved to Arizona. We had job offers out there, to Arizona from California and then so we were working at our jobs.

He was a teacher. I was working at Special Olympics. We were getting to the point with the farm where it was just growing and becoming a real business and we were driving back and forth so often that eventually we just decided to quit our jobs and move back to California to really try to get this farm off the ground. The farm was really the basis for everything. I mean, I was writing blog post for the farm. I was just in the circle of influencers that the farm was working with and communicating with them regularly. I wanted the skincare products to be super connected with the farm because I never really intended for it to become a big business of its own. I was just going to start selling them on the farm’s website. With that in mind, I wanted it to be super connected and Primally Pure is what we landed on.

Felix: Got it. You wanted to first just start selling them on the farm’s website. Was there an inflection point where you realize that this is going to become possibly bigger than the farm and actually should be its own business?

Bethany: Yeah, in the very beginning I didn’t even plan on selling them at all. I was just totally doing it as a hobby and eventually after we quit our jobs and moved to California we were all living in a house together like my husband and I, his parents, his sister and her husband and their son, and then his other sister. We’re all living together in this house and it was not a big house. I mean, we all quit our jobs and just didn’t have a lot of money. Jeff at the time was like, “Okay, you need to start selling these products that you’re making and earning a little bit of an income.” He was like, “I want you to have the goal of bringing in $500 a month.”

I thought he was crazy. I thought that there was no way that anyone, that that many people would want to buy these products. He eventually pushed me enough that I started selling them on the website and was super surprised to find that people actually were interested in them and wanted to buy them. Then I just started running with it. I started selling on my website in February of 2012 and then in I think July of 2012 is when I moved everything over to a new website just for Primally Pure.

Felix: You said that you are just doing it as a hobby and then you had this goal, those goal are set for you to try to hit the $500 a month. At that time you’re just, “Okay, now I got to try to take this more seriously.” What changes did you actively make so that you could work towards this $500 a month goal?

Bethany: I mean the $500 a month goal happened the first week I started selling products in the farm website. I think right away I was like, “Okay, people are interested in this.” I just thought for me of like I don’t know, how do I want to move forward with this, do I want to really push it. I don’t know, it’s really been three and a half years now of just flying by the seat of my pants and trying to grow this business and keep up and get ahead and all of that. In the very beginning I was really excited by the response and it just made me want to work even harder as those sales started coming in.

I was just reinvesting everything back into the business and was able to save up enough to rebrand because in the very beginning, one of my friends that just done labels just kind of really quickly for us which was great to get us off the ground but once I realized that this was actually working I just started thinking more creatively and just strategically about what I really wanted the brand to be and the aesthetic I want it to have and all of that stuff.

Felix: This might be a bit ignorant on my part but I wouldn’t initially imagine that there’s that much overlap between a farm website and a skincare brand. Were you surprised by this? What was the overlap?

Bethany: I think the overlap was the facts that our farm customers are truly the people that care about their health so much like they had to really seek out Primal Pastures. They were on the hunt for a place that they could trust to buy their meat from. These are people that are willing to pay a premium price for health and they really care about their health. I think just because of that it was such a good fit. We use tallow from grass-fed cows in our skincare products. Tallow is made from the suet of the animal, the fat of the cow which is something that our ancestors have used for generations but just isn’t used as much any more. It’s making a comeback now but it’s really good for the skin, super, super nourishing and it goes along with our whole nose to tail philosophy of just using every part of the animal. I was actually using tallow from our farm. I was rendering it myself and using that in some of our products. That was another tie-in.

Felix: Got it. Now, do you remember at that time how much traffic you were getting to the farm website?

Bethany: I have no idea. That would be an interesting, interesting to know.

Felix: Yeah, it must be a good amount to have that, again that overlap plus the $500 a month so once that started to happen and you realized that there was demand for this product, you mentioned that you were reinvesting back into the business. You said that the first thing you did was to save up or one of the main things you do is save up to rebrand. What was involved in this rebranding process?

Bethany: I’m still thankful to my sister-in-law who really nudged me to rebrand because she has really good taste and had some really key insights into just what the look of the brand should be and all that over the years. She really pushed me to do that. I actually found a marketing design agency randomly through a blogger’s website who I was following. I was just looking at a lot of different websites at the time at the bottom to see who design the website because I wanted to redo our website as well.

I was making a bunch of different calls and I had called this agency and they’re a husband wife duo from Ohio but they actually happened to be the day after I called them they were like going to be driving up from San Diego to L.A. and our farm is in the middle of San Diego and L.A. so they ended up stopping by and we totally hit it off. We did entered into a partnership with them for this rebrand and we still work with them on an ongoing basis all the time today. It’s super, super lucky find.

Felix: What comes with, in your case, what came with the rebranding? It sound like a website redesign and the label. What else was involved?

Bethany: A total website redesign because I think at that point I was starting to create our new store on my own on Shopify but once I started and then I was selling from it but I didn’t revamp it until we had started working with them which started in August I think. They redid our whole website. Ally, she designed completely, completely new products labels for us and she’s an amazing photographer as well so she photographed all the products and just helped us set up a whole new aesthetic for the brand.

Felix: Now, if someone out there wants to launch a business, they didn’t take too much time thinking about the brand at first but now they have the time to go back and say, “Okay, let’s relay a foundation and recreate the brand.” What’s your involvement when you work with an agency like this? How do you make sure that your direction or your voice, your messaging that you want to put out there is communicated correctly through the brand?

Bethany: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s just important to figure out what the agency’s process is that you’re choosing like the agency I work with I really liked … They walked me through the process in our initial meeting so that was really helpful for me. They had a questionnaire that I filled out and then I had another call with them where I just in detail told them what I was looking for. I think I set up a Pinterest board so that they could see some of the ideas I had already and then Ally went back and just concept it like she came up with three concepts.

Then over a Skype call presented them to me and then during that call is like I don’t know, I think it was a three hour call. We just refined these concepts until we have one that we loved. We worked together and made tweaks and adjustments until we were super happy with it. I loved that because it would have been so difficult to go back and for, back and forth over email for days and weeks figuring out exactly what the look is that we wanted to achieve.

Felix: She was redesigning things live as she was getting feedback from you?

Bethany: Yeah, I was like just staring at the screen as she was making tweaks. It was a long process but I think it was short and painless compared to what it would have been if we would have just done it all over email.

Felix: Yeah, now that you say that, it does make a lot of sense that that’s the way it probably should be done where you sit down altogether and go through it and reduce the lag time going back and forth.

Bethany: Yeah, totally.

Felix: When it comes to the brand, is this something you have to constantly keep changing, keep an eye on, or something that you can just create once and then not have to necessarily worry about it for a couple of years? What’s the approach that’s been working for you guys?

Bethany: I think that once you get a foundation that you’re super happy with, you can just make small tweaks and refine over time. That’s something that’s really hard to have a good grasp of and really be creative and brainstorm with when you’re just so deep into the day to day stuff. Whenever I have the chance to get away from work or go on a trip or something, that’s when those creative wheel start turning for me and when I can take a step back and evaluate our brand and the look of our brand and what changes I might want to make going forward. Ever since we did the big rebrand I haven’t made any major overhauls to the look of our brand.

We taken new website photos. We redid our blog because we hadn’t gone all out in our blog to begin with. I mean, those were all minor things. We’ve made a few minor tweaks on the spacing of certain things on our labels but other than that, nothing big. I think I can see this happening that as we continue to grow and as the years continue to go by, I think there’s just going to be less and less that we have to change because we’ve already done a lot of that leg work.

Felix: What are some things that you’ve learned during this process to make sure that your brand is crystal clear in your customer’s mind whether it mean specific things that you’re doing on the website, specific things that you are placing on the label. What have you learned about that? Of making sure that the messaging comes through clearly.

Bethany: We just try to be so consistent with what we’re putting out there. Like I said, we still work with this agency so they design a lot of things for us. They design emails for us that we send out to our list. They design graphics for Instagram. Just all kinds of things so I mean, to some people it might seem like we go a little bit overboard and do too much design. We discount probably do less and send out just plain text emails every once in a while but I feel like our customers they just come to expect that from us that we’re going to be sending out really branded, nice looking things. We just try to keep it consistent as much as possible and like you said, just for the purpose of being easily recognized. I just always like the idea of if someone sees something of ours, a product or a photo just for it to be so evident that that’s Primally Pure.

Felix: You would be willing to hold off or move slower essentially when it comes to sending out communication through email or social media or on your website to first make sure it’s on brand. You rather have an on brand than to be I guess turning things out quickly?

Bethany: Yeah, I think in the beginning I was held back by that a little bit more because I didn’t have things as planned out so if we wanted to send something like one day I got an idea and wanted to send something out, I would have to first get that designed and then send it out. If it was something really important I would still just send it out in a plain text email but now we’ve created a launch calendar for the year. We’re pretty well planned out in terms of everything that we’ll be sending out in any given month to our email list. Any giveaways we’ll be hosting and just big pushes, big focus pushes for each month so yeah, it’s gotten better now that we’ve been planning ahead a little bit more.

Felix: Yeah, I think that that’s important. Now you have these templates in place, you know what you need to have in place to meet these deadlines that you set up in the calendar. Can you talk a little bit about this calendar that you’ve created? Is it for product launches or content launches? What are you including in your calendar?

Bethany: Yeah, I mean it’s great. It’s been a life saver. We’ve only been using it for maybe four, five months now but it’s been awesome. We actually had a girl from an outside agency create it for us who comes from a more corporate background but she did an awesome job and I’m so grateful because I wouldn’t have been able to come up with that on my own. It’s just in Google Sheets. We used Google Sheets a lot and it’s for product launches or if we’re relaunching a product in new packaging or if we’re just doing a promo during that month. Sometimes there’s more than one thing going on at a time but it lays out the big pushes and then if you click on each one it takes you to a separate spreadsheet with a 360 degree campaign for that launch. That list out each team members’ part in that launch and then we cross things out as we get them done so it list out what each team member is responsible for, when it has to be done by, and then we just cross off as we go.

Felix: It sounds like it goes pretty in depth, this calendar with checklist and you’ve mentioned a 360 campaign. What is that? What’s involved in a product launch?

Bethany: In a product launch I mean I think the very first thing is I’m still developing the products. I have a holistic aesthetician on my team now who helps with some of that. We’re still doing all the product development in house so that’s the very first thing is just deciding on ingredients and the recipe, testing it out, getting feedback, making tweaks until we have a final recipe that we’re comfortable with. Then doing the first run of it. We usually do a ton of test runs but the first real run and then sending mailers out to our affiliates or other influencers and media, deciding on what packaging we’re going to use for the mailers.

Creating graphics for newsletters that we’ll send out about that new product, creating Instastory graphics. Just ensuring that we have all of the packaging requirements that we need for that new product and ingredients, that kind of stuff. Then, what we’re going to send out to our affiliates so that they can share that product with their audiences.

Felix: Before this calendar, were you just flying by the seat of your pants and just trying to put altogether as you’re going?

Bethany: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was crazy.

Felix: Where does the idea for a new product originate from? How does that even begin the process of even before you create the calendar? Where does the idea of new product launch come from?

Bethany: You know what, it used to always come from like when I would go on a trip like I was saying earlier that’s when I’m feeling the most apart from the day to day stuff and I can really be creative and think creatively. I still remember I was on the beach in Mexico drinking a mojito and thought that it would be great to create a mojito scent of something and we have a mojito beard oil now that’s made of lime, essential oil and peppermint essential oil but just different experiences and things like that will always get my wheels turning. Then more recently I think a lot of our team members have had really great ideas that I’ve used and developed into products based on different thoughts and ideas that they’ve had but yeah, it can come from all sorts of things.

Felix: Do you have any validation or market testing before getting the wheels to actually start turning and putting this product into place?

Bethany: Our market testing is really just with all of us on our team, our families, our friends, our community, and we do little focus groups. Sometimes we will bring a whole bunch of people in and have them try different scents and just get that on the fly like first reaction type of feedback which is super helpful and then we always just send out a lot of products and let people try it for a longer term and then get feedback after that.

Felix: This looks some kind of like panel of customers.

Bethany: Yeah, a very like hodgepodge panel of people that we know. It’s like those are the first people that we turn to because we are our target audience and our friends are our target audience and our family members oftentimes are our target audience. We know that the people that we’re having test these products are the people that would be buying them like a 100%.

Felix: What do you want to see or hear from the panel that makes you say, “Yes, this is a product that we should definitely move forward with”?

Bethany: I think if any time that people come back and start asking, “I ran out. When are you going to start selling it? I really need to keep using it.” Anytime that happens then I know that that’s a good thing or when people just kind of text or post without just that they’ve been trying it and loving it. That’s always a good sign but we actively seek out their feedback also and are always following up and asking for their honest feedback.

Felix: Are there specific questions that you always want to ask for whenever you are working on a new product?

Bethany: Yeah, I mean I think just getting a feel for what they think of the texture or consistency of the product, how the product smells, and how the product works are probably the three biggest things.

Felix: Got it. What about the opposite of this. Are there any red flags or things that you’re looking out for that will make you decide this is not a direction we want to go in?

Bethany: Yeah, it’s interesting because I mean we work with only essential oils to scent our products. We don’t use any fragrances or anything like that so essential oils obviously they’re natural substances. They’re not the chemically smell that a lot of us are used to so I think that it takes some time for people to adapt to essential oils and there’s some essential oils that’s just across the board everyone loves and there are some that people especially if you’re used to using products that contain fragrance just they turn their noses off that. I want to pick essential oils based on efficacy but I also want to stray away from using the ones that just wouldn’t appeal to broad audience. That’s where just getting that initial reaction of like, “Ohh,” or like, “Yeah, I love that.” It’s so helpful whenever we actually bring people in to have them try it in front of us and see what they think.

Felix: You mentioned that you also in your release calendar you also look for affiliates and influencers and the media and make sure that they are able to get their hands on the products as well. Based on your experience, how far ahead of time do you try to get the products out to them to make sure that their opinions or there are articles or that the press is ready to write about it when you do a release?

Bethany: Yeah, we’ve sent things out as far as a month or so in advance if the situation is right but usually when we do our larger mailings it will be a week or so before the product is released just because we don’t want a lot of people posting about it and then a month to go by and for our consumers to forget about it. Then all of a sudden it’s launched but no one really remembers that they were waiting for it. We always want to just drum up excitement in the week or so before the launch and then put it out there so that people can just buy it right away.

Felix: Makes sense. Where did you find these influencers and affiliates?

Bethany: That’s really how Primally Pure has grown primarily, I mean we didn’t do any paid advertising for the first two and a half years we’re in business. We were just working or just getting customers through word of mouth and then just working with influencers, sending them product and a lot of times they would post about it and we would see really good results from that. Then, when the Instagram algorithm started changing, that just dropped off a little bit so now we’re doing more with Facebook ads and we’ve had an affiliate program where we pay a commission based on sales that the influencer refers which has done great. Now we’re just engaging in a few more paid sponsorships as well with different influencers like flat rate paid sponsorships.

Felix: Are these mostly through Instagram or other channels at this point?

Bethany: Mostly Instagram and then we work with influencers. We like to work with influencers that have a blog as well as an Instagram account that they’re consistent with but a lot of them are just Instagram as well.

Felix: Why is that important to do? Why is the blog important?

Bethany: I like blog posts especially if it’s a reputable blog that people are consistently visiting just because that content lives there forever and it’s always linking back to our site so we’ve had some influencers years ago that posted about us that we’re still getting traffic from. I think anyone that has had a blog for a long time that they’re consistent with and who has a community that’s consistently engaging with their blog that’s always amazing.

Felix: Yeah, I think you definitely would know this where they are great influencers and the influencers that appear to be great and one of the keys that you look for is that blog and that there’s a community around that blog. Are there other things that you look for to identify whether influencer is going to be a good fit and actually will end up driving customers to you?

Bethany: Yeah, we spend a lot of time on this because I mean influencer marketing is just a huge part of how our business has grown and continuous to be a huge part of it. We spend a lot of time just vetting people and deciding who we want to bring in and bring into our community but we look for, I mean following we look at that but that’s definitely not the end all be all. We look at engagement, we kind of just think about like is this someone that we would personally want to follow or are we actually interested in what they’re putting out there for the world to see, do we think that our community would also be interested in what they’re putting out there.

Just kind of the quality of content that they’re providing I guess. Are they engaging in authentic way? Do they seem authentic? That’s just a huge thing for us like are they a trustworthy person? Are they likable? Are they really connecting in a meaningful way with their community? That’s huge and then when looking at new influencers now we like to see if they’re already promoting other brands because not all influencers do. If we see that they’re working with other brands and if those brands are kind of inline with our values then it’s just usually a slam dunk.

Felix: Got it. What do you consider an account that has a great engagement? What are you looking at? Is it the likes, is it the comments or is there a certain ratio that you even look at?

Bethany: Yeah, we don’t get super technical with it but we just like to see that if their engagement matches up with their following, I mean sometimes we’ll get emails from accounts that have like hundreds of thousands of followers but if you look in their comments I mean maybe they have 20 comments on a picture but they’re all spam comments.

Felix: I see, you’re looking to just make sure they’re not fake followers or accounts of fake followers?

Bethany: Exactly, yeah.

Felix: How many influencers do you or affiliates that you work with today?

Bethany: We have 175 affiliates right now.

Felix: That’s not a small amount. How do you make sure that you manage the relationship with 175 affiliates?

Bethany: We used to use an affiliate program called Idev and I was the one managing that. We only had about 48 affiliates in the system at that time and I didn’t have the capacity to work with anymore so I just kind of kept it small but it was a huge chunk of our sales so I knew we had to grow it. Just a few months ago we hired on a new gal who’s completely taken over our affiliate program, we moved it to another platform called Refersion and it integrate so well with Shopify so we love it. Her main priority, responsibility of her job is just to seek out new affiliates and to work with our existing affiliates and try to help them grow their affiliate businesses with us.

Felix: Got it. Now, you mentioned that due to changes in algorithm, Instagram influencers still a big part of your marketing and sales channel but you now want to supplement it with Facebook ads. Can you tell us a little bit about your strategy there?

Bethany: Yeah, we, like you said have been just primarily growing through influencers not paying for anything and with Facebook ads we’ve really been able to continue on with our growth the same sort of growth we had been seeing in the past but we just have a to pay a little bit for it now. For that, the agency we work with is really great, we don’t have to do a whole lot ourselves so we’re not really digging in to Facebook ads and working with it a ton but they just give us tips on what photos are doing really well. They like to turn just our existing post into ads, the ones that are performing well. I just meet with them a few times a month and get their insights on what types of photos and what types of captions perform the best when they’re turned into ads and then we just try to do more of that.

Felix: Based on your experience is there a rule of thumb that you’re now following to make sure that there are certain types of photos that you’re producing that tend to do better than others?

Bethany: Yeah, any photos of our team tend to do really well. I think that that just helps to build trust with people when we show photos of us making the product because that’s pretty rare for a skincare company to continue to make all their products in house. It’s just not something that we’re willing to outsource and possibly compromise quality. Just seeing photos of our team in action, making products with our story, our brand store being told that kind of stuff does really well. Actually, our guy was saying how our photos with a girl smiling holding our product always do really well.

Felix: They’re the same thing.

Bethany: Really? That’s funny. We try to post that kind of thing here and there too as much as we can but yeah, I think those are the main things.

Felix: Got it. I’ll talk a little bit about the way that you are able to price your products, I think looking at the catalog, the price range from $4 up to about $48. What’s the thought process or how do you determine when you’re about to release a new product, how do you determine like what is the right price point offer at that?

Bethany: Yeah, we just kind of look at some of the competition, we believe that the products we create are of higher quality than a lot of our competitors especially in the natural deodorant space just because we use all organic ingredients, certified organic ingredients, we really, truly don’t cut any corners. Because of that our cost is a little bit higher and I also think that our customers understand that. We were a little bit higher when it comes to especially our natural deodorant. Then with everything else we just kind of look at the numbers on what we have to price to that in order for it to make sense for us to sell and don’t go higher than we need to but just kind of what is going to allow us to continue to be in business and sell this this product in a way that makes sense for us.

Felix: Because there are those values that you want to make sure that you keep to which obviously will drive the cost of the product. How do you make sure that you’re communicating that to your customers so they understand why there might be a more premium pricing on your products versus something they can buy in a random store?

Bethany: Yeah, I think we try to talk about that a lot over Instagram just what sets us apart. We have a blog connected to our store that we just try to educate our customers a little bit more in depth on and not in a salesy way and not really super focused around our products but within whatever topic we’re writing about. We also try to tie in that this products that we sell that maybe is a better alternative than this one that you might be using is better because of X, Y and Z and then we just kind of try to lay it out that way. Yeah, we’re not super in your face about it but we just try to take different angles on educating customers about what sets us apart through Instagram, product descriptions, blogs, stories, all that kind of stuff.

Felix: The values change overtime as you’ve gone to learn more about your customers or have you stuck to the same values from the beginning?

Bethany: Yeah, our values, I mean have not changed at all, the only time we’ll use a non-organic ingredient is when the organic ingredient is no longer available or if we can’t source it at the amount that we need to in order to fill a product. I mean in that case we’re always transparent about it and we won’t ever obviously mark anything as organic that’s not but we always will choose the organic ingredient over conventional if it’s available and that’s just something that will never change about us.

Felix: When you are sitting down to or at least initially to redesign the website, were there certain things that you wanted to make sure was included on the website or certain pages that you definitely wanted to include? What was the thought process when you sat down to create your store or website?

Bethany: I think in the very beginning we just wanted it to look a lot nicer and I wanted the product pages just to be super clear and to the point and not have a ton of distractions like a ton of like random buttons or just weird like random bits of information for it to just be really clear, really simple and that was kind of the goal in the beginning. As we’ve gone along we actually just added a page to our site all about our deodorant because that’s something that I do just want to educate people on as to why our deodorant is different because it is more expensive but like I was saying earlier, we truly believe that’s the best option out there.

We created a landing page just solely about our deodorant, we even have a comparison chart on it that compares it to other leading natural deodorant brands and kind of just outlines the categories that ours really exceeds the competition in and that was really fun to create. I think it’s awesome anytime you really want to get a point across to create a separate landing page just for that purpose and it’s great to drive ads to as well. We drive a lot of deodorant ads to this page because there are shop links from here and there’s links to other blog post with even more information from here but it’s just a great central location for everything deodorant related to live.

Felix: Yeah, I also like the feature or the page on your site, the deodorant quiz that they can take. Tell us how this quiz helps you, it looks like it’s helping to build your email list but tell the audience if they, obviously they can’t see it right now but tell us how this quiz works.

Bethany: Yeah, the quiz I’ve been really excited about the quiz, it’s been great for us . It’s just kind of a fun way for people to figure out which of our deodorants is the best fit for their lifestyle. You started in and it kind of ask you, it’s only six or seven questions but it asks you kind of silly things like, “Would you rather be gallivanting through a meadow, working out, relaxing at a SPA or going shopping or like your theme song is X, Y or Z,” just kind of fun questions about your interest and hobbies and then based on that we kind of created these personas for each deodorant of what we think each deodorant would be like if that deodorant was like attached to a person and you get your results and then you enter your email to see your results and it takes you to a landing page with your results.

Then we also have an email sequence set up for each one and everyone that takes the quiz we just try to serve them with information on what to expect when switching to natural deodorant, why switch to natural deodorant, reviews and feedback on our natural natural deodorants and just connecting them with other people that have tried it and what they liked about it. That’s been awesome, that’s just really cool to know that that’s just kind of running and people are taking it as they visit our website and are just kind of being served with all this information because it is a topic that people tend to have so many questions about.

Felix: Yeah, do you know the conversion rate for the email sign up with the quiz the way that you’ve created it?

Bethany: That’s a good question. I know like the amount of money that we’ve brought in from each person that has gone through and taken it it’s like not a ton it’s like less than a dollar per person but we had quite a few people go through it and those are just the people that have clicked on the links and bought right away.

Felix: Got it. What kind of software or application that you used to create this?

Bethany: We used a website called Interact, I think the website is like tryinteract.com and it just integrates, I think you just have to enter some code into Shopify to get it to be embedded into your site. If you don’t want to do that, you can just link it to the Interact page quiz page and it’ll just take people from your site over to their site to take the quiz. We kind of like the idea of having it be embedded and just be a super seamless experience.

Felix: Do you use any other applications on the website, on the store website?

Bethany: We use Refersion so that is a plugin is that the same thing?

Felix: Yes.

Bethany: Yeah, that has been great for our affiliate program we use the Bold Recurring Orders plugin because we have a deodorant subscription program so that one has been awesome, we just launched that a few months ago. Those are the bigger ones that we use. We also use one called Ultimate Special Offers for whenever we’re doing a promotion and that one is actually pretty cool. I don’t know, it’s very like well known but it’s been great, we’ve been using it for years and it just allows you to create promos like, “Spend $75 and get a free lemongrass deodorant,” and it’ll just automatically have that added to someone’s cart once they reach the $75 limit and when they’re close to it it’ll say, “Spend X amount more to get a free lemongrass deodorant,” and that one always does great for us whenever we do promos.

Felix: Yeah, you’re actually the second store owner I heard in a row that mentioned this application.

Bethany: Really?

Felix: It might be new or something, I don’t know.

Bethany: That was funny.

Felix: It definitely sounds like a great addition to try to drive with that average order value, that was card value.

Bethany: Yeah, I love it.

Felix: That makes a lot of sense. For anyone that wants to check out the quiz which I highly recommend. I don’t see [inaudible 00:46:08] doing this and it’s like front and center on the website too, I think it’s a great way to get customers into your funnel and get them to learn more value. Go to primallypure.com, P-R-I-M-A-L-L-Y-P-U-R-E.com. Thank you so much for your time Bethany. What kind of other products, what kind of other releases can you tell us about that the audience can look forward to?

Bethany: We’re actually coming out with a new deodorant next month, it’s going to be a blue tansy deodorant, it has a light blue tint to it but we are super excited about it. It’s anti-inflammatory so it’s great for anyone that experiences irritation in the underarm area and it smells really, really nice.

Felix: Awesome, again thank you so much for your time, Bethany.

Bethany: Thanks, Felix.

Felix: Here’s a sneak peek for what’s in store the next Shopify Masters episode.

Speaker 3: Having some popular products fell out every now and then, people realize like, “Oh I should have got that one,” it creates a type of demand.

Felix: Thanks for listening to Shopify Masters, the ecommerce marketing podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs. To start your store today, visit Shopify.com/masters to claim your extended 30 day free trial. Also for this episode show notes head over to Shopify.com/blog.

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