Increase Ready-to-Engage Traffic to Your Blog

Food Blogger Pro is an online membership community that helps creative foodies achieve their dreams of building a profitable food blog and online food businesses. They offer tried and tested strategies, insight into important trends, and behind-the-scenes conversations with top experts. 

But when it came to connecting with new subscribers via email, they couldn’t nail down the right strategy, what to say to their readers, or how to promote their paid membership.

“I love writing, but writing emails that consistently convert is a whole other beast. Finding the right lingo and the right features to highlight is the tricky part for me.“

“We’d love to be able to start a conversation with our potential members and prove the value of a membership with an email campaign without asking for people to join all up front.”
— Alexa Peduzzi, General Manager of Food Blogger Pro

They saw a ton of potential in email marketing and knew that a solid strategy could help them achieve business goals — like boosting membership enrollment and building deeper relationships with readers. However, they had put very little energy into keeping their list of 22,000+ subscribers warm, engaged and growing. 

Plus, they had a stagnant (ahem, outdated) welcome sequence that no longer reflected how the membership community had evolved since those emails were first written.

“We realized we were often talking about emails that needed to be written or copy that could be improved, but we were dragging our feet. We needed someone to help move the ball forward.”
— Bjork Ostrom, Founder of Food Blogger Pro

That’s where I came in to help Bjork and Alexa create a purposeful email marketing strategy – one that engages and serves new subscribers on autopilot while clearly introducing the benefits of becoming a Food Blogger Pro member.

I had worked on a similar project in 2020 for their sister company, Pinch of Yum, so when Bjork and Alexa reached out to me, they knew what was possible for the Food Blogger Pro email list. We needed to get their email marketing in better shape and finally get it working for them.

A research-first approach takes the guesswork out email marketing

To kick things off, we did an audit to assess Food Blogger Pro’s current email marketing efforts — their sequences, branding, tech and email platform setup, the new customer journey, and more. By clarifying their brand and business goals, I had a valuable baseline that allowed me to provide them with specific, personalized recommendations to improve their new subscriber experience.

As we continued working together through my done-for-you service, the Duett Debut, we surveyed Food Blogger Pro’s audience (both their current members and any non-members on their list) and we discovered that:

1. Readers started their food blog because they wanted to make money while sharing their passion with the world.
2. Their audience’s biggest pain point is not having enough time to learn and implement all of the things it takes to grow a successful blog.
3. Food Blogger Pro dramatically shortens the learning curve by offering expert strategies, community, and accountability in one place.

Because of our research, we knew exactly what to say in the welcome and sales email sequences to grab (and keep!) their attention, address some of their biggest frustrations and fears with blogging, and show how joining the membership could bring their big blogging dreams into reality.

“Honestly, that strategy piece is huge. We were just guessing when it came to putting together emails for our list. I feel like you can’t understand your audience enough.”
— Alexa

Segmented email sequences add a personal touch, boosting long term engagement

Research was only the first step in Food Blogger Pro’s new email marketing strategy. To boost engagement and lead readers to their paid offers, we mapped out the entire flow of the welcome and nurture sequences.

Segmenting their new subscribers ensures that each one receives personalized content that speaks to their unique challenges, current mindset, and goals for where they want their blog to go next. The content is specific to the reader. And, thanks to deep audience research insights, the email copy feels less forced and more like the solution their readers need.

“I love that we’re not blindly sending emails to our entire email list, hoping that what we’re saying will resonate. We’ve asked our list what they want, what their goals are, and what they’re interested in, so we’re sending them exactly that!”
— Alexa

The benefits of automated email sequences are ongoing

Before we worked together, the Food Blogger Pro team didn’t have the bandwidth to learn how to write emails that resonated with their audience (or set them up in their email service provider to function properly). Now, they have a killer email marketing strategy that connects and converts subscribers on autopilot.

“I can’t tell you how valuable it is to not have to juggle all of the marketing balls myself.”
— Alexa

Thanks to an audience-focused, research-backed strategy, Food Blogger Pro has seen a 1000% increase in site traffic from emails between January 2020 and January 2021! And, in the first three months of 2021, traffic increased 100% compared to 2020-Q4. 

Not only that, in less than one year of the automations going live, these new emails have boosted new member enrollment sign-ups and increased sales revenue by over $7900 (much of which will be recurring revenue, since it’s a membership fee).

Nurtured subscribers develop trust, brand awareness, and take actions that lead toward sales

With their new automated nurture sequences, Food Blogger Pro experienced:

• A 1000% increase in site traffic from email (Jan. 2020 vs. Jan 2021)
• 10% of all new subscribers clicking through to the Food Blogger Pro membership sales page via the New Subscriber Welcome email sequence
• 3,994 unique membership sales page visits within one calendar year (July 2020-August 2021)
• Over $7900 in sales from new member enrollment directly attributed to strategic welcome and sales sequences (all within the first year of the sequences going live)
• An average open rate of 45% on general newsletter emails (an increase of over 20% than prior to having a welcome and nurture sequence created)

“That’s a testament to the way Allea writes emails. She gets people excited to learn more.”
— Alexa

Beyond these impressive stats, there were rich, intangible benefits of our partnership — like how easy it felt to delegate this project because our business and personal values were aligned.

“When I think about working with people, there is the deliverable, which is important. But there are also the hard to define elements, like what it’s like relationally. Allea is someone who is good to work with. You can trust her to do the things that she says she’s going to do, to show up and work really hard for you, and is a really positive person as well. You can’t put a stat around that stuff, but it’s important.”
— Bjork