Summary

• Ritual A/B tested HEARD against in-person interviews for a research study on HyaCera, a new skin supplement. Not only did HEARD interviews deliver the same type of participant responses as in-person interviews, they also uncovered more insights overall.
• HEARD accelerated post-launch insights from four weeks to two days compared to in-person interviews, and saved the Ritual consumer insights team 20+ hours of manual work. 
• The Ritual marketing team used insights from HEARD to optimize their creative and influencer strategy, improve the conversion rate for paid advertising and increase subscriptions by uncovering new cross-product bundle opportunities.
• Since their initial pilot, Ritual has replaced all of their in-person qualitative research with HEARD.

About Ritual

Ritual is a personal health brand beloved for high-quality, traceable vitamins and supplements. To build the future of daily essentials, Ritual looks for every opportunity to connect directly with their subscribers and learn about their needs.

As the Sr. Director of Consumer Insights, Emma Woo plays a big role in fostering Ritual’s deep customer understanding. Despite being a lean team of one, Emma supports all research initiatives across product development, innovation and marketing. 

After each new product launch Emma conducts 15-20 in-person interviews to collect feedback on product efficacy, benefits, and challenges. Ritual’s marketing team depends on these insights to make crucial post-launch decisions like optimizing advertising targeting strategy, copy and creative.

Ritual’s looked to HEARD save time on manual work and speed up post-launch research insights to optimize the marketing strategy.

Emma strives to deliver the post-launch report quickly, but found that it took 4-6 weeks to schedule, moderate and analyze interviews. Not only were teams waiting on insights, but the manual work required for customer interviews prevented Emma from tackling other important projects. "The scope of this research bogged down my bandwidth, impeding my ability to focus on other research needs across the business," Emma said.

When Emma discovered HEARD, she was excited about the potential to have open-ended conversations with Ritual subscribers without the logistical hassle of in-person interviews.

She was also interested in HEARD’s ability to interview hundreds of customers quickly, which would enable her team to discover statistically significant trends from the data – something that’s impossible to do with a handful of in-person interviews.

Lastly, Emma was intrigued by HEARD’s ability to automatically create insights – yet another way to save time and free Emma up for more strategic work.

A/B Testing HEARD head-to-head against in-person interviews.

Emma decided to A/B test HEARD against traditional in-person interviews to validate effectiveness. After preparing a discussion guide with 20 questions for both HEARD and in-person interviews, she ran each study in parallel. 

The table below breaks down the tasks involved for each methodology, the timeline for completion, and how much time Emma spent on each task.

HEARD delivered similar insights as in-person interviews but over 10x faster and at 10x the scale.

HEARD completed 150 customer interviews and delivered a detailed report in two days compared to four weeks for in-person interviews. Emma found that HEARD generated insights much faster than in-person interviews without sacrificing on quality. “There was a ton of parity in the insights gleaned, which signaled that in-person vs. HEARD interviewing structures elicited the same types of responses from participants. Interviewees were engaged in the same way, despite the different interview mediums,” she said.

In fact, the AI-interviews uncovered more themes than in-person interviews by interviewing 10x more participants and optimizing the questions along the way. As HEARD learned from each interview, it asked smarter questions to maximize overall learnings. 

In addition to delivering on speed and quality of insights, Emma saved 20+ hours on HEARD interviews compared to in-person interviews.

Ritual used insights from HEARD to increase sales of HyaCera by optimizing their conversion funnel.

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With a 10x larger data set than traditional in-person interviews, the Ritual team felt more confident using the insights to make important marketing decisions. 

“HEARD has been incredibly valuable at helping us understand the nuances within our product audiences. The ability to create subsegments via hundreds of interviews helped us approach targeting and claims messaging in a more nuanced way,” Emma said. 

Here are the key decisions the team was able to make after HEARD interviews.

Optimized creative and influencer strategy: HEARD validated positioning HyaCera as a beauty product, not a supplement. This led to new product imagery, targeting and influencer partnerships.‍

Improved conversion. Interviews showed that HyaCera’s “stickiest” benefits were wrinkle reduction and increasing skin smoothness, so Ritual refined messaging to focus more on anti-aging benefits instead of skin hydration.

‍Increased subscriptions. HEARD surfaced new opportunities to bundle HyaCera with other products like probiotics and the 50+ multivitamin.

Ritual replaced all in-person qualitative interviews with HEARD.

After the success of the  A/B test, Ritual replaced the vast majority of in-person qualitative interviews with HEARD. Occasionally, Emma will do 2-3 in-person interviews to dig deeper on certain findings from the HEARD interviews.

With the time saved through HEARD, Emma has been able to effectively scale her impact to take on more strategic research initiatives throughout the business while still delivering critical insights to support important moments throughout the product and marketing lifecycle.

“HEARD has enabled us to run qualitative research more efficiently by streamlining the time, resource, and financial costs for customer interviews. HEARD consistently delivers high quality insights on par with in-person interviews, and speeds up projects that typically took us several weeks to just a few days. As a single-person research team at a high growth company, HEARD has unlocked fast, informed decision-making and enabled us to allocate more bandwidth to other high-impact initiatives across the business.”