“Partner with the ambassadors that are right for your values: Joe Wicks and MotherPukka are celebrities that reflect all our values. They come across as very authentic partnerships, and that’s why they are so successful. Be true to your brand, and partner in a very natural way!” – Lavinia Franzetti, Acquisition and Retention Director at Gousto
Founded in 2012, Gousto pioneered the recipe box offering in the UK.
Conceived whilst working long hours in the finance industry, Founder and CEO Timo Boldt, identified a need for convenient and easy to cook recipes that offered exciting variety at home, whilst reducing food waste.
Today, Gousto delivers nearly 8 million delicious meals per month, sending precise ingredients with easy to follow recipe cards, making it simple and fun to whip up impressive meals from scratch.
Gousto offers the most recipe choice in the market globally, with over 60 recipes to choose from each week, from authentic world cuisines to 10-minute meals and family classics.
In this interview, we talked to Lavinia Franzetti, the Acquisition and Retention Director at Gousto to understand the role their community has played in their success.
What are your goals for growth at the brand?
We have been growing rapidly for the past few years and the recent lockdown accelerated this demand.
To help us serve more customers, we will invest significantly in capacity with the launch of two new fulfilment centres by the end of 2022. We’re also doubling our workforce to 2,000 people this year.
How does the brand engage consumers? Do you have a community for your fans, customers, etc?
We have very engaged social communities: Our Instagram and Facebook pages reach a total of 500,000 followers, and we also have a Facebook group of nearly 10,000 of our most loyal and engaged customers, where people exchange opinions, provide recommendations and it’s beautiful to see how organically people come together to discuss our product.
We serve over 60 new recipes every week on our menu – which means that we have a lot of recipe content to publish.
This puts us in a great spot to attract a lot of new and existing customers to our Cookbook and Blog – so that if people are not ready to buy from us, they can still get value from our brand and service.
From an existing customer perspective, we have monthly newsletters with all sorts of tips around cooking – customers love it and our engagement is well above industry average with a CTR of 3.47% (vs industry average 2.25%)
Does your brand have an ambassador program? If so, who are they? What is their role? How does your brand use ambassadors to drive growth?
Yes – we have external ambassadors and internal ones (through our Referral programme).
From an external perspective, we have been in a partnership with Joe Wicks for a few years now.
Joe is one of the leading fitness figures in the UK – he started off as a PT and became a huge presence during our lockdowns thanks to his family workouts streamlined via the BBC.
He’s such an awesome partner – he loves our product as much as we love his. He’s even an investor in the business.
The partnership came naturally. He now helps us design healthy recipes like his Lean in 15 range, and also raises our brand awareness and drives new customer acquisition for us.
We also partner with MotherPukka, a beautiful equal rights advocate in the UK. She represents every Gousto value and she’s a working mum, which really resonates with our target audience.
Our internal ambassador programme has scaled significantly during the past 3 years – we managed to double the amount of referrals each new customer drives.
This is because we reward our customers appropriately and create engaging gamified campaigns.
Referrals are the best way to get your brand out there as it’s building on something spontaneous.
And because no customer would recommend a product they hate to their friend – it’s an excellent indicator of brand health too.
Do your brand ambassadors give product feedback? Write reviews? Help design the recipes/meals? Host events?
Joe Wicks co-creates the menu with us from a healthy recipes perspective. We also sponsor events he participates in order to maximise our exposure.
With MotherPukka we organise many external and internal events – the last one has been an internal panel and discussion around Diversity and Inclusion.
This is something very dear to Gousto and MotherPukka brought this topic to life with a lot of relevant experience.
Extremely inspiring!
What is 1 tip you’d share with other brands looking to drive brand and community growth?
I’ll give you three!
- Listen to what customers and prospects need – we spend a lot of time and energy in observing web analytics on most popular searches and our content team adapts quickly to emerging trends, so that we’re always relevant. We also talk to our customers on what type of content they like to consume – both from surveys and from our FB closed group.
- Partner with the ambassadors that are right for your values: Joe Wicks and MotherPukka are celebrities that reflect all our values. They come across as very authentic partnerships, and that’s why they are so successful. Be true to your brand, and partner in a very natural way!
- Reward adequately your customer ambassadors – we invested early on in our RAF programme. By giving exclusive discounts to the referred friend, and by giving generous credits to our existing customers referring.
Thank you Lavinia!
To learn more about Gousto, visit Gousto.co.uk and check out their Instagram.
