FreezerFit.com is an online cooking membership site with more than 10,000 paying members that sells access to 500+ freezer meal recipes, at-home workouts, cookbooks, and more.

ZWE Marketing partnered with this company at the ground floor. There was no website, no followers, no customers, no real business plan… not even a logo. It was simply a great idea which needed structure and an engine for generating sales. Our team, having worked with almost 100 small business clients over a span of about a decade, decided to put our tried-and-true social media marketing strategies towards something we had real ownership of. After all, what better way to prove to our clients (and potential clients) that we stand by what we sell, than risking our own money to deliver those same promised results for ourselves? While we had worked with restaurants, we had never worked in the online food niche before, but we believed our strategies could apply to any industry and wanted a chance to prove it. And so, we did. Here’s how.

STEP 1: CREATING A MEMBERSHIP WEBSITE

Our development team went to work, creating the most intricate website we have ever built. This website needed a level of customization which we had not previously come across as each recipe, from serving size to cooking instructions, needed to be customizable for each individual member based on the number of people they cook for. The customization didn’t stop there, as each member needed to be able to print or download their shopping list from their list of custom recipes. All the ingredient totals needed to be added up and then separated into the aisle that members could find them in at their local grocery store. In addition to all of this, this website needed to include custom search categories for diet-type, cooking method, cuisine, etc, a multi-tier membership system for add-ons such as at-home workouts which cost more than the base membership, full store functionality with PayPal and Stripe integration, and one-click upsell functionality for items to be added to the cart after payment had been inputted and approved, but prior to the processor accepting it. We completed this process ahead of schedule and under budget.

STEP 2: COMING UP WITH AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER

This is where we put our creative minds to work. We studied the industry and brainstormed what we could offer to prospective customers that would entice them to give the membership a try. To do that, we needed to increase the perceived value and decrease the barriers to entry when compared to the business strategies used by competitors in the space. In the end, we decided to offer a free 30-minute cooking class where FreezerFit’s head chef showed attendees how to prepare 10 freezable meals all at once. If an attendee stayed till the very end of the class, they would receive a free cookbook directly to their email inbox.

This did a few things for us.

1) It made it easy to collect data on who our audience really was. With an offer this good and a $0 cost to the consumer, we knew we would receive a ton of leads as potential customers would freely give their email address in exchange for the pre-recorded class and cookbook. This email address would be critical for future marketing efforts.

2) The 30-minute class gave us sufficient time to pitch the membership. It allowed potential customers to see in real time how this membership could help them save time in the kitchen and money at the grocery store for life. By only guaranteeing the cookbook (the higher perceived value item) for those who stayed until the very end, this locked the audience into fully immersing themselves in the experience and showing them everything we wanted to show them about the membership.

3) We knew that this offer would go viral. We knew we would get likes, clicks, and follows. Most importantly, we knew that people would tag their friends in the comments without us asking them to do so, thus giving us a massive amount of free marketing.

If you’re marketing anything online, creating a scalable offer that is more irresistible than any offer put out by your competitors is a massive competitive advantage that will ignite the performance of your ads and will serves as rocket fuel for your business. We were able to do exactly that with FreezerFit.

STEP 3: DEVELOPING A LEAD SEGMENTATION SYSTEM

Lead segmentation is a critical component to any well-run business because it makes your marketing that much more personal to potential customers. With FreezerFit, we needed to make sure the leads we were about to get from our “irresistible offer” would be placed into proper categories of interest so that our messaging would clearly address the specific pain points they face which lead them to be interested in our product in the first place. We also knew that they would need to be categorized by the point they were at in the sales process so that our messaging applied directly to them.

We decided to segment our leads in the following three ways:

1) We decided that our irresistible offer, consisting of a free cookbook and free cooking class, should be divided up by diet-type. In other words, we would be doing a Keto cooking class and cookbook, a Vegan cooking class and cookbook, and a general healthy-eating cooking class and cookbook.

2) We decided that there should be a poll that popped up in the middle of our pre-recorded cooking classes that asked if attendees were most interested in saving time, saving money, or eating healthy.

3) We decided to segment leads by those who had signed up for a cooking class but not attended, those who had signed up and attended a cooking class but not purchased, those who had purchased a membership but not purchased one of our various upsells (like our at-home workouts or a discounted gift card), and those who had purchased the membership and an upsell. We knew that by separating these leads into all these various groups, our messaging would be laser-focused and clearly speak to the audience that they were intended to speak to. By clearly identifying pain points and segmenting them into a proper system, our sales conversion rate for FreezerFit went through the roof.

STEP 4: RUNNING THE ADS

Now that we had a great product, an irresistible offer for generating leads, and an effective backend system for organizing the data, it was time to turn on the traffic. We started with Facebook and Instagram ads because our product was best explained in video format. Facebook advertising is fantastic for this niche (and many others) because it allows you to micro-target by certain characteristics. Based on our initial research, we knew our audience would strongly lean female, a little older, and be fans of cooking. Facebook allowed us to target this exact audience.

We also created a large variety of ads to “split-test” which called out a number of different pain points and customer characteristics. For example, we had ads that focused on Costco shoppers who were looking to no longer spend an hour per day in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning. We had ads that focused on diabetics who were looking for sugar-free recipes. We had ads that focused on moms looking to save thousands of dollars a year by buying their food in bulk. You name it, we tested it.

As the leads poured in, our Facebook “pixel” started to learn who our potential customers were. We could “retarget” people who watched, liked, or commented on our ads with more ads. We also were able to build what Facebook calls “Look-a-Like” audiences, by targeting people who had similar characteristics to the people who were interacting with our ads. It’s important to note, this process took some time. Contrary to popular belief, running social media ads is never just turning on the faucet and printing money. However, with proper campaign management, we were able to dissect the data and continuously make improvements until our ads became wildly profitable.

While the techniques are different on every social media platform, we took this same overall strategy to Google, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. Some things worked, some things didn’t. The important thing was we were able to identify what worked and what didn’t early on so that we could cut out the things that didn’t work and aggressively scale the things that did.

STEP 5: EMAIL AUTOMATION

They say the average potential customer must see a message seven times before they’ll be provoked to take an action. Our ads were cooking, no pun intended. We were getting a huge amount of leads at an affordable price, and we were profitable on the front-end. While our margins were good, we knew that it wasn’t sustainable because of our extensive experience running ads for our clients. With social media marketing, platforms like Facebook already know who the hottest potential leads are for any given audience. Once their algorithm figures out who that audience really is, they will show your ads first to the people most likely to buy. This is intended to ensure you get results and thus, spend more of your ad dollars with them. It’s a great feeling, but it’s short-lived, and far from scalable. We needed a system of follow-up that consistently gave value to the people that don’t buy something online every day. We needed to consistently remind them of who we were and, most importantly, why our product could really help them. We did this through email automation.

With extremely segmented lists, we were able to fill the email inboxes of our leads with value. These emails addressed the specific problems that they shared with us which they were hoping FreezerFit could help them solve. We included cookbooks, videos, advice, testimonials and stories from people experiencing similar pain points, and more. There were dozens of emails which sent every other day to encourage the potential customer to decide to join the membership and solve their problems. Best of all, our leads did not view these emails as spam. Why? We led with value first and asked for the sale last. Ironically enough, the old saying rang true for our business as well, as the average buyer purchased after one ad and six emails (seven total touchpoints). Email automation turned FreezerFit into the scalable, 7,500+ member business that it is today.

WHAT DOES FREEZERFIT’S SUCCESS MEAN FOR YOU?

No two businesses are exactly alike, but as we have proven time and time again, the overall strategies behind effective digital marketing can be extremely similar. We’ve run ads for 100+ small businesses using the exact same strategies we used for FreezerFit. If we didn’t fully stand by these strategies, we would never put our money where our mouth is and risk our own money using them on our own business. These strategies worked for FreezerFit and they will work for your business too. Schedule a free consultation with our team and we’ll show you how.