The Vitamin Shoppe

I joined The Vitamin Shoppe’s creative team to cover a four-month maternity leave for their lone copywriter.

It ended up being a great assignment, but it had quite the start.

On my first Monday, after a couple days of onboarding, I woke up to a message from my new boss that I'd be on my own due to a death in his family. So for my first full week I was the only copy-focused person on the team, picking up the brand voice and workflows as fast as I could.

Once he was back, we developed a great working relationship, I enjoyed the work I did, and I left proud of what the person I worked with every day had to say about me and my work (you can read his recommendation here).

During those four months I was the lead writer for this national wellness retailer on customer acquisition projects.

I was asked to write a bit of everything, mostly digital ads, paid social, app content and SMS/MMS, but also things like a script for a radio/podcast ad spot, OOH billboards, store signage, DTC mailers, email content, and probably a few other formats that have slipped my mind.

In terms of performance, the two most-consistent recurring campaigns I worked on were text messages and push notifications. I asked the respective marketing leads for some data to quantify how those did during the period I wrote for them:

- SMS/MMS messages went to a possible audience of 696,354, delivering a click through rate 39% higher than the competitor average benchmark and driving 22% greater web demand vs. the previous year. The average opt out rate of 0.3% was 97% lower than the competitor benchmark. We also performed more than 30 A/B tests resulting in +15% click through rate and +10% conversion rate.

- Push notifications went to a possible audience of 277,468 users and regularly beat engagement benchmarks, with top performing messages influencing as much as 21% of their audience to open the app. These pushes frequently drove more than $100,000 in direct sales, and some resulted in upwards of $350,000 direct in-app sales.

You can see some examples of the work I did below.