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In health and wellness, trust isn't optional.
Customers want to know that the products they're buying work, that the information they're reading is credible and that they're making the right choice. But in a digital landscape where customers can discover products through search, social media, advertising and AI, building that trust has become increasingly complex.
At sync, clearer.io Tom Goodwin, President and COO, welcomed Jannik Schlomann, Senior Management Web Development at Kijimea, to explore how the health and wellness brand is building trust across the entire customer journey.
For Kijimea, the answer starts with something deeply familiar: the pharmacist. When Jannik joined Kijimea three years ago, the business was beginning to build its online presence. In 2023, the team launched its Shopify store in Germany, with a clear ambition: recreate online the experience customers already trusted from the offline pharmacy.
“When you come to offline pharmacies, there’s one person you always trust, which is the pharmacist,” Jannik explained.
The challenge was turning that relationship into a digital experience.
Building trust from the first interaction
In a pharmacy, trust is built through expertise and personal recommendation. Online, there isn't necessarily a person standing beside the customer to answer questions or recommend a product.
For Kijimea, that meant trust had to be built into every stage of the customer journey. That journey starts before a customer even reaches the website.
From TV advertising shown shortly before the national news, through online marketing, landing pages and the Shopify store, and eventually into CRM, Kijimea looks for opportunities to reinforce the same message: this is a brand customers can trust.
Reviews play an important role throughout that journey.
Rather than treating reviews as something that sits at the bottom of a product page, Kijimea uses them as part of the wider brand experience. The aim is to give customers the same reassurance online that they might receive from speaking to a pharmacist offline. And the team has tested whether that approach actually works.
Turning trust into measurable conversion
Kijimea doesn't simply assume that reviews build trust. The team tests it.
Through A/B testing, the business experimented with different ways of presenting trust and scientific credibility across the customer journey.
One of the biggest areas of focus was reviews. Using customisable review widgets, Kijimea tested how customer feedback could be integrated into the experience while still fitting naturally with the brand's design.
The results were significant: “In combination of all the tests we had, we had an impact over 20% conversion rate uplift,” Jannik explained.
For Kijimea, the result reinforced an important point: trust isn't just a brand metric. It can have a direct commercial impact.
Scientific evidence remains central to the brand, but customer voice adds another layer of reassurance. Together, the two help customers understand both why a product works and what other customers experienced when using it.
Connecting trust with discovery
Trust doesn't begin when someone lands on a product page, increasingly, it starts with discovery. As Tom highlighted during the session, clearer.io has been focused on “deepening the integration between trust and discovery.”
That connection is becoming even more important as the way people search for products changes. Search engines remain an important source of discovery, but customers are also increasingly using AI-powered tools and Large Language Models to find information and make purchasing decisions.
For brands, this doesn't mean abandoning SEO. In fact, strong search fundamentals remain important because the information that performs well in traditional search can also influence what appears in AI-driven experiences.
Reviews can play a role here too.
By structuring review data around specific attributes and USPs, brands can make it easier for search engines and AI systems to understand what customers value about a product. Rating snippets and review information can also be surfaced through shopping experiences such as Google Shopping.
The result is a closer connection between being found and being trusted.
Reviews aren't just about acquisition
For Kijimea, the value of reviews doesn't stop once someone has made their first purchase. Customer lifetime value is another important part of the strategy, particularly as acquiring new customers through digital advertising becomes increasingly expensive.
That makes encouraging customers to reorder and replenish products particularly valuable. Kijimea can connect reviews back to the order they came from, allowing the team to understand how customer sentiment changes over time.
Jannik highlighted an interesting pattern: customers who have ordered more than once can leave even higher ratings, with reviews from repeat customers reaching around 4.7 or 4.8 compared with around 4.5 for first orders.
That creates another opportunity.
By combining purchase history, search behaviour and review data, brands can build more relevant CRM experiences, recommending products when customers are most likely to need them rather than relying on generic messaging.
Making customer feedback actionable
As the volume of reviews grows, managing that information manually becomes increasingly difficult.
For Kijimea, AI and API integrations create an opportunity to analyse customer feedback in real time, helping the team identify patterns and respond to issues more quickly. That could mean identifying recurring feedback around delivery, product experience or other parts of the customer journey.
Instead of simply collecting reviews, brands can use them as a source of operational insight. There is also value in owning the environment where those reviews are presented.
A dedicated review page on a brand's own domain can support SEO while giving the business greater control over how customers discover and interact with its feedback. Rather than relying entirely on third-party review platforms, the brand can make customer voice part of its own digital ecosystem.
Be found. Be trusted. Be chosen.
Kijimea's approach highlights how closely discovery, trust and conversion are becoming connected. Being visible is no longer enough. Customers need reasons to believe what they're seeing. For brands operating in health and wellness, that means combining scientific credibility with real customer experiences and reinforcing both throughout the customer journey.
The lessons from Kijimea are clear:
Build trust across the entire journey.
Trust shouldn't start at checkout. From advertising through to CRM, every interaction is an opportunity to reinforce credibility.
Test what actually builds trust.
Kijimea's A/B testing showed that reviews could have a measurable impact on conversion, with an uplift of more than 20% across its tests.
Connect discovery and trust.
SEO, reviews and structured product information can help brands become more visible across both traditional search and emerging AI-driven discovery.
Use reviews beyond acquisition.
Customer feedback can reveal how sentiment changes across repeat purchases and provide valuable insight for improving retention and lifetime value.
Ultimately, Kijimea's story is about more than collecting positive reviews. It's about building an experience that reflects the trust customers already expect from the offline world, then using technology to extend that experience across every digital touchpoint.
From being found, to being trusted, to being chosen, the opportunity is to make those stages feel like one connected customer journey.
