Meet Oral BioTech
The United States is known around the globe for a population with strong, white teeth. However, that’s a facade: virtually all adults, 96% of us, will have tooth decay by the time we turn 65. To dentist Kim Kutsch, this is a tragic fact because this is not an inevitability — major advances in the understanding of dental decay causes have lead to excellent preventative treatment programs. In 2004, he founded Oral BioTech to provide dental professionals with cutting-edge cavity-prevention tools, products and training.
As the business evolved, the enthusiastic leadership team eventually conceived of three revenue streams:
● CariFree: cavity-prevention products for dental professionals
● Key Smile Credit: financing for uninsured dental patients
● Remin Media: content platform for dental professionals
Market realities force strategic shift
Unfortunately, Dr. Kutsch’s vision hit a roadblock: the healthcare insurance industry. Fewer and fewer patients had dental insurance. The number of independent dentists decreased while Dental Service Organizations increased, along with less compensation to dentists by insurers. Caries prevention did not become the standard of care he thought it would be, because dentists don’t get paid to keep patients healthy — they get paid to treat problems.
With sales below projection, they needed to shift their strategy.
Enter the skyrocketing health and wellness industry, which is currently estimated at a trillion dollars. While dental professionals may feel ho-hum about cavities prevention, a legion of consumers feel otherwise. Enthusiastic about taking charge of their health in all areas, wellness-oriented consumers might prove to be a more receptive audience. Oral BioTech decided to pivot their offering directly to consumers, while improving sales to dental professional clients.
The website dilemma: stay or go?
Shifting from B2B to B2B+B2C is easier said than done. By the time Gravitate met Oral BioTech in 2015, the state of their web properties was a mess. They had eight different websites for their three business units, created by a succession of freelance developers. Their primary revenue-generating website, www.carifree.com, had a clunky, sometimes completely broken user experience with all the problems common to websites making such a transition:
- Site design that doesn’t convert
- Ineffective optimization
- Wasted pay-per-click spend
Our Solutions
As strategic website experts, we knew they needed a new site. However, even though it wasn’t working well, it was difficult for them to swallow the idea of abandoning it and building a new site from scratch — they had invested considerable money and weren’t ready to accept that it was a sunk cost. Sometimes, a client isn’t ready to jump, and sometimes, it’s not the right move for us to push. This was one of those times.
Gravitate works with clients to improve website effectiveness in a couple of ways. Usually, we start out a new client relationship by building a new site, but sometimes, we start out by optimizing their current site. For Oral BioTech, we took the second approach and spent the next year doing our best to optimize the old site. Once we had exhausted every means of improving the old site, it became clear there was nothing more we could do — the patient was terminal. So, in the second year of our relationship, we built a new ecommerce site from scratch.
The Outcome
The new CariFree website launched in May, 2017, and after launch we have continued to collaborate with them to improve the effectiveness of their website and pay-per-click campaigns. Over the past 12 months, the average sale per order has more than doubled, thanks to an increase in professional accounts, cart optimization, cross-selling, product bundling and more.
“Since redesigning our site in early 2017, our online sales have increased dramatically, largely due to the changes Gravitate implemented. Our new website is not only beautiful, but is also providing a smooth and simple shopping experience for our customers, a complete turnaround from our previous website. I’m not sure how we did anything before working with them!”
- Ashley Latimer, CariFree
For CariFree, Gravitate is far more than just a website developer. Yes, we provide technical expertise and skilled manpower. But we offer more than that — we’re a strategic consultant that can assess the situation objectively, then proactively implement solutions that have solved challenges, increased user engagement, increased revenue, and bridged gaps. We genuinely care about Oral BioTech’s success, and look forward to being an ever-more valuable business partner in the years to come.