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

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across common 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 Gro 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 GRO platform. And they’re actually doing an office hour session soon. So if you want to see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at gro.co, that’s G-R-O.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 gro.co promo code podcast.

Emily Walker: 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 three-part series with Gro, formerly known as Grocers List with the founder of Gro Ben Jabowi. 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 Gro have sent over 100 million DMs across Instagram and Facebook on behalf of their food creator customers. That kind of skill 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. Bjork 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 Gro’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 Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Ben, welcome back to the podcast.

Ben Jabbawy: Thanks so much, Bjork. Awesome to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you did a podcast before your previous business, you built and sold a business. You’re now doing a podcast with Gro. We’re going to talk about that, Grocer’s List to Gro. So this is second nature for you. Sometimes people get on, they’re like, “I’ve never done a podcast before. You’ve done many podcasts before. You have experience with this. We’re going to talk about a lot of different things today. You are deeply embedded in the world of food, but we’re going to 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 Gro. There’s a big transition happening in name. In product, it will look the same. It’ll operate the same, but give people a little bit of a update on what’s happening here with Gro.

Ben Jabbawy: 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 grocers 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 all the fuss. It turns out that’s the least interesting thing that has happened at Grocers List over the last two years. And what people really cared about, and this is very 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’s working also when something’s not working. Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: You got to be careful. Double-edged sword. Yeah.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly. And so I think we’ve been referred to content creators in fashion, in gardening. We have a huge crochet group of creators that 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? ” Because I’m not posting recipes. And so obviously our roots and our focus has been on food and we’re not changing course there, but I think 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 lets us put our best foot forward on where we’re headed.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing that I love about it, it honors where you’re coming from in that it ties back to the original name and it also projects forward what you’re going to be focusing on, which is growing, growing revenue, growing traffic, growing email. We’re going to be talking about what’s working well for all three of those things. But one thing that I want to 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 just kind of some random name that they come up with. I’m talking about in the world of 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.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s been cool to see you and your team build something that 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 because the tool works, but it does start to matter if somebody who 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 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 Gro? Will that stay the same? And if you are somebody who is a crafter or somebody who wants to have some type of DM feature that goes out for maybe they’re a food creator but they do something around travel, will there be an option to change the messaging within a DM that goes out?

Bjork Ostrom: What will that look like?

Ben Jabbawy: So for a while now, every word that gets included in your DMs or if you’re using our safety email feature is customizable. About six months ago we just quietly got, well, I shouldn’t say we got rid of the word recipe. 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 an Amazon link that is just of the shorts that they’re wearing. I mean, 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.

Ben Jabbawy: And so that’ll still be there.That’s a pretty cool concept. I think for a number of reasons, online grocery isn’t exactly where 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 do love that

Bjork Ostrom: Feature. That’s great. So for food creators to know the expansion from a market focus doesn’t mean that things will become 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 growing traffic, growing revenue and growing email. You’ve seen inside a lot of companies, creator companies, and you’ve been able to witness people using the tool in ways that are having a big impact. 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?

Ben Jabbawy: Let’s start with traffic. I think that’s primarily how this community is monetizing. So we just hit a huge milestone. We’ve now sent a hundred million direct messages across Instagram and Facebook for our customers. And I think it gives us a really unique lens into what’s working, like you said. And I think if you looked two years ago at where that traffic was coming from, it was coming from the feed. These are posts, these are reels. 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 even just two or three years ago, you might’ve 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 can post a Roundup on Instagram that includes like five to 10 images and you swipe through it in the feed, that has been really effective in the feed.

Ben Jabbawy: We have also seen, and 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 again, two 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, Facebook’s promoting these things, there’s great engagement on this comment for DM works to drive traffic on Facebook. So that’s the second thing. And then the third is something that I know you’ve probably seen and people have talked about, but is this concept of story reply and we’ve seen across those hundred million DMs, the traffic we’ve generated, 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,

Bjork Ostrom: Which is

Ben Jabbawy: Pretty amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Let’s talk about each one of those. Carousels is interesting. It’s such a great example of two years ago it’s like, man, what is the next thing going to be? Because it feels like video. Video is the end. It’s always going to be video and that’s going to be the focus. But we also 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 is like, well, it’s probably going to be this for a long time. And then, well, it’s not 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. So talk about that as it relates to Gro.

Bjork Ostrom: 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? Because 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?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. So I think in a world where most posts in the feed have shifted to video, 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 the carousel and you can swipe through. I think that alone helps. But in terms of why I think carousels are performing so well, on you actually have different tools at your disposal to stop the scroll with a hook. It’s an image so you can determine what’s the first image. Is it in food? Is it the completed recipe? Is it the partially completed ingredients behind the scenes? But you also can use an overlay of text. 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.

Ben Jabbawy: 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? 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 telling the story. So I think there’s different types of flows that are working well. The other thing just mechanically in the feed that’s worth talking about is

Ben Jabbawy: If I’m your follower and I see your carousel right now, maybe I flip through the first two 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, you might get another at bat, so to speak, where

Ben Jabbawy: It’s immediately loaded to slide three because I stopped at slide two and you’re kind of getting multiple at bats in the feed, which is pretty powerful. And then 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 when they were doing their Trader Joe’s meal plans, those performed really well. But think about a carousel post of five recipes. Hey, Mother’s Day’s coming up, what’s the five dishes from your site that you’re going to be cooking or Memorial Day or July 4th. So grab five images, you already have them on your phone probably, post those in the feed as a carousel and then that’s super exciting because you have an excuse for why you’re posting that now, the seasonal calendar.

Ben Jabbawy: 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 set up to mimic that with the nice images of the five to 10 recipes that you’ve just shared in your feed.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that’s the deliverable, the conversion that happens on those. So 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 for people who comment whatever the comment word is, what that looks like for them when it’s delivered?

Ben Jabbawy: 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 carousel of visual DM cards that you’ve set up in advance in your account with Gro to 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. So if you have a 70% click-through rate on your DMs with Gro, you layer in more things

Bjork Ostrom: To click- Multiple options to click. Yeah.

Ben Jabbawy: 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 an easier to execute post in the feed if you’re just struggling with what to come up with and it actually performs really well from a click-through rate perspective too.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 posting about gadgets, it’s like you can’t go back three years and include in social media content a post that you did about an iPhone from three years ago, but because we’re in the world of recipe content, we can reach back and pull this 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 see the playlists. And for food creators who have a large bank of content, one of the value ads 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.

Bjork Ostrom: It might be quick summer meals, like if your family’s busy, you’re involved in a bunch of sports and stuff, here’s my quick healthy summer meals on the go or something like that. 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 something to experiment with if you haven’t yet and probably could even be a natural part of your rhythm. Once a week on Sunday you’re doing a roundup of meal plan roundup or whatever it might be. It’s something that we’ve found to be super helpful.

Ben Jabbawy: Absolutely. Even if you have five or six reels that have performed really well in the last three months, try setting those up as a carousel post in your feed. 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.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. I love that. So the second one, remind me what the second one was, story DMs or- We talked

Ben Jabbawy: About story reply and Facebook too, but …

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah. So Facebook, one of the interesting things with Facebook as the number two 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’ve been trained to comment like recipe or whatever it might be. So we need to make sure we’re capturing both considerations, 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. How do you recommend doing that with Facebook, knowing that it’s a little bit different?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. So our guidance on Facebook has actually changed from a year ago, let’s say. So a year ago 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 four, six 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.

Ben Jabbawy: 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

Bjork Ostrom: That’s

Ben Jabbawy: Our recommendation.

Bjork Ostrom: I think this is really important to point out because what you’re saying is one of the great things about Gro is the simplicity. The simplicity specifically around being able to include a link and grow recognizing and making the connection and then sending a DM when somebody comments, whatever the word is. So you’re not having to, 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 Gro are solopreneurs or they have a small team. They don’t want to be full-time marketers sitting in a tool and creating these automations. But in order for that to work previously in Facebook, you had to leave the comment, 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 and potentially 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?

Bjork Ostrom: But now what you’re saying is Gro understands if you leave a comment with a link, 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 Gro will understand that that link is there and then send the DM tool. So you kind of get the best of both worlds, so you get traffic from both spots.

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s been a huge shift internally in 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. And so for many of our customers, there’s been no change in behavior and it just works. And for some that were cross posting from Instagram with the link and the caption to Facebook, they’ve changed their behavior a little bit for Facebook.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. We have a couple great interviews on Facebook growth. So go back and check those for anybody listening. We’ll link to them in the show notes, but it’s been interesting to see the rise in 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 creators are seeing a lot of great traction with Facebook 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.

Ben Jabbawy: 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. So 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 storyframe has the link sticker in it and everyone can add a link sticker, the reach goes down because Instagram or Meta notes- Same idea. Yeah, same concept. Traffic’s leaving the platform.

Bjork Ostrom: We don’t want people to leave.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly. And so what happens with story replies is rather than include the link sticker, you’re just either face to 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 or they know about this and they’re happy with it. But what happens is if you start a new set of stories with that, there’s no link sticker and what Instagram sees is, oh wow, here’s York’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.

Ben Jabbawy: I have had so many conversations with customers where they poo-poo it and then they finally try it and they’re like, I’m not going to square, but they’re like, holy crap, and that was insane. And I’m talking like if a normal story gets 5,000 views, this might get 100,000 plus. We had a customer, Sally’s Baking Addiction, who switched over and was 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 totally blown away. I think if you’re in the rhythm of posting stories daily and you haven’t tried this yet, I totally get why, but it’s very rare on Meta that there’s something that can have that big of an impact. So I would just say there’s a reason you’re seeing, especially in food, so many content creators doing this right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Low risk to just try, experiment, see what it’s like. 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 going to be issues. If you’re only thinking about how do I create the most value, you You’d have a site that has no ads because it’s going to look faster. It’s going to be less intrusive. You would post everything free.You wouldn’t have subscriptions or there’d never be ask for costs or a payment for anything. And so the initial pushback my guess is that people would say, “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 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?” And I think 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.

Bjork Ostrom: 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 switched 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. I also think

Ben Jabbawy: One thing I just want to say is you mentioned four to five times more traffic. We have Micah from Joy to the Food coming on as part of this series and I think she’s 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.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh yeah, great. Okay. So even more so.

Ben Jabbawy: Massive. Yeah. We even have other customers on Brandy from Stay Snatched told me that literally her feed is dead and all the traffic she drives comes from story or reply on social. Cool. So it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Crazy. 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 Pinch of Yum coming from me interviewing people, is if you can take away one of these an episode, which oftentimes I will, even for our conversation, Ben, I’ll go back to Lindsay and Jenna on the team and be like, “Hey, let’s experiment with this 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. It’s one of the valuable things that comes from you getting the inside knowledge and expertise from seeing hundreds of creators creating thousands of pieces of content, tens of thousands of piece of content. So that’s kind of in the realm of traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s how we think often, that’s how we speak often. What do you want to talk about next? Because we can talk about email growth and we can also talk about revenue growth, both of which are really important.

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. Let’s do a quick update on list growth and then we’ll get into revenue. So I think hopefully most people are familiar with this concept of safety email. I know in food, a lot of people have that option on their recipe posts and 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 kind of automatically syncs it to Kit or Flowdesk or Mail or Lite, 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 so that they become subscribers. So it actually performs better than a pop-up on your website in terms of opt-in rate.

Ben Jabbawy: 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. And that doesn’t even include traffic that you’re going to drive from that subscriber by adding them to your welcome series. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Over the next five years or whatever it might

Ben Jabbawy: Be. Exactly. So huge, huge impact and it’s just you turn it on once and you forget it.

Bjork Ostrom: And a quick thing, in addition to email that’s important, if you’re with Raptive, Kit has this integration automatically. Any click that you get from an email subscriber is going to be more valuable from an ad perspective because it’s going to have first party data with it. So most people are aware of this, but if you’re not, you want to make sure that you are appending some special characters onto the end of a URL within the emails you’re sending, which Kit has this integration automatically, I think with MediaFind and with Raptive 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

Ben Jabbawy: Continue what you’re saying. No, that’s huge. The other playbook that formed actually when Lindsay came on the podcast about a year ago when she first started using Gro, 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 to deliver a more valuable resource. And so the way that they would do that is I think Jenna 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 meal plan on this post, send them a link from Instagram moving them to the Kit landing page. I want to 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.

Ben Jabbawy: The big update though over the last two 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-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like friction, results and drop-off. Yeah.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly. Friction and think about the time it takes the content creator to set that whole thing up,

Bjork Ostrom: Right? Yeah. On both end, there’s friction. It’s friction for the creator and friction for the user. Yeah. But it worked well. So

Ben Jabbawy: Well,

Bjork Ostrom: Worth it. It worked so

Ben Jabbawy: Well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ben Jabbawy: But in the spirit of Gro, 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 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 Gro that asks for the email first.

Bjork Ostrom: Within the chat.

Ben Jabbawy: Within the chat.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally

Ben Jabbawy: 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 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 maybe an hour or two of setup to maybe five minutes if you’re doing it all from Gro. And most importantly, the opt-in rate. So you’re going from 70% of people will click and then 50% of those people will opt in to the landing page to 40%, 50% of people will opt in directly inside the chat without leaving the chat.

Bjork Ostrom: 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, comment meal plans to be able to 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 browser and Instagram that they have to load. Maybe the form isn’t above the fold or

Bjork Ostrom: Not optimized. Whereas now what you’re saying is people comment meal plans, they get a little message in their DM and then 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, if it’s kit or whatever email service provider you use all within the chat interface. And so it’s huge reduction of friction. 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. ”

Ben Jabbawy: And on top of that, with Gro, your DM has awareness if this person has previously used your save to email feature. And so if Bjork comments meal plan on your post and we already have his email for your account, you can just actually skip prompting Bjork a second time and just say, “Thanks, you’re all set.” Here’s your PDF.

Bjork Ostrom: 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.

Ben Jabbawy: Save time, grow your list faster, try the lead magnets inside of Gro now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Another quick thing worth mentioning is that the DM cards that people receive will also, if you want, have the ability to have the recipe emailed. Do you want to talk about that real quick?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. So 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 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. And you end up getting more traffic from that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: 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. Might be a dollar, 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.” If we are strategic in sending out three 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 ton of value in building your email list.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s talk about revenue. The Gro team has launched a pretty cool product that people are using and creating significant revenue from integrating into their site. Talk a little bit about what that is and how that works.

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. There were two trends that we saw. One was a lot of content creators tell us that their audience asked them if there’s any way to enjoy the recipe or whatever without ads. They ask that unknowing that the ads business fuels this industry. 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 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.

Ben Jabbawy: So when we started hearing a lot of these things, we said, “Wow, why hasn’t anyone just made it easier to execute that type of Substacky experience on top of the WordPress site?” And so it turns out it’s hard and WordPress is complex and the ad model is complex and technically and there’s just a lot of stuff. So we spent maybe six months building this out. We now have over 50 membership programs live, most of those in food, some in other verticals and we’re integrated on the backend with MediaBuying and Raptive 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 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.

Ben Jabbawy: If you want additionally, a lot of our content creators that are growing quickly with this product are setting aside handfuls of recipes or creating new recipes that they have a configuration in WordPress where they can decide, “Hey, this recipe out of my thousand, these five are going to be gated to members only.”

Bjork Ostrom: 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 kind of marketing model, which is 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. ” But same idea, just doing it all through your site. So how does that work? If you’re a visitor then you come to the site, 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 a premium Substack newsletter would look like where you have the gated part that you have to click on and sign up?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. So the content creator, we give a handful of options. If they are going to gate content, they can choose to gate the entire post in which case when you land there, could be after five seconds or after you scroll 50%, you can determine how your gate works. They’re prompted with 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 recipe and that would work for WPRM or Tasty or any of those. So you really have some choice. 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

Bjork Ostrom: It. Talk about how great it is, why you like it.

Ben Jabbawy: You’re still getting ad revenue and then if they decide they want to cook it, that’s a great hook to start a

Bjork Ostrom: Trial

Ben Jabbawy: On your membership.

Bjork Ostrom: What are you seeing in terms of price points that people are asking $5 a month, $20 a month? What does that look like? And do you have a recommendation?

Ben Jabbawy: I think there’s two categories. We have a bunch of programs live that are just offering ad free. I would say those are transacting between three 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, all this stuff, that’s where we’ve seen price points go higher. 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 it’s really like we would coach you on price points if this is anything you’re interested in exploring, but on the low end for ad-free, it’s probably 30 to 50 bucks. On the high end for a whole experience, it’s 50 to probably 70s is the highest we’ve seen so far, like I said.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think it was about the recent one that made it successful?

Ben Jabbawy: 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. And then on top of that, she had basically a category of recipe content that she loves but hasn’t performed well in Google that she kind of took a few days to reorient around, “Hey, this is going to be stuff that I’m excited to promote. These are recipes that I love, but I don’t really care about chasing Google for them.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, 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 such a refreshing thing, especially for people who hate the process of 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, what you’ll find is you’ll have some people who really love what you’re doing and you’ll be able to get those signups.

Bjork Ostrom: 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, $100,000 a year thing for me. ” What would your guidance be for people around expectations if that is even fair? Obviously there’s a lot of variables there, but …

Ben Jabbawy: 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 pag on your WordPress that talks about the membership. It doesn’t need to be long, doesn’t need to be fancy, you don’t need a developer. We can help you with that. That’s the page that gets hooked up to the checkout process from Gro and that needs to be linked somewhere prevalent ideally in your top navigation. 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.

Ben Jabbawy: And so it’s like one or two hours to get this live. Again, big part of Gro is our support, 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 Raptive and you do that, you’re going to offer an ad free version, three to five bucks, you’re going to get members. I don’t know what it’s going to be. Some fraction of your traffic will do this. 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.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a product. It’s not just like ad-free.

Ben Jabbawy: 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 to 20, you might. But if you’re doing this where, hey, out of the six to eight recipes you create this month, if two of those are gated or one of those is gated and you are promoting that to both members and non-members, that’s where the growth really comes in. And we tell everyone in terms of expectation settings, this is not going to replace your Raptive or your media buying revenue. However, some of our fastest growing programs are at 10, 15% of their annual earnings from their ad network.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s within-

Ben Jabbawy: This product’s been live for five months now?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The other great thing about it, it’s predictable in a way that there’s some level of predictability with ad revenue, but not as predictable as membership, especially after you’ve been doing it for a year or two, you can really start to get a fee for the rhythm around it 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.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: This is great. It’s been super fun. Yeah, go ahead. Lastly-

Ben Jabbawy: I was going to say one thing before we jump

Bjork Ostrom: Mika

Ben Jabbawy: From Joy of the Food who’s 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.

Bjork Ostrom: Love that.

Ben Jabbawy: She’s off to a great start on memberships.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. I know that you do a lot of education for creators, helping people understand how all of this is implemented. 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 moved forward with Gro, or maybe they are using it and they just want to use it better. What’s the best way for maybe a current customer to level up and then for a non-customer of Gro to learn more, potentially take the next step?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. Every two weeks, if you go to our website, Gro gro.co, gro.co, we do a kind of office hours webinar thing. So you’ll see that right on the homepage. We call it our events page. If you’re an existing customer, we also just launched a 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 under resources, we have some pretty awesome video guides now on pretty much all the core functionality.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. And all that can be found gro.co, which is if nothing else, really fun to say.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Exactly. That’s great. Ben, it’s been fun to follow along with the journey, 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, they’re following their revenue, their email, their traffic, all of that. Where would people find that podcast if they want to follow along?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. So season one was called Food Empires and you can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Ben, thanks for coming on.

Ben Jabbawy: Thanks, Bjork. Awesome to be here.

Emily Walker: 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 two of our series with Gro with Mika Kenney 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.