Is iHerb in a Healthy Relationship With Customers?

We looked closely at the health and wellness brand’s customer relationship strategy. Can you guess how the brand scores against other wellness brands?

Adebisi Adewusi

April 7, 2022

iHerb is an eCommerce platform that offers nutritional and healthcare products to customers around the world.

Let’s see if the brand’s CRM strategy leads the pack.

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Be Transparent 10/10

iHerb shares information about its sustainability initiatives and gives us a glimpse of how it treats employees. For instance, we saw a post on Linkedin about iHerb’s effort to help its employees enhance their health, happiness, and wellbeing. The brand also gives us a peek at the people behind the brand by spotlighting its employees.

iHerb makes a decent attempt at being transparent. So they get a 10 here.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

iHerb welcomed us to their website with a lot of goodies! Here’s what we got:

60% of Vitamin D
20% of a range of products

Free shipping for orders over 20%
22% off our first order
iHerb Rewards Program gives customers Rewards Credit for actively engaging with the iHerb community
A 5% discount and free shipping for using iHerb’s Autoship and Save service

iHerb gives customers many ways to shop smart and save money. We give them a 10/10.

Be Relevant 10/10

Relevant brands set out to make the lives of their customers easier. Let’s see how iHerb does for this commandment.

iHerb has a blog that provides customers with information on beauty, wellness, nutrition, and fitness.

The brand’s Autoship and Save allows customers to shop conveniently. Customers simply pick their favorite products and the frequency of the deliveries. And iHerb makes sure the products are delivered.

iHerb has a wellness quiz to give customers personalized recommendations.

iHerb offers customers different payment methods, installment payments, and next-day delivery. iHerb gets an “A” for providing customers with useful services.

Be Helpful 10/10

iHerb contributes to making the world a better place. The brand’s charitable donations have totaled over $3.5 million between 2020 and 2021 and over $9.6 million since 2014. iHerb funds educational projects in Cambodia and recently partnered with Nike and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Redlands-Riverside to provide children with their favorite pairs of Nikes.

Realtime Personalization 4/10

At PostFunnel, we live realtime personalization! So we’re eager to see how iHerb performed here.

iHerb has a wellness quiz to help the brand make personalized recommendations. We played around with this tool to see if the product recommendations would suit our needs. Sadly, none of the products recommended to us matched our preferences.

To test iHerb’s realtime personalization capabilities, we placed a pack of Sierra Bees Sleep Time Balm Stick in our cart. iHerb didn’t personalize its HP, content, or messaging to reflect our onsite search and browsing behavior. Although iHerb showed us products we might like on the HP, we didn’t find them relevant.

There was some cross-selling and up-selling at checkout, but they weren’t relevant.

After leaving the site, no ads tailed us on social media or the internet for the item we placed in our cart.

iHerb missed opportunities to offer us realtime personalization. For example, iHerb could have used the information from the wellness quiz to offer us relevant product recommendations and content. iHerb needs to up its realtime personalization game ASAP if it wants to make more sales and build an enduring relationship with its customers.

Master UX 8/10

Poorly designed websites make shopping difficult for customers. Let’s see if iHerb’s website delivers a great UX experience.

iHerb’s website was easy to navigate. The brand’s Homepage & Category navigation is well structured and we explored the site’s categories without feeling confused.

iHerb’s product pages had reviews, ratings, and a question and answer section. So we had enough information to help us decide which product to buy. iHerb’s FAQ page is well designed and provides answers to a broad range of questions.

In all, iHerb’s website UX performance is decent but not mindblowing. We take off a few points for not seeing some website innovation and creativity.

Leverage Social Media 5/10

iHerb has a solid following on social media. The brand has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, 215k+ followers on Twitter, and more than 3 million likes on Facebook.

iHerb’s Instagram page is well curated. It’s filled with promotional posts, user-generated content, educational content, health tips, and customer reviews.

On Twitter, iHerb shares blog posts, promotional posts, and educative content. iHerb’s content on Facebook is similar to what we found on Twitter and Instagram.

iHerb uses social media well. However, its cross-posting strategy drops the brand’s social media score. We suggest the brand adopts a social media strategy for each platform.

Overall, iHerb scores 62/70 (88%). The brand falls short realtime personalization and using social media. So, the brand’s CRM isn’t in perfect shape. But iHerb has a good shot at delivering a spectacular customer experience if it adopts realtime personalized marketing.

We recommend that iHerb offers tailored product recommendations and personalized customer communication with contextual data. Find out more about how to unlock realtime personalization at scale here.

We hope iHerb implements our recommendations and take its CRM to a healthy level.