Jennifer Streiner is Life Extension’s Director of Digital Marketing, with 18+ years in B2B and B2C channels.
Life Extension has set a high standard for its supplements. Their formulas are the result of rigorous scientific research, both independent and in-house, to ensure efficacy—an exacting approach that’s cultivated a highly loyal customer base online and in stores via resellers. We spoke with Jennifer Streiner, Life Extension’s Director of Digital Marketing, on how their team leveraged experimentation when rolling out their rebrand.
The Challenge
Life Extension has always had a strong brand identity, built on a solid understanding of its customers. But internally, the company felt it was time for a refresh. While Life Extension’s core values and mission remained the same, the team felt that the branding had become slightly out of sync with their positioning. Launching a rebrand is a large undertaking with a lot at stake. While rebrands can help companies keep pace with shifting consumer needs and evolving markets, there’s always the risk that it could miss the mark and alienate loyal customers. Which is why Life Extension relied on data to launch their rebrand, not assumptions.
The Test
The majority of Life Extension’s sales are through digital channels. So, it was imperative that the new user experience was intuitive to both new and loyal customers to avoid a dip in transactions. The team set up a redirect test to gradually introduce the rebranded website to its digital audience. Since the new website consolidated, updated, or retired web pages that existed on the original, there were a lot of caveats to consider. AB Tasty’s Customer Success team worked closely with Life Extension to customize the redirect test and ensure every user had a consistent experience. The cart experience was kept the same to keep a frictionless and familiar checkout process for returning shoppers. Over the course of two weeks, traffic was incrementally increased to 100% to fully unveil the rebrand.
Image from Life Extension’s website
Results
Life Extension measured the success of the rebrand with a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. While keeping an eye on key metrics like transactions, average order value, and bounce rates, they also used the AB Tasty NPS widget to ask users how they liked the new website and how likely they were to recommend Life Extension. The team also used session recording to understand the user experience firsthand. In doing so, they spotted a few pain points that they were able to solve before the full-scale launch. This included streamlining the beta mobile menu by reordering popular sections for faster access, refining internal search results on the website, and adding supporting text to product pages where it had been missing. As Life Extension monitored the new site’s performance, they saw bounce rates decrease by 28% and average order value increase by 5%.
Takeaway Tip
Life Extension shows the value in incrementally rolling out (and testing!) large-scale changes. With the time and investment that went into this rebrand, it was imperative that Life Extension didn’t jeopardize the experience for loyal customers. By testing the new website on a smaller pool of visitors first, they were able to contain and quickly fix points of friction without any long-term negative impact. In just two weeks Life Extension was able to eliminate the unknown risks of rebranding to launch with confidence, with the data to prove their success.
