iO blends technology & marketing for online pharmacy Farmaline

Blended partnership

Just like Farmaline and iO, the collaboration between both businesses has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years. The purely technical story became a multidisciplinary development and marketing story.

The focus of our collaboration shifted, but so did our way of working. Some of the experts on the project are a part of iO, while others work at Farmaline.

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Challenge

How do you keep a long-term relationship between client and agency exciting, innovative, and cutting-edge?

Solution

By mixing trust with a successful synergy of tech and marketing services.

Farmaline & iO, years of loyalty and trust

Farmaline and iO have been working together for 15 years. What started as a tech story evolved into a broader blend of technology and digital marketing. Now, we not only optimise their online platform but also refine Farmaline’s performance campaigns in the Benelux. Luckily, both the tech and the marketing story are iO’s strong suits.

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Custom work will set you apart

Selecting custom platform development at the time turned out to be a great move. Due to the many legal requirements and particular adjustments for certain medicines, the Farmaline platform is drastically different from a regular online shop. So much so that the many requirements would have resulted in a complete mess if the platform had been built with standard e-commerce software.

Fifteen years ago, we convinced the people of Farmaline that a custom-built platform would be infinitely more future-proof than a standard e-commerce shop. Today, we’re proud to be proven right.

When it comes to such business-critical decisions, you don’t need a supplier. Situations like that call for a partner you can spar with – a partner who will guide you in your growth. Even then, we focused on what the client truly needs rather than what the client asks.

Fierce competition, slim margins

In the online pharma industry, the competition is fierce, whereas profit margins are rather slim. If you don’t want to see your margins go up in smoke due to excessive expenses, you will have to look at your marketing efforts in a hyper-efficient way.

Moreover, one of the challenges that Farmaline and iO were faced with, was trying to keep the indispensable marketing fees lower than the already small profit margins. Especially now that less proficient, yet very wealthy, marketplaces such as bol and Amazon offer an increasing number of personal care products and supplements.

100,000 satisfied customers per day

Our developers can still enjoy working on the Farmaline platform. First and foremost, they have to make sure that the website (farmaline.be, farmaline.nl and farmaline.lu) remains accessible to its 100,000 (give or take a few) visitors and thousands of orders a day.

Other than that, they work on the integration of payment systems and various delivery solutions (at home, a pick-up point, and parcel lockers). Furthermore, they continuously optimise the platform in terms of marketing automation, customer loyalty and conversion analysis. The same goes for the order, return and reimbursement flows.

Our developers have the responsibility of taking the customer experience of the platform’s visitors, who are only growing in numbers, to the next level – when customer expectations are only getting higher.

Sprinkle in some Google magic

The online pharma market has exploded over the last couple of years, and the campaign budgets reflect that. The online marketing budget our marketers allocate for Farmaline with such great precision in 2024 is much higher than what would have been required in 2016. We’re talking about managing Google Search campaigns, Google Shopping campaigns, Google Display campaigns, Discovery campaigns, and YouTube campaigns.

The margin takes centre stage

Because many new players have joined the online pharma market, the profit margins came under fire. To ensure that the online marketing costs wouldn’t usurp the limited profit margins, iO determines performance campaign budgets based on product margins.

Channable

The tool used by iO to automate campaigns based on Farmalines product feed is Channable. Aside from facilitating the profit margin dynamics we described earlier, Channable ensures that the entire product range is visible on Google, that the ever-fluctuating prices are included in ad copy automatically and that the ad pressure is always connected to stock levels. After all, it wouldn’t be wise to advertise a product that’s almost sold out.

Targeted product campaigns

Besides applying this always-on profit margin strategy, iO also boosts certain products that Farmaline wants to generate a higher demand for in collaboration with the supplier. There are also seasonal campaigns. Because not only petrol, electricity and pea soup sell better in winter. Medicine does, too. Farmaline always has the highest revenue in January. Because right after New Year’s, resolutions and ailments take over our lives. Nicotine patches, for instance, are some of the most coveted products in January. The summer months, on the other hand, are the perfect time for sun creams and other related products. Of course, we use that information in our strategy.

A head start thanks to development

Just like our marketers, our developers don’t sit idly by. For example, they integrated several features and tools, such as:

Ingenico (payment system)
bpost, DPD and Mondial Relay (delivery services to parcel lockers, homes and pick-up points)
RedPoints (customer loyalty)
Episerver, Mandrill (mailing)

Furthermore, they set up a direct synchronisation with Akeneo (PIM), wholesalers such as Febelco & Belmedis, Medipim (PIM & stock) and Microsoft Dynamics (ERP), facilitating orders and returns.

They also added Amazon CloudFront (caching images), Cloudflare (security and load balancing with multiple front-end servers for nearly 100% uptime and great accessibility) and Elasticsearch (quick search results).

Seamless customer experiences

Because we can always do better, Farmaline visitors now get an automated email to help them check out when they don’t complete their purchase. Farmaline employees are now also able to take orders over the phone, going over the check-out process with the customer, after which the customer only needs to complete the payment using an automated link.

By doing all that, our developers fulfil their mission to take the customer experience of the increasing number of demanding platform visitors to the next level.

Experience is everything

While our marketers perfect their two-fold strategy (always-on approach and setting up targeted campaigns), our developers keep expanding Farmaline’s online platform with additional features that improve the customer experience.

Our marketers meet with the Farmaline team to analyse the weeks and campaigns that have passed and discuss optimisations for the upcoming weeks. At the same time, our developers keep working on the user experience of the website.

Of course, this collaboration is so much more than the sum of its parts. Farmaline enjoys the benefits of the synergy between both iO services. Link that to the sustainable trust we’ve built together, and you know that this blended story is long from over.