How Food52 Strikes a Winning Balance Between Content and Commerce

How Food52 Strikes a Winning Balance Between Content and Commerce

Food52 co-founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have always led with engaging content, confident that sales would follow. Here's what startups can learn from them on how to connect content and commerce to build a brand.

BUILDING A BRAND THROUGH CONTENT & COMMERCE

From the start, Food52’s goal was to be more than a commerce site. Hesser and Stubbs set out to create a resource that would help home cooks across the board, through recipes, articles, tips, Q&A, and, yes, a shop that carries well-curated kitchen and lifestyle tools. “Our aim was not just to be seen as a commerce business but as a place where you could get help in many ways,” says Hesser. “And so naturally, if you needed a new cooking spoon you would come to us because you also trust us for our recipes and expertise.”

Nearly ten years in, the data proves that bet was a good one: 60% of users who register on the site at least one day before they make a purchase had a “meaningful engagement” with Food52 prior to their first order—whether that entails commenting on a post, submitting a recipe, asking or answering a question, or voting on a contest. “We see that as a strong case for building and growing a multi-faceted resource for people,” says Stubbs. “We’ve seen this engagement generate a meaningful impact on our commerce business.”

As the site has grown more established, content leading to commerce has worked in the other direction, too, with the shop leading the way to new content. Food52 started adding new categories to the shop—laundry, organization and home décor—all of which took off. The team began building content in those same categories to meet the interest. “They strongly influence each other,” says Hesser. “For us, it has expanded the possibilities of what we can do, because we're building a long-term relationship with people as opposed to just serving their one need at a moment in time.”

Food52 Co-founder and CEO Amanda Hesser

The Constant Between Content and Commerce

As Hesser and Stubbs share the secrets to their success on various platforms, from Instagram Stories to recipe videos, there’s one strong through line: in all cases, they have diligently honed and implemented their brand personality. “When it comes to developing a visual and written voice, it's so much about connecting with people on an emotional level,” says Stubbs. “It’s powerful. It just takes effort to define it initially and discipline to stay consistent.”

Food52 attributes much of their success to their direct, friendly and educative personality, which they see as part of a sea change in how brands are operating more generally. “The new brands, like Everlane, Casper and Cuyana that you're seeing crop up and succeed? They're connecting on a human level in a way that consumer brands really haven’t done historically,” says Stubbs. “The more you can be human — in everything from your website copy to your customer interactions — and treat people in a way that feels memorable and real, that's the most powerful thing you can do.”

REIMAGINE YOUR EMAILS AS MAGAZINES

Food52 sees email not only as a distribution mechanism, but a vital and creative element of its business strategy. Emails aren’t dashed off as a means to an end, as a way to simply deliver links and generate clicks. Hesser and Stubbs want their emails to increase engagement, of course, but they’re committed to publishing valuable content, in this format like any other.

“Email isn’t just a delivery vessel but its own content. It must inspire, map a narrative and issue a takeaway. If you don't have time to read it, we want you to save it for later.”

Here’s how Food52’s open rates regularly exceed commerce industry benchmarks, by as much as 30%. Here are some of the ways it captures the attention of its readers with its emails:

Establish a feedback loop (a fancy way to say: read and act on replies to your emails).

Several of Food52’s best performing emails were the result of direct feedback from their community. In fact, that’s how they drove $20,000 of sales of a German egg coddler in one month. “This is a product we love,” says Hesser. “We sold it from the very early days and it performed fine, but it wasn't a best seller. We got feedback through customer care that some people didn't understand it, didn't know what it was, or how it worked.”

So the team took that cue and ran with it, building a suite of content including a video and a gif of how the coddler works, plus recipes and ideas for how to use it. It was time to feature the egg coddler front and center in an email. But while many brands would balk at putting more than one click between the customer and a sale, the team decided to use every piece of content to create a rich educational experience.

Other times, customer feedback prompted Food52 to rethink, along with its commerce partners, how products are designed. “Our team has long been enamored by the butter keeper, a dish that keeps butter at room temperature without spoiling. Again, by creating a video and some additional explanatory content, the team turned an underappreciated gem into a bestseller,” says Stubbs.

The takeaway? The best type of engagement is education done genuinely — to teach rather than aim to show the extent to which you’re an expert. Build your content strategy around educating your users by meeting those needs, and the insights you gain in return will be well worth the effort.

Double-down on your sign-up flow.

Thanks to a recent analysis of their sign-up data, Hesser and Stubbs have found that engaged users are literally more valuable, too. “We did an analysis of 2017 subscribers by signup source, and we saw something really interesting,” says Stubbs. “People who subscribed during checkout in order to receive communications about their order ended up having lower lifetime value than subscribers who had signed up for our emails, been readers for a bit, and then made a purchase.”

Food52 Co-founder and President Merrill Stubbs

LIFT OTHERS UP TO STAND OUT ON SOCIAL

Food52 has found Instagram a particularly valuable platform for building community and broadcasting its brand personality. It’s had great success driving direct sales from Instagram, too. “Instagram is a free marketing platform. It’s a no-brainer place for resource-constrained startups to start building an audience,” says Stubbs.

From the moment Instagram took off, Food52 has been on it. “For anyone who works in food publishing, in particular, an image-centric platform like Instagram or Pinterest is a very natural place to be,” says Stubbs. “Right away, we knew it was a platform where we could really take a stand as a brand.”

Hesser and Stubbs understand that Instagram is best suited for companies for which visuals and short videos are at the core of how they convey their business, but many of the following tactics also relevant across other social media channels.

Instagram is a place for Food52 to publish the food photography for which they’ve become known. But it also offers an ideal suite of tools for building and engaging a community. “Very quickly, we jumped to a strategy of regramming other people, calling them out and giving them exposure,” says Stubbs. “Just as we wanted our website to be a platform for other people's recipes, photography and knowledge, we found that Instagram was another great platform for introducing people to a wider audience.”

Don’t stop at donuts.

Before hitting a million — or even 100,000 — followers, though, there was a lot of trial and error. It was an ongoing process of trying out pieces of content to see what garnered the most interest, while also pushing followers to dip their toes in the breadth of content Food52 offers.

“I remember in the early days we discovered that donuts just kill it,” says Hesser. “If you're a food media company, you could do that everyday and get lots of clicks, but you're not going to be an inspiring resource.”

Hesser and Stubbs identified three key tips that, taken together, form a cycle they’ve repeated many times to maintain their high-performing Instagram presence:

The idea is that you should constantly be tweaking and taking risks, measured risks. “The way to do that is to not just post products but frame them as experiences.”

And it works: Stories currently drive 50% of Food52’s Instagram revenue, and 30% of Instagram traffic to their site.

ELEVATING VIDEO: PUT YOUR BEST STORIES ON SCREEN

When it comes to video, the Food52 team has always taken the position that any piece of content, in any format, needs to clear the same bar: it has to tell a great story. “That can look very different depending on the format, the length of video,” says Stubbs.

The success of video yielded 2,500 engagements on Facebook and sold 18 units, far above the company’s benchmarks for organic posts.

Videos are your brand personality in motion.

Beyond their narrative arc, videos are also living, moving bearers of your brand’s aesthetic standards. “It's really important that our video is instantly identifiable as Food52,” says Hesser.

To achieve that mission, Hesser and Stubbs still yea or nay every product and chime in on any major visual decisions for the site. But they’ve taken steps to scale those aesthetic judgments, too.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

For many, the relationship between content and commerce is distant — or a loose correlation at best. But Food52 has found a way to connect them in a consistent way across a number of tools: email, social and video. First, take a page out of old media and reimagine your emails as magazines. Try different formats and curators to introduce variety without surprising your readers.