Holigos

Glycom created a revolutionary product and much of its success was tied to the online business, scaling dramatically and with little advertising within the span of a few years. However, with big scaling comes big challenges.

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As subscriptions compounded in growth and doctors continued to request the product for the patients, we needed to adapt the online store both for Shopify Plus and migrate a series of solutions to meet the growing demand.

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With careful consideration to keep the business and orders flowing and optimize the proficiency of the business, we determined a series of things to improve.

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Those included:

1. Migration from Bold to Recharge Pro for Subscriptions - Holigos customer base was largely built using Bold Subscriptions. Although Bold has a series of app solutions, their dashboard was confusing and limited to customize for customers. As a result, churn was higher, integrations were limited, and Bold Checkout was the method for payment.
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2. Improving the UI/UX of the eCommerce store - this included every alternative page and primary pages being redesigned. For a deeper dive into what was done scroll down to the UI/UX part to this case study :)
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3. Switch the 3PL Fulfillment partner from Amazon Fulfillment to Shipbob - Amazon at the time did not hold a great integration with Shopify for omni-channel selling, particularly for 3PL delivery. This created a number of issues with order processing and fulfillment.
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4. Klaviyo Integration and Mass Coupon Generation for Doctor Signup Process - the team at Holigos had to manually create Shopify coupon codes, account for the use of those coupon codes, and essentially operate at scale with little automation and ways to communicate with the thousands of doctors referring their patients to the product.
   
   By building a data layer within Klaviyo to sign up doctors to automate the communication + coupon generation with Klaviyo's toolset, this allowed us to create an affiliate network for doctors to ease into the onboarding process for themselves, and keep their patients informed and easy to refer to the product.

By migrating to Recharge Pro we were able to retain and increase the rate of subscriptions for Holigos. Our retainment for the migration was 98.7% of its current subscriptions and over the course of 3 months, a post-mortem was performed, in which our the new flow generated over 40,000 new subscriptions through the price break system and Shopify Checkout being implemented with customizations to match the rest of the site. Additionally we were able to minimize the churn rate by 43%.

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The strategies and techstack implemented via Holigos were successful. So much so, that it offered the other companies under Glycom, the conglomerate pharmaceutical company, to emulate those same best practices into their other ecommerce websites.

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As a result, this created an immensily profitable enterprise, with an increase in Average Order Value and Conversion Rate across the board, and permitted Glycom to be acquired by DSM, resulting in a deal worth more than €765 million ($830 million USD at the time). With the acquisition process in place, our team had to serve on a series of key calls to hand things off and train the in-house staff on the development side as apart of the takeover by DSM.

The optimized Holigos website, focusing on promoting digestive health products, had undergone a significant UI/UX redesign to enhance the user experience at all levels.

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With the traffic primarily coming from HCPs (Health Care Practitioners) via referrals and recommendations, we needed to create a website that was simple and straightforward to use.

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Key aspects of the redesigned Holigos site included:

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1. Simplification for User Education

‍The site's content was streamlined to better cater to user needs, focusing on educating visitors about IBS (Irregular Bowel Syndrome) using more imagery and spacing throughout. Using more graphics and less copy also improved usability of the site.

2. Enhanced Online Shopping Experience

‍The redesign had a megamenu, subscription only model, detailed product information including prices and ingredients, to help users make informed decisions. We also designed and built an on-brand cart and checkout page for consistency to improve the conversion rate by over 100%.

3. Removing Old Code and Page Builder Apps

‍Various page builder apps were used to develop the site to launch new pages with speed. However this was not an ideal long term strategy. To offer more flexibility to the website and editor, we developed everything custom both in Shopify and Recharge. This included customizing the account page, subscription dashboard, cart, checkout, FAQ, product page, and numerous other pages.

The outcome of these changes was a more efficient, user-friendly website, leading to increased engagement and a higher conversion rate and LTV. This improvement was a part of Holigos' broader strategy to grow their user base both in physicians and patients being onboarded.