Inside Pinch of Yum's Strategy for Email Growth and Content Distribution with Jenna Arend

If you're a food creator, chances are you've come across comment for DM tools and using that functionality within Instagram can result in some huge wins, but the tools are really complicated and they're oftentimes built for marketers, like people who are in the tool day in and day out, not built for food bloggers or recipe creators specifically. That's where Gro, spelled G-R-O, comes in. It's built from the ground up for food creators. So if you're looking to grow your email list, get more traffic to your site, or maybe earn more affiliate sales, all without spending a ton of extra time or having to learn a complicated tool, then Grow is for you. And what's really cool is they're seeing some pretty impressive numbers, like 75% click-through rates, which is kind of mind-blowing, and 5% opt-in rates from people who are engaging with content that is sent through the Grow platform. And they're actually doing an office hour session soon. So if you wanna see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at grow. That's grow.co. And a little bonus for you as a podcast listener, if you use the promo code PODCAST, you'll get your first month completely free. Again, that's grow.co, promo code PODCAST.

Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team. This week, York sits down with Jenna Arend, General Manager of Pinch of Yum, for the last episode of our Grow mini-series. In this episode, she shares how Pinch of Yum is navigating the biggest shifts in the digital landscape right now, from the decline of third-party cookies to the rise of AI, and why those changes have pushed the team to double down on email and Facebook as their most reliable channels. Jenna also gets into the strategy behind keeping a long-running food blog relevant and thriving, from improving older content to creating targeted resources like meal plans and freezer meals. She also shares how Grow has helped streamline the process of converting social media followers into loyal email subscribers, and why building that direct line of communication with your audience matters now more than ever. If you've been thinking about how to future-proof your content strategy, this one is worth a listen.. And now without further ado, I'll let Bjørk take it away.

Jenna, welcome back to the podcast. Hey. You might be one of the top guests on the podcast through the years because you've been involved with Pinch of Yum for 10+ years. Um, you know, I remember back to when we were doing some hiring for, I think it was like an office manager role.

Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, the vision that I have was, uh, we had this office in kind of north, North Loop, north-ish Minneapolis.

Yeah.

Right on the river. Super cool building, uh, super cool space, but it was kind of cold. Do you remember this? It felt like it was—

Yeah.

I think the day that you came in to interview, we had this like little office that was glass office and came in. The, the vision that I have is like, it was kind of a cold day.

Yeah.

Um, but came in to do this office manager role and have really grown into overseeing a lot of the different components of most of the different components of Pinch of Yum on a day-to-day basis in a general manager position. We're gonna be talking about Pinch of Yum today and kind of what's been happening with it. Obviously Lindsay produces a lot of the content, so people see Lindsay and, you know, the content that she's producing, but you're also scheduling that, a lot of the email work you're doing, which we're gonna be talking a lot about today., helping to put together some of the posts for the roundup content on the blog. Anything else that you'd add? You could, there's a thousand things that we could talk about, but like to help fill out that picture of what your role as general manager looks like at Pinch of Yum.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's shifted and changed over time, um, as our strategy changes, obviously. Um, but that's a good deal of what I'm usually working on the day to day is, um, uh, kind of Like Lindsay's creating the content and then I'm working on how do we get that where people can see it and access it and like enjoy it in a, in an accessible way.

So, yeah.

Yeah. So that involves email, that involves making our recipes discoverable on search and also just kind of helping with just the day-to-day of like getting new content out and improving our old content. So.

Yeah. Uh, one of the things that you have that's really unique that a lot of people don't have is 10 years of experience in the world of publishing content online with a specific brand. So, um, similar to some people listening to the podcast, you've seen a lot of things change and shift and evolve, uh, different platforms that have worked, uh, then they don't work and then they work again. Um,, and some of those are decisions we're making as a team. Hey, we wanna invest in this platform. We don't. Others are just kind of the macro trends, uh, for what we see working and then what doesn't work. So, yeah. Um, from your standpoint, what's kind of the assessment of where things are at right now?

Mm-hmm.

For Pinch of Yum in terms of the platforms that you see working well that we're focusing on. Um, you know, we have a small lean team and so we're not showing up everywhere. We try and show up in, you know, little ways across all the different platforms, but really place a stronger emphasis on some platforms. So kind of from your side, day to day, what are you seeing and what's working well from a platform perspective?

Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, another one of those things that has shifted and changed a lot, just as like algorithms change and, and things that we're seeing success with. And that seems to be like achieving our goals, but also meeting readers where they are. Uh, and right now our main areas of focus, the first one will always be the blog, which seems like, uh, obvious, but, uh, but that's something that's shifted and changed over time so much for us as far as when, and when I say that, I mean publishing on the blog and getting traffic from the blog because obviously that's our our first source of revenue. Um, and that's changed so much where, um, like I think to— I wasn't maybe involved as much right at the beginning of my tenure with Pinch of Yum, but think about like going through COVID and like how that was such like a big shift and change for us. Um, for traffic on the blog, think about like when the third-party cookie was gonna be introduced and that strategy a little bit. Um, and now with AI, like, um, that is, which is what we're still obvious. Every, all publishers are kind of figuring out, um, as newer updates come from that too. So it shifted a lot, but it's still what I, it remains our number one focus. So whether that's like improving older content and optimizing it, which we've talked about a lot on, like, I feel like we've probably had a podcast episode about that. Courses too. So, um, that's where we put a lot of our energy is updating older posts and then obviously publishing new content, um, and making site updates that just perform better for search and make us more, um, uh, I'm thinking about like the EEAT guidelines, um, like position us more of an expert to, to, um, to Google and for search engines. Uh, so that's always our number one area of emphasis of what we're doing. But what we've had a lot of success with more recently that I feel like has shifted into our main areas of focus right now would be email, which, you know, we're going to talk a little bit more about today too. But yeah, email, I want to mention a third-party cookie. It kind of originally stemmed from that.

Yeah, kind of kickstarted it.

Yeah. Yep. And now it's our, uh, number 4— number— our 4th source of traffic, um, which is higher even than Pinterest. So it's just, yeah, it's funny to see the changes where Pinterest had always been our like number 2, number 3 source of traffic.

Yep.

And it shifted into— that's overtaken now by email and Facebook, which is where I would say our other area of growth and emphasis is right now, is on Facebook, which is, um, our third source of traffic right now.

So, so traffic sources would be search and then direct and then Facebook and then email and then Pinterest and then Pinterest.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I, there's those, I don't know if you've ever seen those like data nerd Instagram videos where it's like population over time and it shows the graph going in and out and it's like, you know, or like, uh, operating systems over time and it shows like, oh, there's Windows and then Apple comes and it's the shift as the years progress. It'd be interesting to see kind of a traffic version of that. I think what you'd probably see, at least in Pinch of Yums, is like Facebook was really low and then it kind of rises up, uh, over this last year as we've placed more of an emphasis on it. But the reason that we place more of an emphasis on it is because we were getting more traction there and we kind of figured out Through, um, you know, some recommendations and working with some people, some of the podcast interviews I did that we learned from, um, Lexi from Crowded Kitchen, uh, talking about, you know, Facebook and Facebook strategy and posting frequency. Um, talk a little bit about email. Um, you know, you talked about third-party cookies for those who aren't familiar. The idea with that was there's this kind of, uh, I think of when in Minnesota, when you go to a cabin, I know you have a cabin. And you look out over the lake and you see a storm and you're like, oh, the storm's coming. That felt like third-party cookies was like, it wasn't here yet, but the storm was coming. And every day you'd wake up and you're like this, it's still there. I can still see it, but it's not here yet. And it kind of was that for what felt like a year. But for those who aren't familiar with third-party cookies, this idea that a cookie, this thing that you can track. Allows you to track somebody online and it allowed you to do like targeted ads. And so you would earn more from those ads the more that you knew about somebody and the more that you could target them. If that goes away, you can't be as targeted. So then advertisers won't pay as much. So everybody was kind of panicking and saying, our, you know, ad RPMs are going to drop because we're not going to be able to target as much. That continually got pushed off and pushed off and pushed off. And never really was implemented in the way that people thought it would be. But as that was happening, the rise of email came up because they're like, hey, now we can get first-party data and get information about people, and advertisers would pay even more as long as somebody clicks on a link in an email, goes to the website. So can you talk about from a strategy perspective for Pinch of Yum, as that was happening, as we saw this storm on the horizon and we're like, we need to ready the boats, you know, prepare our strategy, what changes we made to email that now benefit us today as kind of this owned source of traffic. What, what changes did occurred during that time?

Yeah, we mostly just tried to create new like incentives for somebody to sign up for our email list. Our incentive that we had had for just standard so long was The way we'd get email, new email addresses was just the bar at the top and maybe something in the, on the homepage. And our incentive was like an e-cookbook. And that had been, you know, successful to get people on the list for getting our new recipes. But we just kind of got creative with new ways to get people on our email list. So I remember we used to do, we used to call them like niche opt-ins. Mm-hmm. And it would be like on all of the recipes in the quick and easy category, there would be a pop-up that popped up that was like, get my 5 easy weeknight recipes sent to your inbox. So we were doing that and just integrating more opt-ins into the site, like in the recipe card. And doing some inline forms as well. I just remember us doing a lot of testing to see how to get more people on our email list.

On the site specifically.

Yes, on the site specifically. And that was really like our primary kind of way of doing it. We released, you know, maybe a few new products, like we did the freezer meals that was extremely successful and still is as a, like instead of just giving somebody click this link to download the PDF. We were now always saying sign up for this form, it'll be sent to your email. And so creating some more valuable products like that, like freezer meals or meal plans was really successful too. It gave us something as well to market a lot more strongly on social, more than just like, hey, sign up for email list. It was a specific campaign around getting a PDF of freezer meals or PDF of meal plans. So we made some changes like that. And then I think the other piece too is just we, in the last, I would say 2 to 3 years, we really just made the content that we're sending via email a lot more targeted and valuable. Whether that's one thing I didn't mention is we revamped our welcome sequence too, which I feel like it's talked about a lot of, which is when somebody signs up for a form on your site, they get maybe, you know, 2 to 3 emails that's introducing who Lindsay is, sending our top recipes. Things like that. So we just kind of really dialed in on, uh, making just our overall experience for readers via email a lot more helpful and interesting and useful and effective. So, um, which has kind of led into like now what our weekly email cadence is today. Um, and we have other strategies of growth now, which we'll talk about a little bit. Um, yeah, what we're doing on Instagram, but That was kind of where we started, was just kind of testing out like different ways to entice people to get on our email list. And then the other piece of making sure that then what we're sending after that is actually useful and effective. And over time, as we've tested, we've really found what that kind of niche is of, of what people seem to respond to and makes them wanna stay on the list too.

So, yeah, it's, it's one of the things that is great about how people create content on the internet, which is you have this kind of tight feedback loop. You're able to create something, it's a digital thing, you're able to send it out, you're able to see how people respond. The other piece that I think exists in a unique way online is like you're able to in real time gather information from people. I know one of the things that you and Lindsay both do is like create a piece of content. Like Lindsay will maybe do a poll on an Instagram story to see like, hey, what's most helpful? And even just like being in comments and reading DMs that people are responding with and saying, hey, this was super helpful. This made a difference, whatever it is. You start to develop this kind of like instinct around what's going to resonate with an audience. And the thing that you said that I think is really important is this idea of like really targeted, um, targeted and helpful. So it's like specific and helpful. And for all of us as content creators, I think one of the things this applies for what I'm doing with the podcast, like How can we get as targeted as possible and how can we make that as helpful as possible? So an example that I would think about is like AI. Okay. People are interested in AI, but like, what is it like for AI for creators or more specifically, what is it like for AI for food creators? Okay. That's targeted. Um, as a topic. Now we know that we have a targeted topic. Then what does it look like for that to be really helpful? So how do you create something? That is actually going to make a difference for people who are interested in like AI for food creators. I think of a few people who reached out after I did the interview with Jason, who I know, you know, Jason Glassby, you've talked to him before. Um, and he came and talked about OpenClaw, this tool that he's using, great episode that everybody should go back and listen to. Um, and we had a few people reach out and they're like, I started to do this and it was life-changing, like how I'm using this tool. And it's like, oh, that's a great example of targeted and helpful. And, uh, the third piece that I think is really important within this is once you have something that you feel like is really targeted and is really helpful, then our job is to market it. Uh, and one of the things that I love about Grow, sponsor for this series, one of the reasons it's a sponsor, one of the reasons that we're advisors and investors is because of how great of a fit it is creators like ourselves, started as food-specific, specific, now it's broader. So there's a lot of different platforms using it, but its kind of foundation is still with food creators. But one of the things that I really liked about it was it allowed solo creators, lean teams to use a platform like Instagram efficiently to market The things that they are creating that are targeted and helpful. And for a lot of us, we have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people that, uh, who are following us on these platforms. And traditionally what we've done is we've tried to like drum up interest in going to a piece of content and consuming that content on our website, but In using a tool like this, you're able to market a little bit differently. And I think that's what's really exciting when you can have those three things, really good marketing. You can have a really targeted piece of content or a product, even if it's a free product, um, and something that's actually going to be helpful for people. You wrap all of that together and you have this really great opportunity to capture value in some way. The way that we decided to do that. Was primarily through email. Can you talk about a few of the, kind of what that looks like functionally to triangulate with those three things, you know, helpful, targeted, and then how do you actually get people to sign up for an email? And then we can talk about kind of after the fact what it looks like to continue to connect with those people and, you know, direct them in the way that you are most interested in directing them.

Yeah. So I make sure I understand your question.

Sure.

I'm kind of looking at the before you send the content of kind of how you find those people in that, where those things all meet. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. Well, and maybe even what you could talk about specifically is, you know, we could use an example for Pinch of Yum. We create a product. The product would be like a PDF, it'd maybe be a free meal plan, freezer meals. And then I think the piece that would be most interesting to talk about is the actual marketing of that. So like, what does that look like if somebody who's listening has figured out the helpful piece, they've figured out the targeted piece, they've come up with something that they think is going to be helpful. What does it look like to market that well? And maybe ideas that you could share around where and how using Grow as a platform, you know, there's other similar tools that can do stuff like that. So it can be kind of the theory of it, or you can talk specifically around like what it looks like within Grow to use that. But the marketing piece around how to actually get that in front of people and help people to take an action. I think of the examples of like, you know, creating a reel and the reel talking through highlights of recipes that we have and then allowing people to sign up and, and get that email delivered to them. And then they're on the email list. That is an example.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. One way that I feel like we, we as a team like looking at it and me personally is like if you've found, you know, what that specific targeted piece of this is, and for us it's easy dinners. Weeknight Dinners, looking at it almost in a way of what's our reader's problem and how can we solve it? Because I feel like that's kind of what leads our marketing on all these different platforms is what, yeah, what's the problem that they're having and what can we provide that will solve that? And that kind of drives everything that we're doing. It maybe sounds really simplistic, but I feel like looking at it as like a problem to solve instead of just like, oh, here's what they, what people like.

Yeah.

Oh no, they actually have this problem. Like a lot of our audiences, um, maybe people with kids and families or maybe, you know, a single professional who just doesn't have a lot of time to cook in their week. Um, and somebody who wants, uh, easy dinners, but they feel more elevated than just like box mac and cheese and chicken nuggets, which there's nothing wrong with that. But like just a little—

Been there. Yeah. We also have that.

Yeah. I love it.

So yeah.

Um, but yeah, I feel like looking at that's the problem to be solved and then how can we provide a solution to that? And for us, for Pinch of Am specifically, it's been, um, I mean, email is such a large part of it because I, the thing about email that's been really fun is it's somebody who actually took the step to like ask to receive your content, you know, and people can click follow on Instagram, or it shows up on their Discover tab, but somebody on email, I feel like we have this kind of next level relationship then.

Yeah.

And so we have just like hyper-focused in on that as a, as like the target of what we're sending via email. And so it's like I can walk through even our kind of our email cadence too, but you know, it's something that comes up multiple times a week. That are like, even though it feels repetitive, it's just specifically targeting that problem and just continuing to give solutions for it. Um, and, and in a very personal way too, where they're, you know, written by Lindsay, they're from Lindsay. Um, so there's that. And then also we have been able to, you know, spin off kind of, I guess, products you could call them, or I guess I would say resources is the better term for it. So, um, freezer meals would be one of them, not to be repetitive, but yeah, freezer meals and then the paid meal plans that we've done. But then we've also been on Instagram right now, really just focusing on like free meal planning content. Not necessarily like, here's a PDF of a meal plan and a grocery list that goes with it, but Lindsay will do, you know, here's what I cooked this week and you can comment and I'll, you'll get all these recipes in your, in in your DMs, in your inbox. Um, and so kind of finding just new ways to give, you know, it's the, like, the awesome thing about it is that it's coming from Lindsay's real life, like, as a mom of two.

It's like also a problem that we're trying to solve.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Become this nice, um, which I would imagine, you know, is similar for you with your podcast example of AI. Like, we are also trying to solve the AI problem.

We're in the middle of it, which makes it easier to create content around it. And for sure, the difference is, uh, in one scenario you might be trying to solve it and then you solve it and then it's solved. In both of our scenarios for Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum, we're trying to solve it, we solve it, and then we create something out of it, a podcast, a download, a course, a Q&A, um, because there are other people we know who are out there trying to solve that same problem. Um, can you talk about, so, um, you know, in the example of creating a list of, uh, different recipes, what does that look like functionally? Kind of like if you talk about a funnel, the top piece of content is the free content, and then the next step down would be, you know, and you described this idea of like a DM that's sent. Can you describe what that looks like? And then also the two benefits of that I would imagine would be potential email signups or traffic. So like people see the, see the content, they comment.

Yeah.

Um, and then what, yeah, just talk through kind of that flow, what that looks like.

Yep.

Yep. Um, so I think like if we start with the problem to solve is people are busy and they want weeknight dinners and we're gonna use Instagram to solve that problem. Um, It's, you know, we create a piece of content that is a reel maybe. We've done a few different content types for this. So, you know, maybe it's a reel of different recipes or Lindsay in the kitchen with, you know, your two kids around running around and, or, you know, it's an image carousel, which again, following like what's working right now, that's what's working on Instagram right now are image carousels. So, you know, it's creating, here are my top 5 easy weeknight recipes that my kids love right now, or here are the recipes I made this week and my ratings for them. Kind of taking from like her own personal life and creating a piece of content about it. The awesome thing about carousels being effective right now is they're a lot less work. Splicing videos together or filming, it's, you know, kind of just bringing the images you already have together and really focusing on— we tend to reshare a lot of whatever our top content is. And sometimes, you know, it might feel repetitive, but it's also just getting— we want to give what's working best for people, get it into their, you know, into their hands instead of something that maybe is, you know, not as highly rated or something like that.

So, yeah.

We're picking recipes that are tried and true. And from there, you know, the CTA is usually comment save or comment recipe. And right now we're using Groceries List or Gro. And, and if they comment, you know, there's a few different ways that they get the content. We're still testing out all these different ways, but traditionally it's sent them to a link to a form and then they sign up like I want, I want this Trader Joe's meal plan and they sign up and they receive it in their email inbox. Or it's a link to a roundup. I was just looking at what's our most successful ones have been and one was, it was like a promotion of, I think it was summer recipes. Yeah. And then it just sent them to a roundup page. It just sent them a link. And then lastly, which this is a new tool, is you can actually do like set it up sending an email or like get it sent. I'm not using the right language for this, but they comment on their SP, the DM gets sent and says, what's your email? So instead of sending them to a form, it's just saying, what's your email? They give them the email. Okay, it's in your email inbox.

So So waiting, and that's also then connected to, in our case, Kit, which signs them up before, uh, kind of the before and after, super, not super clunky, but pretty clunky. Cause it's like, and we'd hear from people occasionally where you're like, hey, you know, DM and I'll send you this meal plan as an example, PDF. So then people DM, uh, or they comment and then they get a DM and And the DM is like, here's a link to sign up for the PDF. So then you click on it and it opens a page, which is like a Kit landing page. And it's like, put in your name and email. You put it in and then there's a confirmation page. We sent you the, and it's like, okay. Like, but that's, yeah, that's what had to happen in order to get an email address, which the exchange is like, we're creating content for free. The way that we're able to do this as a business is like, we need to continue to be able to market to somebody. So That's what we've decided the exchange is gonna be. The bummer was this friction, which now doesn't exist. Uh, you're able to just send a, a DM back with your email address, which then gets them on the list and then they get sent that, that PDF. So yeah, there's less friction. Great for the user, better for you as the publisher because people aren't gonna become disgruntled or fall off along the way.

Cool.

Um, and so kind of two benefits. One would be the traffic. You just click on the link and you go to the site. That's great. Really frictionless, but you maybe aren't, you're maybe getting some short-term value by getting more traffic, but you don't have the long-term value of getting people on the email list.

Yeah.

That's really the primary way that we are using Grow right now. The main value add would be traffic where people get a card and they can click on it and then email and you get some kind of like sprinkled in email signups. Just from people who get one of the cards sent to them. And it's like, hey, you could also, you know, sign up for email and you'll get some of those. And then occasionally we'll do bigger campaigns where it's like, we have this resource, here's this cool thing. We create an Instagram reel. People can sign up for that and become a part of it. So there's that as well.

Yep.

Uh, and then what happens after is that you have these email addresses.

Mm-hmm.

And then the job for you as a creator is to to, you know, talk to those people. It's to tell 'em about the stuff that's working well. So talk a little bit about the things that you would recommend for people based on what we've learned. Once you do have people on your list, like what are some of the things that people could be aware of? Some of the things that could be, could people could be doing, and then maybe some of the like tips and tricks. You can talk about it within the context of broadly speaking, we use Kit, but like, yeah, what would be some best practices for people once they do have somebody signing up for an email list after that?

Yeah. The first thing is I mentioned the welcome sequence is something that a lot of creators do and we do as well. And again, it's just basically when somebody signs up for your list, it's kind of an introduction to yourself and to your brand and top recipes and things like that. So, That's something that everybody gets, whether they sign up from the website or sign up from Grow on Instagram DMs. They're all getting an introduction to Pinch of Yum. We used to have a very long welcome sequence series. It was maybe like 6 emails and it was, it was, it was really good, but it was really long. And we were just kind of fine. I think it was Lindsay who first brought up that was like, Do we have to have it be so long? Like, could it just be one email? And so now I think our welcome sequence is like one or two emails. And the goal with that was just to, when you have somebody coming from the blog, you know, maybe they're more invested in, in what they, in who Pinch of Yum is and who Lindsay is. And that the long string of content for a welcome sequence works for them, but when you have more people now coming from social, like Instagram, they might not want all that content or all that information. Um, and so we shortened it up and so it's just one, I think it's maybe 2 emails now, maybe 3. Um, and so I think that's a good first intro of kind of letting people know what to expect too. So we let them know, hey, I'm Lindsay, this is who I am. Um, this is what I want to to do for you. These are the problems I wanna solve. And you can expect, you know, like 2 to 3 recipe emails from me per week.

Yeah.

Then they know. And so that's kind of the first step for us is just kind of giving them what to expect, which is important. And then after that, we really just honed in on like what kind of content we're sending and how often. And so for us, that is a roundup every Sunday because again, our, focus is on people who need weeknight dinner ideas or to solve the problem of weeknight dinner. And so on Sunday mornings, we're always sending a roundup of, you know, maybe 8 to 10 recipes with a high focus on easy weeknight. Like we just, we really drill into that. But that's what everyone's doing on Sundays, like especially if you're somebody with a family or somebody who's busy. And so So that's one of the things to expect. Then the other is whenever there's a new recipe, you get it sent via email on the day or day after it publishes. And so it's really like we've, we've tried to really focus in on like just sending good recipes that align with the reason that they signed up, which is typically from Instagram now. It's, you know, it's usually somebody who wants a meal plan or freezer meals., or it's a single recipe that they wanted saved to their inbox that is mostly easy weeknight. So, um, so yeah, I think like kind of like our focus is like fulfilling the promise we made of this is why you signed up. And so here's like the content you are going to receive is primarily focused on that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and what I love about it is it doesn't have to be super complicated. Uh, it's a lot of work, like the actual process of coming up with something that's helpful. You know, we kind of have the targeted piece, especially if people have been creating content for 10 years, you probably are at the point where you kind of know who your audience is and your target is, but you're probably continually trying to think about like, what's a helpful thing I could create? Uh, but then to actually create like the marketing content around it, for us, it's primarily Instagram for other people that can show up in other places, but like, that's a lot of work. Um, But the, the system, the process is relatively simple. You create a valuable piece of content. You have a call to action. I think that's one thing that a lot of people miss, which is crazy, but like, uh, the call to action is like, what is the next step that people see after they see that piece of content? And for us as food creators, um, we have this opportunity to have people sign up for an email or to go to the blog. Some of us have products that we could sell, whether it be food product or a cookbook. And I think of, uh, friends that we know who are just content creators. And generally what they're trying to do is just get as many eyeballs as possible. Like there's not a real strong call to action unless they're maybe doing branded content. But from a business perspective, we're really lucky that we have this. Not only are we trying to figure out how to get as many people to see it as possible, but then we can have this call to action where we have email lists and websites that we can send people to. Um, And then it's that rinse and repeat of, of like, okay, you get people signing up for the email. Uh, and you know, in our case, 50 to 60% of people, is that accurate? Will open an email. Uh, yep. And so, uh, if you get 1,000 people who sign up, that's an additional 500 clicks.

Mm-hmm.

And you know that, you know, every 1,000 clicks could be $50, $60, $70, uh, you know, depending on the day and the season and the platform and how many ads you have running.

Yeah.

And to some degree, it allows you to play the numbers game a little bit and say, okay, I can see some predictability with this as I continue to grow this as a valuable group of people that I can talk to in a way that's more predictable than the, like an Instagram algorithm or even like search algorithms, which are becoming more unpredictable. And so I kind of view it as like, we have these platforms that are fluctuating. You might, go really well. You might get a lot of views, you might not get a lot of views, but along the way, how can you be as strategic as possible to build the things that are reliable, like an email list that are predictable, where you know you can have this open rate, you know, you can have this click rate, uh, and you can kind of rinse and repeat that. And so generally you have up and to the right with email, even if platforms fluctuate and something works and then it doesn't work, but figuring out How do you capture a little bit, a bit of that? If you have, you know, something that goes viral and a million people see it, uh, what's your call to action that's getting people to take action there? So can you talk a little bit about, um, you know, as you see it, like one of the things I'll often ask creators when they come on is like, what would you view the most valuable platform to be? Or like, um, you know, rank order the most important, um, kind of broadcast areas that you have for your content to get in front of people. Would you have, it wouldn't even have to be like, where are you earning the most revenue from, but like from where you're sitting, what would you view as the most valuable for Pinch of Yum day to day in terms of different platforms or places that we can reach people?

Yeah. It's very repetitive, but like I would say email. I think, I mean, I think we've been, it's like the third-party cookie thing was kind of a panic moment and then it kind of died off, but I'm really glad we had that panic moment because it made us rethink the importance of email. And so, as you were even just describing, like the, it's more like storm safe from algorithms. Like it's like—

Yeah, yeah.

You, there's not much influencing it unless, you know, we suddenly pivoted to sending content that was, they did not agree to receive. Like if we switched to, you know, like clothing lifestyle kind of stuff. Yeah.

Dance videos.

Yeah. Yeah.

Me, of me.

Yes. That like, it's more like, it's harder to influence it and touch it. Like we are fully in control of it for the most part.

Yeah.

And I think that that is something that feels really good, 'cause especially as we have looked at our, you know, search traffic over time, and I don't think at this point, like, traffic from email would ever overtake organic search traffic. That's, you know, and so yeah, like you said, it's not necessarily the most profitable, but it is, a place that we have more control. And so I think that is, is really important. And I think related to that, especially with using Grow, like it with Instagram, it used to just not be any important source of traffic for us because we could only get people to the site from stories.

Yeah. It was kind of ambiguous awareness. Like that was kind of the purpose. We were like, we don't have a product. We're maybe not doing a ton of sponsored content.

Yeah. Yeah.

The question was like, and Lindsay would often say like, we have this great platform, but I wonder like, what's the primary purpose of it?

Right, exactly. So I think it's, it's made it a lot more important. Um, and then with just kind of Facebook making this comeback over the last year.

Yeah.

Um, like social is, is still important. Um, and we do use Grow on Facebook too. Um, But I think with some of the, like we've had some of our Instagram posts, especially the Trader Joe's meal plans and the freezer meals go kind of like viral with a large percentage of people seeing that being non-followers. So they're finding it in their discover tab or just in their feed for suggested content. And now it is more valuable because it turns into emails. Um, and so I, and I feel like it's, it's also a, we have a very strong open rate for our emails and click rate. And so, um, that also feels like it's a good indication that after people get on our list, they, um, they're in like what we're sending is fitting what they want to see because they're opening it consistently. Um, and so it feels like, yeah, it's kind of all comes together where it's, it funnels into like our social is really, I mean, it's for like, we, like I said, Facebook is our, okay, it's our third source of traffic. And so like, it's, it's very important for direct clicks from Facebook, obviously, but.

Which is easier on Facebook because they allow linking. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, they're before now, like there just wasn't a way to convert that to an email subscribers. And so that's been, it's been fun to have a tool to do that. And it's just then made social, Facebook and Instagram, um, more valuable for us. Yeah.

It's a, it's a little bit more clear. I think one of the things that will be more true generally every day moving forward is that for people who have the business of creating content on the internet, social will become more and more important. And it's not even really social media anymore. Like, I think it's just this like hangover term from 10 years ago when it truly was social, where you'd like find your friends on Facebook that you went to college with, where now it's like an algorithmic content play. And somebody who has 1,000 fans, I would say has almost equal likelihood of somebody who has 100,000 fans of getting, producing a piece of content that gets 500,000 views, as long as that piece of content is all of the things that it needs to be in order to be engaging and interesting and, you know, fascinating to a group of people. And if the algorithm sees that, then it will surface it to hundreds of thousands of people. And so it's in, in that way, I feel like it's a great, uh, time to be a content creator because you can start tomorrow and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people. It's not as much of a slow start as it was 10 years ago. You have to have those skills and those abilities and, and kind of that intuition, which that would be the slow part is developing that. But I think social more and more every day is becoming more significant, more important. Then the question is like, okay, as you start to get better at that, what's the transaction that's happening. And you're starting to see people who only build on social and they're transacting on social and they might have, you know, products that they're selling. They might have a shop, they might be like a course, but it's all linked from within their social accounts.

Yeah.

Then the question is for us as content creators who are used to monetizing by people going to a blog, going to a website, what is the play for us? And I think what you've just described is a great implementation of that, which is, okay, we need to in some way, uh, transact on the platform. So on Instagram, how are we going to get people to interact natively? DMs, comments, it's all happening natively, but then eventually have the conversation around Here's the link, here's the email where you can sign up and, and, and move people over to the place where we are transacting. And that was a lot harder to do before. It feels like that gap was wider than it is now. And, uh, you know, tools that allow you to do that, the one that we're talking about today is Grow, uh, have, have shrunk that gap. So it's easier to get people to click, to sign up, to engage. In a way that you can eventually bring them over. So, um, you know, if somebody was starting today, uh, we can talk specifically to Grow. Like what was the one thing that was easiest to get started with?

Yeah.

If somebody does wanna try it out, if they wanna get into the platform, if they wanna try a thing, like what's the, what's the first thing that you think that they could try? Or even like, what's the first thing that we did when we first tried it out that would be a good like entry point for somebody as we round up the interview?

Yeah, I think the most standard, and this is our day-to-day usage of it, is to set up your, you know, there's like a, you can set up default words for on any post that you publish. If you include a URL in the caption, they can just always, for us, the default words are save or recipe, I think. And so they can just always on any post, if they type save, it'll send them the recipe that you're promoting. So I think like on single recipe usage is the place that I would start. And that's where we started too. So just kind of set it up, the defaults that we have, you know, some people might want to set up like comment pasta for this pasta recipe or something like that. But like the easiest standard way to do it. And for us that worked well was to set up just default words and only use those. And so That's how we started was, you know, it would— then the CTA and the caption would be comment save to get this recipe in your inbox. And that's kind of the standard way that we used it for a long time. So that's, that's where I would start is just kind of seeing how that goes. And again, the, the fun thing about it is that you can, like on the DM card that they get, it says the link to the recipe, which is why they commented., but then it also says like, email me this link or whatever language you wanna put in. And even just from that day-to-day start with just doing it on individual recipes, um, I wish I had like the, the chart in Kit, but it's like slow. Like it's like our numbers are like flat and then it just like kind of slowly starts going up. Yeah. And then when we hit like the next level, it just kind of, um, it just—

because you have now hundreds of pieces of content. That people are seeing. And so it's like, it's incremental, but it's, uh, maybe compounding in that like every one piece of content you produce that has that allows that graph to go up a little bit higher.

Yeah, for sure. And I think it's, it's just that it's also a preference of like where people want to consume their recipe content. Like some people want to cook from Instagram and save all that in Instagram, and those people aren't clicking the email me this recipe button. Um, but other people like live more out of their inbox, which means maybe like a, even like an elder millennial thing too of like, I don't know, for sure from Instagram. Um, and I'm solidly millennial, so like it's, it's just differences too and, and how people consume it. Um, and so that, yeah, that, that's kind of the, just the, the day-to-day of how we've used it. And then from there we kind of started doing new things with it. So two examples that I'll share. Um, one is I've talked a lot about these specific resources that we have, have sent. So, uh, freezer meals, which is a PDF of freezer meals, it's like a whole prep PDF of everything you need in it. And then we started doing these one-pager Trader Joe's meal plans. That's like 5 Trader Joe's dinners for under $100. And we started using those as specific opt-ins. So whether it's a, like I said, a reel of Lindsay, um, cooking the recipes in her kitchen or holding up the freezer bag or something like that. Um, and it's, you know, click to get this resource. And those are the ones that, like, if I sort by what's been most, uh, DM'd or saved, it's, um, like right at the top is, uh, freezer meals and then Trader Joe's meal plan., and then like, uh, viral easy dinners. Um, and so again, that kind of speaks to like our target here. Um, and so that was kind of our next step was trying out like, what if we offer something more, like something bigger than just an individual recipe on the site? Mm-hmm. And that was kind of like the key for us to unlocking, like where you see the line and convert kit go like really high up is That was, people were like, yes, I want that. And this is a really easy way for me to get it rather than before it would've been like, click the link in my bio to go to a Linkin profile or Linktree. And then so much friction and then you get to a form and then you like, it's just much more easily accessible. Um, so that's kind of like the next step up we did. And now one thing that, one usage that we're having success with is doing like these recipe carousels. So Lindsay will share, here's my meal plan for the week, or here are the meals I cooked my family this week and what I rated them. And it's, you know, if you comment save, I'll send you all these recipe cards. And I really love just how it looks in the DM. It's like, say it's 5 recipes you shared in the carousel, you get a DM that's a scrollable, like 5 recipe cards and you can save all of that, all of them to your email or you can just click, each individual one. So it kind of takes like, oh, I like the recipes in this carousel and you get all of the links directly to your DM inbox. And so, yeah. So we've kind of taken little steps up, but, but it's been fun to see how like each of them have been really successful for us.

So yeah, it's, I think it's such a great example of this idea of how do you find little ways along the way to introduce something that isn't a huge lift, It takes maybe a little bit of learning, takes a little bit of work in the beginning, but then you can kind of fold it in as this little multiplier, value multiplier on the content that you're creating. And we're going to be creating that content anyways. We're going to be publishing. It's what we do. So then how do we think of something that's going to make that more valuable for the business? We slot that in as a system and as a process, you know, So then you have more people seeing it or the same amount of people seeing it maybe, but then you have more people who are clicking on the link or signing up for the emails. Once they're on the emails, you get more people who get that in their inbox and potentially click on it and all of that stuff. You know, just one little thing on its own probably doesn't make a big difference, but when you're producing 25 pieces of content a year or 50 pieces of content a year, and then each one of those has that little multiplier along the way, and then you find, 5, 10, 20 different things that you can have as little multipliers, it really adds up and makes a difference.

So, uh, one thing I'll just note that when I was looking at just some of the analytics is like in within Grow is, um, we even like we did the freezer meals maybe last summer, last fall, and it was super successful. And then we just shared it again like last month or 2 months ago. Um, and it got almost the exact same conversion rate and response, and we didn't change anything. Like, it's, it's, it was a good reminder for us of, yes, all this existing piece of totally, totally before. Yeah, but if we share it again and captured new users and was also successful again. And so, yes, I think sometimes in our heads it's like it's too repetitive, or like, yes, shared it. And, um, and I think like it's I think I talked about this in the last, like one of the Q&As we just did, but like, I think a lot less people are paying attention than we think. Like it's, you know, it's some people didn't see it before and now they see it again.

And, um, or they did see it before and then they see it again and then they, yeah. Right. Like I think of commercials and it's like, man, sometimes I see a commercial, I watch a football game or like if you watch the NBA, I know you're a Timberwolves fan, you watch the Timberwolves and it's like, you'll see the same commercial. 30 times if you're watching it live.

Yeah.

Um, you know, it's probably not the worst thing in the world if somebody who's scrolling Instagram sees your 12-second video twice in, in a year.

Yeah.

It's such a good reminder for those of us who have a bank of content, which most of us do, to think about how can you do a light lift on pulling that content up and potentially scheduling it again. So it's a great, it's a great takeaway. We could talk for another hour about this stuff. We'll have to have you on again soon. Jenna, we're super grateful for you and all that you do for Pinch of Yum. You do such a great job, and I know so many people probably not listening to this podcast, those who listened got a lot of value from the day-to-day, but literally millions of people are getting, you know, have their lives impacted kind of by the quiet, like significant work that you're doing behind the scenes for Pinch of Yum and all the day-to-day stuff there. So super grateful for you. Thanks for coming on, talking a little bit about what it looks like day-to-day. As you do that important work. And we'll have to have you on again soon. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks. Thanks. Appreciate it.

Hey there, Anne again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thanks so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast and for tuning into our Grow miniseries. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week for our next episode as Björk interviews Rebecca Blackwell about how she built her 6-figure digital business from her RV. We'll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.