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Based on our experience, the right food and beverage marketing strategies can turn your direct-to-consumer efforts into one of your most profitable channels. We know this because we’ve actually worked with many of the fastest growing 7-8 figure food and beverage brands online such as Kettle & Fire, Verb Energy, and Drink02.
We’ve seen what it’s like to deal with the naturally low average order value, low profit margins, fast approaching expiration dates, and potentially high shipping costs most brands experience in this space. But we’ve also found that if you focus on the strengths behind the food and beverage business model, growth is virtually guaranteed.
Food and beverage marketing really comes down to 3 steps.
Most food and beverage brands will try to outperform with one, but if you focus on improving each step, even by a little, you’ll be able to grow faster than competitors with less stress and less resources. This is true whether you sell cauliflower cheese puffs or plain ol’ cans of water.
The trick to making all of this work is using the right tactics.
For food and beverage brands, there is nothing more important than having the right offer because the right offer determines if all of your paid advertising is profitable or not.
So what does the “right offer” look like?
At the beginning, you’re looking for products with a high enough margin and high enough average order value, plus a strong USP. These will be the safest offers to test first.
With that said, this is where most food and beverage brands start and end.
Big mistake.
What you really want to do is test “cohorts”.
The little known secret behind customer acquisition is that the way visitors become purchasers has a direct correlation in how much they’ll end up spending with you in the future. This means some offers will lead to a high LTV and others will lead to a low LTV.
Considering food and beverage products naturally have low margins and low average order value, finding these high lifetime value cohorts should become your top priority.
Once you do find them, you’ll want to spend most of your ad budget on them.
Some categories were made for ad creative.
Food and beverage is one of those categories.
Food and beverage content is some of the most popular types of content on the internet because of how visually appealing they can be even though it’s a product you have to taste to get the full experience. All it takes is a slow-mo of melted cheese to crave it again!
Take advantage of this.
You’ll also want to combine these visuals with direct response principles.
For example, if your USP is Keto-friendly cauliflower chips, say it in your ads. Maybe you have a great customer testimonial or even your own version of The Pepsi Challenge. And in some cases, you may want double blind scientific studies to prove that your product is actually healthier than your competitor’s products (this is also one of the best supplement marketing strategies you can use).
In other words, great visuals with great direct response is the key to getting new customers.
With enough testing, you can find multiple winning ads that will grow your brand.
Paid advertising is a game of data and math.
For it to work correctly, you have to gather enough data so that the AI knows how and where to best place your ads. When it comes to Facebook specifically, they say your goal should be 50 conversions per week for best results.
This means you can’t have 100 different ads on.
Most ecommerce brands can’t afford 50 conversions per week across that many ads.
Instead, you’re much better off combining your ads into ad sets that test between angles, offers, and audiences. By pouring more money into fewer, but more impactful ad sets, you’ll be able to hit those conversion numbers with your existing budget, which in turn will lead to better customers at a lower cost.
With that said, this isn’t just a Facebook thing.
You should apply this ad account structure across all of your paid advertising efforts, regardless of what channel you’re using.
Facebook, TikTok, Youtube…etc
They all use AI and they all become way more profitable when you feed them more data.
Ad accounts that bring in more data will bring in more profitable customers.
When most people think of SEO, they think of ranking for articles. But that’s not where your SEO strategy should start. Instead, you want to build around branded search first.
Branded search is when people are literally typing your brand name into Google.
This is the highest intent visitor you can possibly attract because they’re already near the end of the customer journey. They know they have a problem, they know of all the possible solutions, they know about your product’s specific solutions, and now all they need is the deal.
The challenge?
It requires pure demand generation since no one will know your brand name at the start.
However, with a combination of SEO, advertising, email marketing, and more, you’ll naturally get more customers typing in your brand name on Google to find you.
In fact, think of it as a lagging indicator.
You know you’re doing things right if your branded search is going up and to the right.
Most food and beverage brands start with recipes.
This is a great idea, but it’s not where you should start. The goal of SEO is to bring in customers, not visitors. So the best path forward is to start with the highest intent keywords possible. After branded search, this means commercial keywords.
In practice, this means ranking your product and collection pages.
These pages are lovingly called “money pages”
The reason is that people who Google for product and collection pages are ready to buy. In ecommerce SEO, these pages will drive the bulk of your sales directly from the page. So you not only want to optimize them for your ideal keywords, but also send all the link juice you can.
Commercial SEO doesn’t start and end with these pages though.
There are also middle of the funnel articles that convert visitors to customers wll.
People who Google these types of keywords are already deep into the customer journey. So while you won’t get that much traffic from these articles, you’ll still drive more revenue than average.
Once you’ve exhausted all of your middle and bottom of the funnel keywords, which focus on conversions, you can then focus on audience building with top of funnel (TOFU) keywords.
Why audience building?
While top of funnel keywords are usually the lowest converting phrases, they do end up bringing in the most traffic. This means TOFU keywords lend themselves to traffic and list building.
Examples of top of funnel articles include…
Many of these phrases are highly competitive, so you’ll want to focus on long-tail searches.
With that said, food and beverage brands have an advantage here.
Turns out, not only are recipes the most popular search terms in this market, but they also convert relatively well compared to other top of funnel keywords.
The key is to focus on using your product in your recipes.
So if you sell olive oil, the best path for you is to rank recipes that use your olive oil as an ingredient. This is a low key, but highly effective way to promote your products.
For best results, use both recipes and traditional TOFU articles.
The #1 mistake food and beverage brands make is selling undifferentiated products.
The #2 mistake food and beverage brands make is not promoting their differentiation.
When you’re trying to get more conversions, having a rock solid USP on your product pages are critical. That’s why all food and beverage marketing must start with positioning.
For example, Siete started out as a tortilla brand that used Cassava flour as its main ingredient, which was attractive to the healthy eating crowd. Another example is Nightfood, which sells sleep-friendly ice cream for people who like to binge eat at night. And yet another example is Lakanto, which specializes in selling food products that contain monk fruit.
All 3 brands give customers a reason to buy them over competitors.
Strong positioning leads to higher conversion rates, which leads to a lower CAC.
So if you don’t have a USP, find it, and focus your product pages on it.
Product pages are essentially a list of customer objections.
If you answer the right objections in the right order and format, you’ll make the sale.
In the food and beverage space, the main objections tend to revolve around…
So if you sell a salsa, you will want to make sure to use words and visuals to prove your salsa tastes great, is made with healthy ingredients, and can be used in a lot of recipes.
Another popular objection to cover is comparisons.
For example, the keto cereal market exploded in part because it was the opposite of traditional, sugary cereal products. The main way this was promoted was in comparison charts showing keto cereal had way less of the bad stuff compared to traditional cereal.
Not all food and beverage products will be able to use comparisons…
But if your product is comparison-friendly, it’s a must-have.
In any case, you want your product pages to answer these objections using the OCP formula.
Every year, paid advertising gets harder.
There’s always more competition, CPMs are always rising, and now with privacy updates like iOS14 making things even worse for everyone, there’s no room to slack with conversions.
Normally, this means improving your product and collections pages.
However, most food and beverage brands should also test niche landing pages.
By niche landing pages, I mean dedicated landing pages that promote niche angles.
For example, if you sell a health bar, you could create dedicated niche landing pages targeting morning, mid-day, and nighttime snackers separately. You could also create niche landing pages targeting men, women, seniors, professionals, and more. You can even create landing pages to test if your health bar sells to crossfitters, runners, and yoga lovers.
Why?
Message-market match.
The reason why most food and beverage brands tend to sell to general segments of the markets is due to convenience and ease of scaling.
But as customer acquisition costs go up…
The main way to bring them back down is to increase your conversion rate.
Once you find your winning pages, your CAC will go down.
Chances are, you’re probably undercharging for your product.
This is because most food and beverage brands actually underestimate their price elasticity. Because most pricing is based on sheer guesses, there’s rarely ever any testing to see just how much your products can actually go for.
This is why we recommend increasing your prices by 5%, immediately.
It may or it may not work, but it definitely is something every brand should try.
Raising your prices is the single fastest, easiest, and most effective way to boost your average order value. When you do the math, it’s even more effective than upsells or cross-sells since it doesn’t require an additional sale to happen.
Plus, it directly improves your margins.
Every food and beverage brand needs a higher margin.
The best part is that while the upside is big, the downside is almost non-existent. It’s just as fast, simple, and easy to bring your price back down if it doesn’t work out.
If you didn’t know food and beverage products had a low profit margin compared to other categories before you started your brand, well now you know.
Surprisingly, most decide not to do anything about it.
It’s a big reason why so many brands struggle with paid ads.
Talk to any media buyer and they will tell you the dream scenario is to work with a product that has a profit margin of 75% or higher. The higher your food and beverage profit margin, the more breathing room you have, especially as you scale up.
The problem?
Most food and beverage brands aren’t anywhere close.
So the goal when pricing for margin is to get as close to 75% or more.
Some products will get relatively close. Others will still be far away.
It doesn’t matter.
The point is that a 40% profit margin is still better than a 30% profit margin. And you’ll never find out if you can get that 40% profit margin unless you actively test for it.
And if you can’t?
Launch a new version of your flagship product that can command that higher margin.
Pricing IS positioning.
At least, it’s the main way to present your positioning.
You can’t be a premium priced food and beverage brand without premium pricing. You also can’t change your pricing like a “value based” brand would with constant discounting.
In other words, you have to charge more and stick to that price.
This does two things…
1) You increase AOV by charging more
2) You keep your AOV by sticking to it
What many food and beverage brands forget is that discounting is the leading cause of average order value decline.
Sure, you can’t run away from discounts completely…
But if you’re launching products with a higher cost of goods sold because you’re trying to innovate, then positioning is the only thing keeping you in the game. The combination of a high cost of goods sold and low pricing or steep discounting is the fastest way to go out of business.
Instead, you want a price that screams “premium”.
And you want a discount strategy that says “rare”.
“You just won a year’s supply of M&M’s!”
While not seen very much in ecommerce, this is probably one of the most famous ways to bundle food and beverage products.
Of course, I’m not suggesting a literal free giveaway…
But what I am suggesting is that time is a great way to position a bundle because you take the focus away from the actual literal amount and frame it based on the number of days.
For example, let’s say you sell keto muffins and every package lasts 30 days.
You could bundle 3 keto muffins together and say “Buy our 3 pack” and leave it at that. However, while you should keep the actual amount of packages in there, you could also add in “time” by saying they’re getting a 90 day supply of keto muffins.
If you sell delicious products, you may have customers saying it’s all really a 1 day supply.
This is actually a really great testimonial.
With that said, don’t over promise either.
Try to be fair and accurate as to how long people can expect them to last. If a 3 pack of keto muffins is really a 21-day supply, then so be it. The point is the positioning, not the literal time.
Did you know it was Sam Walton that invented the “food sampler”?
He realized that by giving away free food samples, it made customers much more likely to go and buy that food product. So he made it a big part of Walmart’s sales process in the early days.
Of course, this works when you go to the store in-person.
But what about when you’re selling food and beverage products online?
This is where variety packs come in.
While it’s not a perfect alternative, if you offer multiple flavors, you can put them into a single bundle so customers can try them all, decide on their favorites, and then come back for more.
It’s not as low-risk for customers… but they are popular.
Besides, the higher average order value makes it more likely you’ll be profitable with paid ads and the sampling process naturally leads to a higher lifetime value as customers will be able to find their favorite flavor on the first purchase rather than risking a bad experience.
Remember Lunchables?
They were essentially a plate of food items that went well together, put them all in a single package, and then positioned as an entire meal. This same idea of bundling multiple food items to give customers a “complete meal” can be done for your products.
For example, let’s say you sell both protein pancakes and organic honey for those pancakes.
You can and should have a bundle that includes both because it only makes sense for the customer to buy both at the same time, especially if there’s a discount involved. You would then promote it as a “full experience” so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In other words, the key is relevance.
The more relevant the products within the bundle are, the higher the conversion rate.
The higher the conversion rate, the higher your average order value.
“Would you like fries with that?”
This is a common example to show how McDonald’s dominates by training their staff to offer upsells at the point of sale. However, this is an example of a cross-sell. Not an upsell.
“Would you like to get a large for 25 cents more?”
That is a proper upsell.
While confused often with cross-sells, upsells are when you offer “more” of what the customer just bought. This can mean anything from a bigger size to more units of the same SKU.
When done properly, upsells are crazy profitable.
The reason is because of relevance.
Many food and beverage brands assume that if someone buys one of their drinks that it only makes sense to offer customers something else.
They bought the drink. Surely they don’t want to be sold on it again?
Wrong.
The fact that someone bought your drink is the #1 sign that they are willing to buy more of that drink. It’s an indicator of interest rather than an indicator of completion.
You’ll raise your AOV by selling another 3 of the same drink at a 15% off discount.
You can smell a cross-sell from a mile away.
Cross-sells are all about selling complementary products to what customers just bought. The more that other product complements what they just bought, the higher your AOV will be.
For example, Tostitos sells chips and dips.
So when a customer buys one, it makes sense to offer the other.
Of course, they won’t always be as clean as this.
If you’re Banza, once someone buys your chickpea pizza, it still makes sense to cross-sell them your chickpea pasta. They don’t go as well together as chips and dip, but they’re still pretty relevant to your overall chickpea-fueled diet.
You can even cross-sell between different flavors.
Long story short, every food and beverage brand needs to look for every opportunity to cross-sell products if you want to improve your average order value.
Have you ever seen additional products right under the “Add To Cart” button?
This is called a “bump offer”
Bump offers are one of the least used, yet most effective food and beverage marketing tactics you can use if your goal is to boost your average order value.
Typically, bump offers are “add-ons” or relevant cross-sells.
The difference between bump offers and traditional cross-sells though is that the bump offer happens right before the customer decides to add your product to their cart. Think of it like the candy and magazines sold when you’re in line to buy your groceries.
It essentially moves single SKU purchasers to bundle purchasers.
So even if you’re not promoting a bundle, the right bump offers can lead customers to “upgrade” on their own, making it seem like it was their idea.
And like most cross-sells, the more relevant the bump offer, the more likely it’s bought.
Best of all, you can offer multiple products in the bump offer stage, which makes it more likely you’ll get a customer to bite on something rather than nothing.
The welcome flow is the first few emails a non-purchasing subscriber would receive.
In other words, people who sign up through your opt-in box rather than buying.
Personally, I think the welcome flow is one of the most important, if not the most important email flow you can send to a subscriber. Not just because it’s usually one of the top 3 highest earning flows, but also because good welcome flows set the stage for more repeat purchases.
With our clients, we don’t just want sales.
We want to build our positioning, spread awareness of our product line, and then sell.
This way, once customers experience the awesomeness of your product, they’re fully convinced your brand is the number one brand in the category. And once this happens, repeat purchases are almost guaranteed.
Besides, it’s hard to get repeat purchasers if you don’t get the first sale either.
We recommend this flow to be 4-6 emails long.
The closer your flow is to the sale, the higher ROI it is.
This is why your abandonment flows will tend to be the highest converting flows you send, which is also why we recommend you install all 4 if you want the best results.
Site abandonment is a flow for non-purchasers who have been “active on site”. Browse abandonment is a flow for subscribers who have seen a product. Cart abandonment is a flow for subscribers who added a product to their cart, but then left. Checkout abandonment is a flow for subscribers who went through the checkout process, but then left at the last minute.
For these flows, we recommend following the ROI sequence.
In other words, the first email should remind customers what they just saw. The middle email(s) should answer the biggest, obvious objections such as social proof. And then the last email should drive the sale with an incentive.
As you can tell, post-purchase flows are flows you send after someone buys.
Now, depending on what you define as a “post-purchase” flow and what you decide to include in one flow, there are actually multiple types of flows you can consider to be a “post-purchase” flow including UGC, cross-sells, and more.
So for the purpose of this section, we’re going to include it all in there.
Now, post-purchase flows won’t be your most profitable flows, but they are still extremely important as they serve as the onboarding emails for new customers. Plus, when done right, they still drive plenty of sales.
Every food and beverage brand needs at least 2 post-purchase flows
One for first time customers and one for repeat customers.
Each should thank customers for buying, then go into asking customers to do “brand ambassador” activities such as following on social media and getting referrals. With that said, the end goal of a post-purchase flow for new customers is to buy another product, while the end goal of post-purchase flow for repeat customers is to get a subscription.
It’s much easier to make sales when customers already have their wallets out.
We know this because we can see it happening everywhere. For example, Black Friday.
Pretty much all food and beverage brands know that Black Friday is their best time of the year. It’s not because your product changes during Black Friday. It’s just that millions of dollars of advertising and millions of dollars more in publicity, along with decades worth of conditioning, has taught consumers that Black Friday is the time to get the best deals.
The same offer will make 3-5X more on Black Friday than on a regular Friday.
The question is, how do you get Black Friday-results to happen more often?
The answer is to manufacture them when you’re creating your email calendars and then build your campaigns strategy around them to create “revenue peaks” when customers are already inclined to buy.
For example, Mother’s Day is another big day for food and beverage brands.
With that said, there are months you may need to rely on launching new SKUs, months where you’ll want to take advantage of cultural moments like Back To School, and yet other months where you’ll want to promote a huge promotion such as “Christmas In July” discounts.
If you aim for one “peak” every month, you’ll see your revenue grow.
You need to send more emails.
This is shocking news to most food and beverage brands. You may be looking at your own inbox filled with hundreds of unread emails and think to yourself, “I don’t want to annoy my subscribers. So I’m just going to send them when we have something to say.”
Wrong.
After working with tons of clients, we’ve found 2 things to be true.
While most food and beverage brands barely send one email per week, we tell all of our food and beverage clients to send 2-3 emails every week. On top of that, we’ll send an additional 2-3 resends every week to subscribers who didn’t engage. Then when holidays or product launches come around, we’ll send 5+ emails that week.
Yes, it’s possible to send too many emails.
But if you follow the frequency above, you’ll be safe and drive more revenue.
Love using puns and jokes to sell your food and beverage products?
Well, I’m here to tell you that you might as well light your money on fire.
While there’s a time and place to try and be entertaining and funny, the truth is that relying on these elements too much leads to low calorie emails (see what I did there?).
Instead, you want to send emails with substance.
The best kind of substance is answering objections.
In other words, we’ve found the highest converting emails for food and beverage brands to be emails that take away doubt and help customers buy with confidence.
Of course, feel free to be funny to these types of emails.
However, unless you decide to hire a comedian or someone who is just naturally way funnier than the actual person, don’t rely on comedy to make the sale. Heck, even if you do go that route, it’s still more profitable to be funny about objections and their answers.
We’re here to make sales, not make people laugh.
Because most food and beverage brands have low margins and low average order values relative to brands in other categories, LTV means everything to the survival of the business.
The problem?
Most food and beverage brands also think they just have to send emails and text messages to increase their lifetime value, but nothing is further from the truth, and this is coming from an ecommerce email marketing agency!
Email and text messages by themselves improve LTV by a little.
The offer you promote is what ends up determining repeat purchase rate.
So what’s the #1 highest LTV boosting offer?
Subscriptions.
Once you get customers on a subscription, they are typically in for the long-haul. They’ll go from having bought once or twice before to buying for 6+ months straight.
Subscriptions are game-changers.
In fact, most beverage brands wouldn’t survive online if it weren’t for subscriptions.
So once you have a subscription offer ready, you need to promote it through both your flows and campaigns. This means adding it to your post-purchase flows and sending limited time campaigns that get customers to make the switch right now.
Food and beverage customers need a reason to buy more from you.
While you can come up with a million marketing angles to promote over email and SMS, we’ve found the best reason you can give subscribers to buy again is by launching new products.
There is nothing more exciting and compelling than a new SKU.
“NEW! Chocolate flavored keto cookies!”
As the saying goes, the two most popular words in marketing are “new” and “free”. While you should be using the word “free” sparingly, you can use the word “new” relatively often.
Food and beverage brands are also uniquely positioned to do this often.
Many times, it’s cheaper and faster to launch a new flavor than it is to launch a completely different type of product, so there’s opportunity to launch new products with less risk.
Best of all, it’s exactly what repeat purchasers want.
Once someone has become a customer and they enjoyed your product, they’re excited to try all the new stuff you have because if what they tried was great, imagine everything else.
Every food and beverage brand needs a strong product launch strategy.
“10 more points and get 10% off your next order”
You’ve probably seen this pitch a million times and that’s because it just flat out works.
While loyalty and rewards programs can have some differences, functionally they’re the same. Give people “points” for engaging with your brand, which they can then use to buy more.
It’s a great incentive to drive more sales without always offering discounts through email.
Here’s the best part…
It gamifies and builds a habit for buying your products
Customers go from just buying products to collecting points so they can get whatever reward waiting for them on the other side. And like free shipping minimums, this also pushes them to buy more in a single purchase. So it increases both AOV and LTV.
All customers like perks for being a loyal customer.
So give it to them.
Loyalty and rewards programs typically work best for food and beverage brands that have a lot of SKUs. So I wouldn’t recommend it if you only have 3 flavors of 1 beverage. But if you have 5+ products in multiple flavors, then it’s worth introducing it.
Compared to regular food, beverages are in a unique situation.
Beverages tend to have all the faults of regular food products, but with the additional issues of also having huge minimums and expensive shipping costs. This creates a situation where cash flow becomes extremely tight and your return on your marketing spend needs to be higher.
So what do you do?
The truth is that you need to do everything that is on this list of ecommerce food and beverage marketing strategies. With that said, these are the 3 tactics you want to emphasize the most:
The goal of every beverage marketing plan should be to get as many customers on a subscription as possible. With variety packs, you maximize your average order so you can afford customers, while allowing them to try different flavors on the first purchase. With niche landing pages, you can market your variety packs to different niche audiences until you find a few winners that scale while having a reasonable CAC. And with subscriptions, you maximize the lifetime value per customer so your brand can actually make a profit.
Every successful beverage brand follows this formula because it’s what makes the math work.
In addition to this, you need to look beyond ecommerce.
Unlike categories like beauty, the beverage businesses can’t rely on just their direct-to-consumer channels. They need as much volume as possible, which means also getting into Amazon and physical retail.
It’s not uncommon to see an 8 figure beverage brand making low 7 figures online.
In other words, use your ecommerce beverage business to collect data, which you can then use to get into as many physical retail stores as possible.
Food and beverage marketing is ultimately about telling future customers about what you’re selling, getting them to actually buy, and having paying customers identify your brand as the number choice for your particular category. Food and beverage marketing involves the entire marketing funnel including awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
Beverage products should be marketed like any other food product. You need to have multiple traffic sources including paid media, owned media, and earned media. That traffic then gets sent to your online funnel, which is made up by your store, landing pages, and retention channels. And lastly, this allows you to collect the data you need to take your beverage brand from just an ecommerce business into an omnichannel brand.
When it comes to ecommerce, the ideal marketing mix ultimately comes down to 50% of your traffic coming from paid ads and 50% of your traffic coming from organic channels. Think of it like an investment portfolio. You want to make your food and beverage marketing as diversified as you can so that if anything happens, such as Apple’s privacy updates or Google’s algorithm updates, your food and beverage brand will still survive.
Once you have a Shopify store, there are 3 main ways to promote your food online. The first is through paid media, which includes any paid sources from Facebook ads to podcast sponsorships. The second is through owned media, which includes anything your brand owns from your store to your email newsletter. The last is through earned media, which includes any traction your brand earns from others from influencer marketing to digital PR.
Food and beverage products usually have a low profit margin relative to other categories. The way you improve it is to focus on optimizing the elements that control cost of goods sold, marketing costs, and pricing. You improve the cost of goods sold by buying higher volumes of less variations. You improve marketing costs by building your organic channels and improving your conversion rates. And you improve pricing by testing higher prices so you can see just how far your price elasticity actually stretches.
The first step to advertising your food and beverage business is to find out what metrics you need to hit to be profitable with your customer acquisition. If the cost is too high, you’ll want to fix that first by improving your margins. The second step is to pick an advertising platform such as Facebook ads, TikTok ads, or Youtube ads. The last step is to then test different offers, angles, and audiences until you find a winning combination.
Our ecommerce email marketing agency, SupplyDrop, has worked with food and beverage brands like Kettle & Fire, Verb Energy, and Drink02.
So once you’re ready to turn email into your most profitable channel, hire us as your food and beverage marketing agency for email and sms marketing.
