What's Actually Working for Food Creators Right Now with Ben Jabbawy from GRO

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.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are kicking off our 3-part series with Grow, formerly known as Grocer's List, with the founder of Grow, Ben Jabawi. If you've been looking for a smarter way to turn your social media followers into website visitors, email subscribers, and paying members, this episode is for you. Ben and his team at Grow have sent over 100 million DMs across Instagram and Facebook on behalf of their food creator customers. That kind of scale gives Ben a uniquely data-driven lens into what's actually working for food creators right now, and in this episode, he shares it with us. Björk and Ben chat about recent changes in the social media landscape, dig into the strategies of successful food creators, and discuss why Facebook is suddenly driving a major surge in traffic for food bloggers. They also get into the email side of things and how Grow's new membership program lets food bloggers offer an ad-free experience or exclusive recipes directly on their site without any coding. There's so many great takeaways in this episode. We think you'll get a lot out of it. So without further ado, I'm just going to let Björk take it away.

Ben, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks so much, Björk. Awesome to be here.

Yeah, this is, uh, you did a podcast before your previous business. You built and sold a business. You're now doing a podcast with Grow. We're gonna talk about that, uh, Grocer's List to Grow. Uh, so this is like second nature for you. Sometimes people get on, they're like, I've never done a podcast before. You've done many podcasts before. Uh, you have experience with this. We're gonna talk about a lot of different things today. You are deeply embedded in the world of food, but we're gonna kind of go beyond that with this big rebrand that you have coming up. So let's start there. Let's talk a little bit about Grocer's List to Grow. There's a big transition happening in name. Yeah. In product, it will look the same, it'll operate the same, but give people a little bit of an update on what's happening here with Grow.

Yeah. So we just had our second birthday as a business, which is pretty cool. And We've hit some pretty big milestones. It's really been amazing. I think the name Grocer's List originated around one feature that we thought would just change the world, and that was going from a recipe reel to shopping on Instacart or Amazon Fresh inside the DM without, you know, all the fuss. It turns out that's the least interesting thing that has happened at Grocer's List over the last 2 years. And what people really cared about— and this is very, you know, common in software businesses, you learn and you adapt— what content creators really care about is traffic, list growth, and revenue. And that's why they love the platform. And I think the most amazing part of this ecosystem is just how quickly word spreads when something is working., also when something's not working.

So yeah, sure. You gotta be careful. Double-edged sword.

Yeah, exactly. Um, and so I, I think we've been referred to content creators in fashion, in gardening. We have a huge crochet, um, group of creators that are, are driving a lot of traffic and revenue with us. So I think one of the things we've heard as we get this kind of inbound growth is, but does it work for me? You know, because I'm not posting recipes. And so obviously our roots and our focus has been on food and, you know, we're not changing course there, but, uh, I think it's, it, it, it doesn't put our best foot forward to be naming ourselves after a feature that is really the least used feature in the platform. I think we wanted to come up with a name that honors where we're coming from, but gives us a, you know, lets us put our best foot forward on where we're headed.

So the thing that I love about it, it honors where you're coming from in that, like, it, it ties back to the original name and it also projects forward what, you know, you're going to be focusing on, which is growing, growing revenue. Growing traffic, growing email. We're gonna be talking about what's working well for all 3 of those things. But one thing that I wanna point out that's inspiring from a business perspective that I see oftentimes people get kind of hung up on is this idea that they need to come up with the perfect name. And we've seen a lot of people who have, you know, just kind of some random name that they come up with. I'm talking about in the world of like food blogging and creating a brand on Instagram or a website, but what really matters is the product and the product of content that you're creating, or in your case, the product of the actual software that you're building. And that's what wins in the end. And it's been cool to see you and your team build something that, you know, a lot of people probably didn't even know that's where the name came from. The name doesn't really matter to some degree, uh, because the tool works, but it does start to matter if somebody who's, uh, has a crafting business reaches out and they're like, hey, is this tool for me? And they maybe filter out when they look at it and they're like, wait, maybe it's not for me because it's, you know, focused on food. One of the questions that I do have that I think other people will probably have is what about for the things that are food specific? Within Grow, uh, will that stay the same? And if you are somebody who is a crafter or somebody who wants to have some type of like DM feature that goes out for maybe they're a food creator, but they do something around like travel, um, will there be an option to change kind of the messaging within a DM that goes out? What, what will that look like?

So for a while now, Every word that gets included in your DMs, or if you're using our save to email feature, is customizable. About 6 months ago, we just quietly got, uh, well, I shouldn't say we got rid of the word recipe. We, we swapped the word recipe for the word link. And that was because actually even our content creators in food that use the platform are sharing an affiliate link. They're sharing,, you know, an Amazon link that is just of the shorts that they're wearing. I mean, like, you name it. And on the internet, a link is a link is a link, kind of. And so we said, okay, let's make it easier for people to share any kinds of links. The feature that I'm referencing is our Shop the Recipe feature, which basically, if you are sharing a recipe through the DM, We have the ability to scan the ingredients from your recipe card and make that a checkout on Instacart or Amazon Fresh. Um, and so that'll still be there, right? Like, that's a pretty cool concept. Um, I think for a number of reasons, um, you know, online grocery isn't exactly where we, we thought it would be. That just never really took off, but some people use it, some people swear by it, and it's not going anywhere. So that'll be there. For the people that, that do love that feature.

That's great. So for food creators to know, the expansion from a market focus doesn't mean that things will become, you know, more generic or less focused. Still works in the same way, still operates the same way, still is just as effective as it was. And those features that were there that maybe are food-specific will continue to be there. Just shifting what the name is to more align with what the product is, which is focused on, uh, growing traffic, growing revenue, and growing email. You've seen inside a lot of, uh, companies, creator companies, and you've been able to witness people using the tool in ways that are having a big impact. Uh, I think what would be really great to talk about next is each one of those buckets, each one of those categories, and talking through what's working right now really well. For creators who are looking to grow email revenue and traffic. Which one of those would be best to start with?

Let's, let's start with traffic. I think that's, you know, primarily how this community is monetizing. So we, we just hit a huge milestone. We've now sent 100 million direct messages across Instagram and Facebook for our, our customers. And, um, I think it gives us a really unique lens into what's working, like you said. And I think if you looked 2 years ago at where that traffic was coming from, it was coming from the feed. These are posts, these are reels. Um, very quickly over the last 12 months, we've noticed a few things. Carousel posts have almost gotten to a similar level of traffic generation to Reels, which if you, if you know, even just 2 or 3 years ago, you might have thought that was crazy because it felt like Instagram and Facebook were shifting in a major way to video first. And I still believe that they have, but this concept of, you know, you can post a roundup, uh, on Instagram that includes like 5 to 10 images and you swipe through it in the feed, like that has been really effective in We have also seen, and you know, I'll, I'll spit off a few and we can see where it goes, but we have also seen a major surge in Facebook driving traffic. So I think, uh, again, 2 years ago everyone was focused on Instagram first. I think there has been a lot of success on Facebook and a shift back to, okay, um, Facebook's promoting these things. There's great engagement on this. Comment for DM works. To drive traffic on Facebook. Um, so that's the second thing. And then the, the third, um, is something that I know, uh, you've probably seen and people have talked about, but is this concept of story reply. Um, and we've seen across those 100 million DMs, the traffic we've generated, 20— you can drive an incremental 20% more traffic think about that from Instagram as a channel or Facebook, Instagram, whatever. If you're engaging in this concept of story reply, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah. Let's, let's talk about each one of those carousels is interesting. It's such a great example of, you know, 2 years ago it's like, man, what is the next thing going to be? Cause it feels like video, video is the end. That's the, it's always going to be video and that's going to be the focus, but we also know You know, we've been creating content for 15 years. There's all these different seasons and there's always a new thing and it feels like the current thing, it's like, well, it's probably gonna be this for a long time. And then, well, it's now like carousels work. Okay. So lean into that. And it's one of the requirements for somebody creating social content from a business perspective. You always have to be aware of and trying new things. We've seen that. Work really well recently. Uh, so talk about that as it relates to Grow. What does it look like to do carousels well from the content perspective? And then what does it look like to capture that from a traffic perspective? Well, cause it's one thing to get engagement on the platform like Instagram. There's probably some net benefit from people going and searching for that. That's beneficial from an SEO perspective. But really, if you're looking to transact and get traffic from a carousel post, what are you seeing that's working from the actual content perspective and then from the conversion perspective? Yeah.

So I think in a world where most posts in the feed have shifted to video, uh, just this idea of I'm scrolling my feed and I have something that's a little bit more calm., that kind of breaks the scroll a little bit because it's a normal photo with the way that they showcase, um, the carousel and you can swipe through. I think that alone helps. But in terms of why I think carousels are performing so well, one, you actually have different tools at your disposal to stop the scroll, right? With a hook, it's an image, so you can determine what's the first image. Is it You know, in food, is it the completed recipe? Is it the partially completed ingredients, like behind the scenes? But you also can use an overlay of text. You know, if you're posting on Instagram, they let you add text on top. And so you can actually use the combination of the image and the text as a hook, right? Like, why should I scroll right on this carousel? Is it because my mind recognizes this is an incomplete image and I want to see what the finished recipe looks like, right? Almost flipping it on its head compared to how we think about hooks in a reel where maybe you're starting with the end product really, really quickly and then like telling the story. So I think it's just, you know, there's, there's different types of flows that are working well. The other thing, just mechanically in the feed, that's worth talking about is if I'm your follower and I see your carousel right now, maybe I flip through the first 2 slides in the carousel and then, I don't know, I get distracted and I leave Instagram. If I come back later, Instagram remembers where I left off in your carousel, and if it's performing well, I might get you might get another at-bat, so to speak, where it's immediately loaded to slide 3 because I stopped at slide 2. And I, you know, you're kind of getting multiple at-bats in the feed, which is pretty powerful. And then, you know, one of the coolest opportunities for food, I think, that we've seen in the feed is that you can use a carousel to execute on a new type of post. That actually performs better, faster without editing video, right? Because think about it, the more value you offer your audience, the more engagement you're going to get. And so we've talked about this for Pinch of Yum, um, when they were doing like their, uh, Trader Joe's, you know, meal plans, like those performed really well. But think about a carousel post of 5 recipes. Hey, Mother's Day's coming up. What's the 5 dishes from your site that you're, you're going to be cooking or Memorial Day or, you know, July 4th, right? So grab 5 images. You already have them on your phone, probably post those in the feed as a carousel. And then, you know, that's super exciting because it's— you have an excuse for why you're posting that now, the seasonal calendar. It's easy to execute because you already have this photography on your phone. And then lastly, people are interested in that and the engagements more because it's such a valuable post that if you are enabling a comment for DM automation on that, comment recipes and I'll send you my July 4th menu. You can now also pair the DM setup to mimic that with the nice images of the 5 to 10 recipes that you've just shared. In your feed.

Yeah. And that's the deliverable, the conversion that happens on those. So, you know, to recap, you want to have this strong hook. The hook is the first image that you are showing people. You want to deliver on that. So get creative. What do you think will bring people in? How do you deliver on that? And then you have some transaction, the comment to DM in this case, which this is the cool part. When people do that, then what they are getting is a similar deck of DM cards that they can scroll through and visit those posts. Can you talk a little bit more about specifically what that looks like within the DM?

Yeah.

For people who comment, whatever the comment word is, what that looks like for them when it's delivered.

It's super slick on the phone. It mimics the exact setup of a carousel post in the feed. Where you can, from inside the DM, you can kind of swipe right on this, uh, carousel of visual DM cards that you've set up in advance in your account with Grow to, you know, you paste in the link, we pull in the image, and those can line up with what you've posted in your feed. And so the amazing thing that we see with carousel DMs is that you get more clicks, right? So if you have, if you have a 70% click-through rate on your DMs with Grow, you layer in more things to click.

Multiple options to click, yeah.

And there's that pattern recognition. Yeah, these are the recipes I was just engaging with in the feed. You end up getting an average of 1.5 clicks per DM is what we've seen. So tying it back to traffic and revenue and food, I mean, it's, it's an easier to execute post in the feed if you're just like struggling with what to come up with. And it actually performs really well from like a click-through rate perspective too.

Yeah. It's one of the things that is great about food content, which is we have the ability to remix old content. If you're a I, if you're posting about gadgets, it's like you can't go back 3 years and include in social media content a post that you did about an iPhone from 3 years ago. But because we're in the world of recipe content, we can reach back and pull this, you know, bank of content that we have, remix it. I think about it like Spotify. It's great to be able to go and listen to individual songs, but part of the value with Spotify is being able to go and like see the playlists. And for food creators who have a large bank of content, one of the value adds that you can have, which is a huge return on your time because it usually doesn't take as much time, but you get a really great benefit from it, is creating these lists of helpful recipes for whatever it might be. It might be quick summer meals. Like if your family's busy, you're in involved in a bunch of sports and stuff. Here's my You know, quick, healthy summer meals on the go or something like that. Um, you don't have to create the recipe. You don't have to take the pictures. All of that stuff exists. So I think it's super helpful and a great way then to be able to capture that value by having the comment tool, which then sends that carousel, which you get traffic from. So carousels are, are something to experiment with if you haven't yet. Um, and probably could even be a natural part of your rhythm. Once a week you're doing You know, on Sunday you're doing a roundup of, you know, meal plan roundup or whatever it might be. It's something that we've found to be super helpful.

Absolutely. Even if you have 5 or 6 reels that have performed really well in the last 3 months, try setting those up as a carousel post in your feed. You know, clearly the recipe resonates. Use your behind-the-scenes photos that you took on your phone while you were building that recipe and turn it into a carousel post.

That's awesome. I love that. So, um, the second one, remind me what the second one was.

Story DMs, um, or we talked about story reply and Facebook too, but, okay.

Yeah. So, uh, Facebook, one of the interesting things with Facebook as the number 2 under traffic is you can include links in Facebook. So tell me about how you would recommend capturing both traffic directly from links, but also we see this for Pinch of Yum, people, even if it's like a random recipe, they'll, they've been trained to comment like recipe or whatever it might be. So we need to make sure we're capturing both considerations, the, the actual link that people can click on and go to that recipe or whatever it might be, but also the ability to send somebody a DM.

Yeah.

How do you recommend doing that with Facebook knowing that it's a little bit different?

Yeah, so our guidance on Facebook has actually changed, um, from a year ago, let's say. So a year ago, uh, we would have instructed you to put the link in the caption on Facebook for the reasons you're saying, it's clickable, plus it feeds the DM automation. I would say maybe 4, 6 months ago, maybe January, We noticed that when you go to post on Facebook, if you have a link included in the caption, Facebook gives you this warning that that link might decrease your reach. So what we did instead was we started reading comments from the author on their own post, because a lot of our content creators have been telling us that they post on Facebook. And then in the comment is where they post the link. So that gets you the benefit of what you were talking about. Someone can just scroll to the comments and click the link. Now there's no link in the caption of the post, so Facebook's happy. And because of the partnership we have with Meta, we can read your comments on your own post, and that can kind of power the DM automation without you having to set stuff up. So that's our recommendation.

I think this is really important to point out because, um, what you're saying is one of the great things about Grow is the simplicity, the simplicity specifically around being able to include a link and Grow recognizing and making the connection and, and then sending a DM when somebody comments, whatever the word is. So you're not having to, you know, with like a ManyChat, having to set up this whole flow, having to go in every time, create that. A lot of the people who are using Grow are solopreneurs or they have a small team. They don't wanna be full-time marketers sitting in a, in a tool and creating these automations. But in order for that to work previously in Facebook, you had to leave the comment, uh, you had to leave the URL in the caption. And that would artificially decrease the reach because Facebook didn't want a link included there. So you had to make this decision. Do I want to have the DM automation? Oh, and, and potentially, you know, my content being artificially decreased algorithmically because it has a link, or do I want to not include it? And then I'm not able to do the DM automation, but now what you're saying is Grow understands if you leave a comment with a link, uh, it's going to understand from the creator account, it's going to understand the connection there and it will be able to do the automation. So you get the best of both worlds. You can have that link included that people can click on in the comment, which I think a lot of people would consider best practice. And then Grow will understand that that link is there and then send the DM tool. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. Exactly. So you get traffic from both spots.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's been a huge shift, uh, internally on the platform. I think most, or not most, but a lot of content creators were already in the habit of pinning a comment with the link to Facebook. Uh, and so, you know, for many of our customers, there's been no change in behavior, uh, and it just works. And for some that were cross-posting from Instagram with the link in the caption to Facebook, they've, they've changed their behavior. Um, a little bit for Facebook.

Great. Uh, we have a couple great interviews on Facebook growth. Uh, so go back and check those for anybody listening. Um, we'll link to 'em in the show notes, but it's been interesting to see the rise and the fall and then the rise of Facebook through the years. Kind of feels like they're on this rollercoaster pattern and definitely in a period now where, uh, creators are seeing a lot of great traction with Facebook, you know, posting pretty frequently on the platform. And we found that to be true as well. So an important one to check out. Talk a little bit about stories and how you're seeing people use stories well for traffic. Yeah.

So I think it's a good transition from Facebook because we know now that Meta, if a link is clickable, Meta doesn't love that, right? So that's, that's why the move on Facebook from caption to pinned comment for links. Stories is very similar and Stories works across Instagram and Facebook, but over the last few years, what we've seen is that if a story frame has the link sticker in it and everyone can add a link sticker, the reach goes down because Instagram or Meta knows.

Same idea.

Yeah, same concept.

Yeah.

Traffic's leaving the platform.

We don't want people to leave.

Exactly. And so. What happens with story replies is rather than include the link sticker, you're just either face the camera or you post a picture, whatever. And you just say, reply with a specific word and I'll send you the link, which again, could be a recipe. It could be a roundup of recipes. It could be an affiliate product. And obviously we're an approved partner of Meta. So it's not like we're doing anything wrong here. They know about this and they, They're happy with it. Um, but what happens is if you, if you start a new set of stories with that, there's no link sticker. And what Instagram sees is, oh wow, here's Björk's new set of stories and he's getting a ton of replies. Let's show that to a much, much larger percentage of his audience than his normal stories that include links.

And.

It sounds funny. Um, I have had so many, uh, conversations with customers where they poo poo it. Um, and then they finally try it and they're like, you know, I'm not going to swear, but they're like, holy crap, Ben, like that was insane. And I'm talking like, you know, if a normal story gets 5,000 views, this might get 100,000 plus. Um, we had a customer, um, Sally's Baking Addiction, who, who switched over and was like so happy with DM automation from the feed, but hadn't tried stories. And then she finally tried it the way we recommended and she was like totally blown away. Like, I think if you're in the rhythm of posting stories daily and you haven't tried this yet, I totally get why, but you know, it's very rare on Meta that there's something that can have that big of an impact. And so I would just say like, there's a reason you're seeing, especially in food, so many content creators doing this right now.

Yeah. Low risk to just try, like experiment, see what it's like. Um, and so much of what we're doing is trying to find the cross-section of what's working on a specific platform right now. And how do we create valuable, helpful content for people? And if it was either one of those exclusively, there's gonna be issues.

Yeah.

If you're only thinking about how do I create the most value, you would have a site that has no ads because it's gonna load faster. It's gonna be less intrusive. You would post everything free. You know, you wouldn't have subscriptions or there'd never be ask for costs. And so, or, you know, payment for anything. And so, the initial pushback, my guess is, is that people would say like, well, if I can include a link, I probably should, because it's going to be easier for people. That's maybe what they expect, which is true. But if you are able to get, you know, 4x more traffic, 5x more traffic, and somebody has to maybe work a little bit more, that's a decision for you as a brand, as a business owner to say, do I think this would make sense? To maybe have a little bit more of friction for people to interact with it in service of greater reach.

Yeah.

And I think, um, again, it's for everybody to make a decision on their own, but usually what we've found is it's less of an issue with people being like, oh my gosh, now I have to comment to DM. It's more of just getting people in the rhythm of a new way to expect to get content from you. So it's the change. It's not ongoing going to be an issue. It's just like when it was a certain way and then you switch to a new way, there might be 10 people who are like, hey, I thought they used to include the links. And then it's like after a month, people don't say it.

Yeah. I also think one thing I just want to say is like you mentioned like 4 to 5 times more traffic. We have Micah from Joy to the Food coming on as part of this series., and I think she's like one of our most creative customers, so I'm excited to hear what she says, but she was telling me it's about 40 times.

Oh yeah, great. Okay.

So even more so massive.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, we even have other customers, um, Brandy from Stay Snatched told me that literally her feed is dead and all the traffic she drives comes from Story Reply on socials.

Cool.

So it's crazy.

It's, uh, that's the kind of stuff where, man, if you listen to the podcast, make a note of that, try that because what we've found, and this is for, you know, pinch of yum coming from me interviewing people is if you can take away one of these an episode, which oftentimes I will, you know, even for our conversation, Ben, I'll go back to Lindsay and Jenna on the team and be like, hey, let's, you know, experiment with this and, and try it out, that can have a huge impact. And if you stack 50 of those little wins in a year, it can be a huge win. So appreciate you sharing that. Uh, it's one of the valuable things that comes from you getting the inside knowledge and expertise from seeing hundreds of, uh, creators creating thousands of pieces of content, tens of thousands of pieces of content. So, uh, that's kind of in the realm of traffic. It's how we think often. That's how we speak often. What do you wanna talk about next? Could be because we can talk about email growth and we can also talk about revenue growth, both of which are really important.

Yeah, let's, let's do a quick update on list growth and then we'll get into revenue.

Yeah.

So I think great. Hopefully most people are familiar with this concept of save to email. I know in food a lot of people have that option on their recipe posts in WordPress. Now we brought that same concept into the DM. It's totally optional. It lets someone basically bookmark that set of links if it's a carousel or that link if it's one from their DM to their email. And then we're integrated with all the email marketing providers. So it, it kind of automatically syncs it to Kit or Flodesk or MailerLite, whoever you use. So that has been amazing because it's a convenient tool for your audience. And about 5% of the DMs that you send out will end up using this, right? So that they become subscribers. Uh, so it's actually performs better than a popup on your website in terms of opt-in rate. Um, the cool part is that it actually, just the saved email template that we configure and set up for you drives an incremental 5% more traffic. Than if you're just using the DMs alone. So, and that doesn't even include traffic that you're going to drive from that subscriber by adding them to your welcome series.

Yeah, over the next 5 years or whatever it might be.

Exactly. So huge, huge impact. And it's just, you know, you turn it on once and you forget it.

And a quick thing in addition to email that's important if you're with Mediavine, if you're with Raptive, Kit has this integration automatically. Uh, any click that you get from an email subscriber is going to be more valuable from an ad perspective because it's gonna have first-party data with it. So most people are aware of this, but if you're not, you wanna make sure that you are appending some special, uh, characters onto the end of a URL within the emails you're sending, which Kit has this integration automatically, I, I think with Mediavine and, and with Raptive. Um, that will add this because that traffic is going to earn you more per visit. So important to point that out as well from an email perspective. So anyways, but yeah, continue. So huge.

The other playbook that formed actually when Lindsay came on the podcast about a year ago when, when she first started using Grow, one of the things that she and Jenna were doing for Pinch of Yum was basically using a DM automation every now and then as a lead magnet, uh, to, you know, deliver a more valuable resource. And so the way that they would do that is I think Jenna would, would go into Kit. She'd create a landing page with a follow-up email for anyone that opted in from this landing page. Then Lindsay, Jenna, whoever it was, would actually set up a DM automation that would, if someone commented, you know, meal plan on this post, send them a link from Instagram, moving them to the kit landing page. I wanna pause there. I know that sounds like a lot of work. That playbook though was incredibly successful for Pinch and has been incredibly successful for a lot of people. The big update though over the last, uh, 2 months since we launched this is we said, wow, with each click, so comment meal plan, get the DM, click from the DM to the kit landing page, then opt-in. There's drop-off at every one of those steps. Even though there were really high opt-in rates and the numbers were massive.

It's like friction results in drop-off.

Yeah, exactly.

Friction.

And think about the time it takes the content creator to set that whole thing up.

Yeah.

Right.

On both end there's, there's friction.

Yeah.

Friction for the creator and friction for the user. Yeah. So, so, but it worked well.

It worked so well and it still works so well.

Yeah.

Um, but you know, in the spirit of Grow, we were like, how can we make it easier to execute this whole thing? And how can we take the opt-in rate and double it for content creators? Because we know how valuable email is. So. We launched a new automation type. There's a number of things you can do with it. We call it like advanced list growth, but in its simplest form, it's a lead magnet inside the DM. So rather than going to Kit, creating a landing page that looks nice, setting up a follow-up email in Kit, and then adding that to your DM, you can just set up a new DM inside of Grow. That asks for the email first.

Within the chat.

Within the chat.

Yeah.

Totally automated. We validate that this is a real email once they put it in, and then you have a number of settings after a successful opt-in. You can reveal a link inside the DM after the opt-in, or you could just sync to Kit and, and send an email from there, or anywhere else. So you have a number of different ways you can do it, right?

Both.

But you go from like maybe an hour or two of setup to like maybe 5 minutes if, if you're doing it all from Grow. And most importantly, the opt-in rate, right? So you're going from 70% of people will click and then 50% of those people will opt into to the landing page to 40, 50% of people will opt in directly inside the chat without leaving the chat.

That's awesome. So previously the flow from a user perspective when they're commenting is you create a piece of content. Here's my meal plans for the week. Uh, comment meal plans to be able to, you know, sign up to get these. People comment meal plans, they get a DM, which is a link to a Kit landing page. They have to click on that, enter their information, click submit. Then they'll get either via email or on that landing page, the deliverable. The huge friction point really is like the link in the DM that they click. It pulls up a little like browser in Instagram that they have to load. Maybe the form isn't above the fold or like totally, you know, not optimized. Whereas now what you're saying is people comment meal plans. They get a little message in their DM and then, you know, it's like, what's your email? They post that in the DM and that will go through a process to sign them up on the, you know, if it's KIT or whatever email service provider you use, all within the chat interface. And so it's huge reduction of friction. Um, and then you can either deliver that PDF or whatever it is in the chat, or you can have it go via email. The message could be like, check your email and you'll have that delivered there. But the point is people get added to your email list. They just don't have to do it by clicking on a form and filling out additional information after already saying like, hey, I want this.

And on top of that, with Grow, your DM has awareness if this person has previously used your save to email feature.. And so if Björk comments meal plan on your post and we already have his email for your account, you can just actually skip prompting Björk a second time.

Yeah.

And just say, thanks, you're all set.

Like, which didn't exist previously. So people would have to fill it out again and it's like, wait, I'm already on the list and it's confusing and you're making them do extra work. Yeah, totally.

So save time. Grow your list faster, uh, try, try the, uh, lead, uh, lead magnets inside of GrowNow. That's great.

Another quick thing worth mentioning is that the DM cards that people receive will also, uh, if you want, have the ability to have the recipe emailed. Do you wanna talk about that real quick?

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, whether you are setting up your DM automation to be like a carousel of links or A single one, that's kind of the save to email feature that I mentioned, which you turn it on, you configure it, you tell us where in your email marketing service to, uh, kind of connect. And then anyone can use that button on any one of your DMs to move it from the chat to their inbox, which is maybe more actionable for them. At a later date. So, and you end up getting more traffic from that as well.

Yeah. I don't know what the number is, but there's definitely a number that you could attach to the value of an email subscriber. It might be a dollar, you know, might be 50 cents, but I think it's helpful for me to think about any emails that we get. If we do a campaign and a bunch of people sign up and we get 5,000 new signups, to me that equates to, Hey, this is probably at least $5,000 of value that we'll have for this business moving forward. Yeah. If we are strategic in sending out, you know, 3 emails a week and some of those are affiliate emails and some of those might be product emails or if you ever launch a thing, all of that is super valuable. So email really important, not just from a traffic perspective, but also from an affiliate perspective, from a sales perspective, all of those are really valuable. And so there's a, a ton of value in building your email list. Let's talk about revenue. So you've, uh, the Grow team has launched a pretty cool product that people are using and creating significant revenue from, uh, integrating into their site. Uh, talk a little bit about what that is and how that works.

Yeah, we, there were two trends that we saw. One was a lot of content creators tell us that their audience asks them if there's any way to, you know, enjoy the recipe or whatever without ads. They ask that unknowing, you know, that the ads business fuels this industry. Um, but the other trend we saw was that people in food or content creation have been kind of going to Substack and creating a second destination for their content and charging their audience for it. So when people come to me and ask me what my opinion is, I think Substack's an amazing platform. But I would never coach someone to start creating content somewhere else. Your .com is your brand. You've invested in it. It's, you know, an audience that you own and it's your email list. Substack, if you push your audience into Substack, you're pushing your audience that you worked hard to build into their ecosystem, right? So when we started hearing a lot of these things, we said, wow, like why hasn't anyone just kind of made it easier to execute that type of Substacky experience on top of the WordPress site. And so it turns out it's, it's hard and WordPress is complex and the ad model is, uh, complex and technically, and there's just a lot of stuff. So, um, we've, we spent maybe 6 months building this out. Uh, we now have over 50 membership programs live, most of those in food, some in other verticals. Uh, and we're integrated on the backend with Mediavine and adaptive so that there's actually zero code involved in launching a membership program on top of your site where you set the price, you own the customer, we're integrated again with all your email tools. Um, and you decide at a minimum, anyone who buys your membership can enjoy an ad-free experience on your site across any one of your recipes. If you want. Additionally, a lot of our content creators that are growing quickly with this product are setting aside handfuls of, of recipes or creating new recipes that they have a configuration in WordPress where they can decide, hey, this recipe out of my 1,000, these 5 are gonna be gated to members only.

It's, it's similar idea to Substack, which is you have free content, then you have paid content.

Exactly.

The difference is you're not having to reroute the marketing pipe to point somewhere else. You're still pointing it in the same direction. And so there's already momentum going there. You're just using the same, uh, kind of marketing model, which is like either ad-free, which is probably a little bit less compelling, or premium VIP-only offerings, which is more compelling if it's like a really great recipe and you say, hey, you have to be a member in order to sign up for this. Uh, but same idea. Idea, just doing it all through your site. So how does that work? Like if you're a visitor, then you come to the site, you, you click on a paywalled piece of content. Do you just scroll down and then is it like, hey, sign up to get access to this recipe? Similar to what like a premium Substack newsletter would look like where you have the, the gated part that you have to click on and sign up.

Yeah. So, so the content creator, we give a handful of options if they are gonna gate content. They can choose to gate the entire post, in which case when you land there, could be after 5 seconds or after you scroll 50%, you, you can determine how your gate works. They're prompted with like a, hey, start a trial on the membership. You get access to all these things. Or you can choose to gate the recipe card only of that, of that recipe. Um, and that would work for WPRM or Tasty or any of those. So you really have some choice. What we've seen, um, what we've seen to be really successful is actually gating the recipe card. If you go down this path, because you're still promoting the recipe, people can learn about it, about how great it is.

Yeah. Why you like it.

You're still getting ad revenue.

Sure.

And then if they decide they want to cook it, that's a great hook to start a trial on your membership.

Uh, what are you seeing in terms of, uh, price points that people are asking? $5 a month, $20 a month. What does that look like? And do you have a recommendation?

I think there's two categories, right? We have a bunch of programs live that are just offering ad-free. I would say those are transacting between $3 and $5 a month. You also set an annual price. I would say anywhere from $25 to $40 for the year. That's where we're seeing success on the ad-free only. For people that are doing meal plans, gated content, you know, all this stuff, that's where we've seen price points go higher. Um, I would still say on an annual basis, you're under $100. We had one launch over the weekend at $69 for annual., and it's actually been our most successful launch to date. So I think, um, it's really like we would coach you on price points if this is anything you're interested in exploring. Um, but you know, on the low end for ad-free, it's probably $30 to $50. Uh, on the high end for a whole experience, it's $50 to probably $70 is the highest we've seen so far.

Like I said, what do you think it was about the recent one that made it successful?

She has had a lot of demand over the years for an ad-free experience. One. So she, I guess over the years had been tagging people accordingly who have asked. Yeah. Um, and then on top of that, she, you know, she had, uh, basically a category of recipe content that. She loves but hasn't performed well in Google. Sure. That she kind of took a few days to reorient around, hey, this is gonna be stuff that I'm excited to promote.

Mm-hmm.

These are recipes that I love, but I don't really care about chasing Google for them.

So, yeah, it's, I think it's super desirable. It's one of the things that people talk a lot about in the world of Substack is like, oh, it feels so good to create for the sake of creating, not to create for the sake of a search engine. And I think the ability to have something that, you know, will provide monetary value for your business that doesn't require you to appease the search gods is like such a refreshing thing, especially for people who hate the process of like doing SEO content. And then if you have social channels, what you're doing then is you're marketing that content and you're saying, this is a great recipe. I'm super excited about it. Here's where you can find it. Sometimes it might be free. Sometimes it might be premium. And inevitably what will happen is people will sign up. Even if you have a smaller following, like what you'll find is you'll have some people who really love what you're doing and, and you'll be able to get those signups. This would be one for business owners where you could say, hey, this might be a $5,000 a year thing for me, a $10,000 a year thing for me, a $100,000 a year thing for me.

Yeah.

What would your, um, guidance be for people around expectations if that is even fair?

Um, obviously there's a lot of variables there, but yeah, look, I think if you are monetized with Mediavine or Raptive, you have potential here. The key ingredients for building a meaningful revenue stream out of memberships is twofold. One, there's a few things on your site you just have to do. You have to build a page on your WordPress that talks about the membership. Doesn't need to be long, doesn't need to be fancy. You don't need a developer. We can help you with that. Um, that's the page that gets hooked up to the checkout process from Grow, and that needs to be linked somewhere prevalent, ideally in your top navigation. Okay. The reason for that is that that serves, just like your website is the anchor of your business, that's the anchor of your membership program. And that makes it easier to integrate into your welcome series that's already there. That makes it easy in your recipe card to talk about an ad-free option if they want that links to the full membership program. And so it's like 1 or 2 hours to get this live. Again, big part of Grow is like our support, right? So we'll coach you on it. Is going to go a really, really long way in making this passive for your business if it's just the ad-free option. So that's first and foremost. And I would say if you're monetized through Mediavine or Raptive, you know, and you're just, you do that, you're going to offer an ad-free version, $3 to $5, you know, you're going to get members. I don't know what it's going to be. It's a, you know, some fraction of your traffic will do this, right? If you look at the programs that have grown past $15,000 in sales through their membership program, 100% of them are creating new content for members only that's gated. It's not—

it's not just like an ad-free.

Exactly. So if you're just ad-free, you set it and forget it. You might make a couple hundred a month, which is thousands per year. You might make at a high end if you have a ton of traffic and we help you implement a good funnel that's passive. You might get to $15,000 to $20,000. You might. But if you're, if you're doing this where, hey, out of the 6 to 8 recipes you create this month, if 2 of those are gated or 1 of those is gated and you are promoting that to both members and non-members, like that's where the growth really comes in. And We tell everyone in terms of expectation settings, this is not going to replace your Raptiv or your MediaVine revenue. However, some of our fastest growing programs are at 10, 15% of their annual earnings from their ad network.

And that's within—

this product's been live for 5 months now.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the other great thing about it, it's predictable in a way that, um, there's some level of predictability with ad revenue, but not as predictable as membership, uh, especially after you've been doing it for a year or two, you can really start to get a feel for the rhythm around it. Um, and it allows you to diversify as well. So if you're only getting ad revenue, we've seen a lot of and heard a lot of stories around businesses having a huge algorithm shift that results in lost traffic, that results in lost revenue. And if you can have another way to market a thing and to earn revenue, it's going to be super beneficial for you.

Exactly.

This is great. It's been super fun. Yeah, go ahead.

I was going to say one thing before we jump. Micah from Joy of the Food is coming on, was really the one who built a funnel around gated recipes that if you look at what those recipes are, it's one paragraph recipe. Plus the recipe card. So hopefully you guys chat about that in your episode.

Love that.

She's, she's off to a great start on memberships. Awesome.

I know that you do a lot of education for creators, helping people understand how all of this is implemented. You know, you talked about your support. I also know that there's kind of like office hour type sessions that you do. Let's say somebody's listening to this, they haven't, you know, moved forward with Grow, or maybe they are using it and they just wanna use it better. What's the best way for maybe a current customer to level up and then for a non, uh, you know, customer of Grow to learn more, potentially take the next step?

Yeah. Every 2 weeks, if you go to our website, grow.co, grow.co, um, we do a kind of office hours webinar thing. So you'll see that right on the homepage. We call it our events page. Um, if you're an existing customer, we also just launched an amazing resource of video tutorials. We've always had great help guides, but people have really been hungry for video tutorials. So if you go to our site, um, under resources, we have, uh, some pretty awesome video guides now on pretty much all the core functionality.

Awesome. And all that can be found at grow.co, which is, if nothing else, really fun to say.

Exactly. Exactly.

That's great. Uh, Ben, it's been fun to follow along with the journey, to to see people using it, having success with the tool, ourselves included. And I appreciate you coming on and a shout out to your podcast as well. If people want to listen to some stories of really great food creators and now probably creators beyond just food who are being smart about growing, you know, their, their following, their revenue, their email, their traffic, all of that. Where would people find that podcast if they want to follow along?

Yeah. So season 1 was called Food Empires. And you can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever.

Awesome. Ben, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Björk. Awesome to be here.

Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts, or share the episode with your community. We'll be back next week with part 2 of our series with Grow with Micah Kenny from Joy to the Food. We're already looking forward to that episode, so we hope you'll tune in. And in the meantime, have a wonderful week.