Kari Gran Sees the Beauty of StoryTap

Kari Gran is a Seattle-based supplier of clean beauty products formulated from organic, naturally derived, wild-harvested, and non-genetically-modified ingredients. The products contain no added water, ensuring you’re getting only the ingredients that matter in a potent and effective state.

The small company had thousands of five-star written reviews but wanted to build a more personal connection with its customers.

“The written reviews don’t really get across the love our customers have for our products. If someone says, ‘I love this product,’ that’s the Holy Grail for marketing,” says Laura Kirkland, the company’s director of e-commerce and marketing. Positive written reviews are great, but they don’t adequately convey customer emotions.

Kari Gran wanted to incorporate video into the process but had to do so in a cost-conscious way.

“We’re small; we don’t have a large operating budget. We don’t have an angel investor so that we can just test a lot of marketing things,” Kirkland says.

Kari Gran also didn’t have a lot of dollars to put into high-end photo shoots with top models, according to Kirkland. “Our demographic is women over age 40. We wanted a way to connect with them that is very authentic.”

Through a former CEO, Kari Gran’s marketing team learned of StoryTap, a video marketing platform that captures video content from customers.

“We hadn’t seen anything like it,” Kirkland recalls. “We learned of the price, and it fit within our budget, so we decided to give it a try.

“In a video, a customer will say something like ‘I can’t believe how much I love this product,’” Kirkland says. “It was a way for us to more closely connect with our customer base.”

The patented StoryTap technology guides customers with tailored prompts to help them create and share authentic stories about the products and services they know and love. Videos can be recorded on smartphones or other camera-enabled devices.

Customers tap a link and follow intelligent prompts to record and share their personalized stories in minutes.

“StoryTap provides an unbelievably easy way for someone to leave a video,” Kirkland says.

StoryTap then curated videos based on Kari Gran’s approval guidelines and distributed branded customer stories to like-minded audiences across the company’s website, YouTube channels, and search engines.

Kari Gran started using StoryTap in October.

“The hope was that as people engaged with these video reviews, they would be more likely to purchase our products,” Kirkland says.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Kari Gran saw a dramatic shift in customer engagement for video viewers and helped convert fence-sitters.

Consumers who watch a StoryTap video on Kari Gran’s site browse three times more pages, and their session duration is six times longer.

Those longer engagements often turn into sales. On average, customers who watch one of the StoryTap videos spend 33 percent more and are twice as likely to make some type of purchase.

StoryTap videos also helped increase traffic by 844 percent; direct referrals by 365 percent; and email referrals by 212 percent.

With that kind of success, Kirkland says Kari Gran is looking to further boost its use of StoryTap and will attempt to entice more customers to leave video reviews and testimonials.

“The women we are targeting are the busiest right now with kids and careers, so we are looking for ways to break through to them to leave us a one-minute video,” Kirkland says. 

The Payoff

Since Kari Gran started using StoryTap, it has seen the following results:

• customers who watch a video stay on the website six times longer and browse three times more pages than those who do not;
• customers who watch a video spend on average 33 percent more per order and are two times more likely to purchase;
• email referrals grew 212 percent;
• direct referrals increased 365 percent; and
• website traffic increased 844 percent.