Building Healthier Habits:
Increasing Early Order Frequency Through Wellness Content
The Challenge
Like most subscription-style grocery businesses, we seea steep drop-off after the first order. The challenge was not just getting customers to sign up, but getting them to come back again and again during those critical first few orders.
January created a unique opportunity. Customers were already focused on eating better, increasing protein, improving gut health, and building healthier routines. The goal was to turn that mindset into stronger repeat purchase behaviour.
The Strategy
Rather than running a standard January promotion, I built a four-week wellness challenge designed to keep customers engaged beyond their first order. Each week focused on a different health topic, paired with curated products and prize mechanics that rewarded customers for participating across multiple weeks.
By combining the below, we created more reasons for customers to keep ordering.
01
Timely & Relevant Content
02
Gamified Incentives
03
Lifecycle Automations
What I Did
Built a four-week wellness challenge around topics like protein, gut health, skin health, and anti-inflammatory foods
Created weekly and grand prize mechanics to encourage customers to participate across multiple weeks
Developed email and lifecycle automation flows to introduce new themes, reinforce prize eligibility, and drive repeat orders
Built a custom retention cohort heatmap in Metabase using SQL to measure repeat purchase behaviour by order number and compare year-over-year cohort performance (amongst other retention tools within the dashboard)
Relevant Content & Gamification
Timely January topics like protein, gut health, skin health, and anti-inflammatory foods
Weekly product challenges tied to themes so customers had a reason to keep ordering across multiple weeks (Weekly + grand prizes)
Combined educational content with incentives so the campaign felt more like a wellness program than a standard promotion
Omni-Channel Presence
Communicating with customers across all channels for challenge reinforcement allowed both the brand and order frequency to be kept top of mind.
Set up & Measurement
The Results
Increased third-order retention from roughly 58% to 61% versus the prior year
Increased fourth-order retention from roughly 44% to 47%
January became one of the strongest early retention cohorts in the business
Improved customer quality and order frequency, not just first-order conversion