Lessons Learned From Online Retailer Melaleuca.com That Appeal to Health-Conscious Shoppers

In the world of big business e-commerce websites, few stand out like Melaleuca.com. It plays to rave reviews from its shopping club members, and its technological features and brilliant UI put it years ahead of other websites in the wellness products industry, where Melaleuca: The Wellness Company does the majority of its business.

Leading up to the site's relaunch mid-2021, Melaleuca made substantial investments in both technology infrastructure and a digital experience platform. These meaningful long-term changes have positioned this health products manufacturer and online retailer to keep pace with the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape. As a result, Melaleuca.com now offers its online shoppers a highly personalized customer experience in a convenient, deeply educational manner. And it's resonating with its users.

Melaleuca.com receives more than 2.5 million visits every month from both current shopping club members and from general consumers interested in learning more about the company, its U.S.-based manufacturing facilities and its unique product line. This ranks it as one of the largest e-commerce websites in North America based on annual revenues.

Melaleuca.com Sitecore Implementation

From a technological standpoint, Melaleuca invested millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours to improve infrastructure and back-end services, allowing Melaleuca.com to integrate with best-in-class technologies.

Knowing that online shopping would only get more competitive, Melaleuca took the plunge by implementing Sitecore, widely regarded as the world's leading .NET content management system, according to analyst groups Gartner and Forrester. This initiative has unified data, analytics, content, e-commerce and the entire customer experience.  

In conjunction with this extensive development process, Melaleuca also completely redesigned its shopping experience. The process started with rigorous research, iterative testing and full-scale usability studies. This all eventually led to a broad expansion of the site's marketing-automation capabilities, including the introduction of a series of new customer-centric shopping tools.

Who Is Melaleuca: The Wellness Company?

There's a good chance you've never heard of Melaleuca before. And if you have, it was likely a friend or neighbor who introduced the company in passing. That's by design. The direct-to-consumer company has firmly rejected traditional marketing strategies since its beginning, favoring a word-of-mouth model instead. By all accounts, this method has driven impressive growth. Founded in 1985, Melaleuca generates over $2 billion in annual revenues worldwide. The privately held, Idaho-based company is a manufacturer and online retailer of over 400 health and wellness products with approximately 2 million shoppers making purchases every month. The company's exclusive products include dietary supplements, nutrition, home cleaners, personal care, cosmetics, skin care and more. As the largest online wellness shopping club, Melaleuca ships customers' orders directly to their doorsteps.

Melaleuca products compete directly with the familiar, major consumer packaged goods brands sold in grocery stores. However, because Melaleuca products are not available in stores, Melaleuca uses Melaleuca.com as both its online shopping portal and an education center designed to explain why its products are superior to the competition.

Melaleuca.com Offers Shoppers Far More Than the Minimum

Almost every business today provides a website where consumers can readily purchase its products. In the consumer packaged goods space, many of these sites provide a smattering of standard product information, like marketing copy, retail price, label deck and ingredients. That's exactly what you'll see from big national online retailers. Generally, these sites provide a minimum of product background and almost never include more robust product information, like the scientific mechanisms of action, where ingredients are sourced, whether the product has been evaluated in performance tests the results of those tests, or the specific manufacturing processes used.

Shoppers can reasonably conclude that these companies don't provide such information because the details are less than appealing or because the companies simply haven't subjected their products to the kind of rigorous testing many expect. If they have, they're unwilling to share the results. Either way, the lack of transparency is an increasingly negative friction point for consumers.

Melaleuca.com Is a Different Kind of Online Store

Melaleuca hinged its massive website makeover on the theory that a well-informed consumer will always make the right choice. That's why Melaleuca created one of the most informative, data-rich websites on the web. Melaleuca.com is a vast compendium of everything shoppers want to know about Melaleuca products. Behind the customer login, Melaleuca Members can find test results, product philosophy, ingredient sources, methods of action, how-to-use information, explainer videos, customer experiences, helpful tips and more.

Beyond the expanded content, the new shopping experience at Melaleuca.com facilitated by the Sitecore implementation presents a range of future opportunities. Given Melaleuca's high repeat order rate of its customers, Melaleuca.com now customizes website journeys based on the shopper's interests, purchase history, website browsing behavior and shopping club tenure.

Using robust digital analytics tools, Melaleuca's digital marketers are now gaining valuable consumer insights. With this data, Melaleuca.com can anticipate customer needs and proactively display relevant content and offers that speak directly to a customer's current needs. Shopper reaction so far has been overwhelmingly positive. And Melaleuca says this is only the beginning. The company plans to continue leveraging its new digital marketing infrastructure to delight customers with an engaging shopping experience that improves with every visit.

Educated Shoppers Become Melaleuca's Most Loyal Customers

If we take a closer look at the section of Melaleuca.com dedicated to one of Melaleuca's jaw-dropping products, MelaPower® 9x Laundry Detergent, we see a web page filled with useful information. For instance, shoppers quickly learn that this product is ultraconcentrated and has contributed to saving millions of pounds of plastic and tens of millions of gallons of fuel and greenhouse gases. They also discover that the product is powered by naturally derived stain removers, employs three separate natural enzymes to clean laundry and uses only fragrances that meet Melaleuca's Safe Scent® standard. Shoppers learn that, unlike national brand detergents, MelaPower doesn't rely on caustic ingredients like chlorine bleach, formaldehyde, phthalates or parabens. They discover that, because of its unique action, MelaPower performs just as well in cold water as it does warm and hot, which could save customers up to $216 per year by doing more laundry in cold water. And shoppers learn that because MelaPower isn't full of unnecessary fillers like grocery store brands, it costs far less per use than brands like Tide®, Method® and Grove®. Product knowledge like this leads to engaged and loyal customers.

If members visit the Learn to Earn library on Melaleuca.com, they find a library of more than 70 short videos that further educate customers about multiple Melaleuca products, including MelaPower 9x.

The area of the website dedicated to dietary supplements goes into great depth on the research and science behind Melaleuca's one-of-a-kind Peak Performance Nutrition Pack. Four separate clinical studies were conducted on this collection of innovative dietary supplements and the truly impressive results of those studies are summarized there.

There are embedded videos available to view and a review of each individual supplement in the Pack, what it does and how it works. Melaleuca content developers expertly lay out this powerful, detailed data so an informed, wise shopping decision can result. This page also points back to the extensive Learn to Earn library, which contains numerous videos providing easy-to-understand content about the development and testing of the Peak Performance Pack.

Melaleuca.com Is Evidence That Telling the Story Behind Wellness Products Is Paramount

For today's consumer, this simple yet transparent, holistic approach to telling the full story behind every product distinguishes Melaleuca.com from other e-commerce sites. Consumers report they find value in learning about the following:

• How Melaleuca products work

• How safe and effective they are

• How they compare to the competition

• What great value they offer

Melaleuca.com is a beacon for those who are seeking better, safer, more effective solutions for their health and wellness. And because the company markets via word of mouth, the additional information even casual shoppers are exposed to allows for informed, authentic product recommendations from its users. Melaleuca says it's proud to offer a vast array of wellness products that truly enhance the lives of its customers every day.