Tag: email review

  • Grocery Stores Are Still Selling Ingredients When Customers Are Trying to Buy Dinner

    Grocery Stores Are Still Selling Ingredients When Customers Are Trying to Buy Dinner

    Image by macrovector on Magnific

    I feel like there’s a joke in there. Of course, grocery stores are selling ingredients; otherwise, they would be restaurants.

    But one of the best grocery emails I ever received understood what I really wanted and changed my behavior. And it was so good, I remember it years later.

    There is an independently owned gourmet food store within walking distance of my home. It’s one of those places with a great selection of meats, decent produce, and a well-stocked and skillfully curated selection of local craft beers and ciders. 

    It’s the type of place you pre-order your Thanksgiving turkey from. The type of place that would never install a self-checkout. And all employees wear aprons with the store name embroidered on the front.

    The offer: purchase a pot roast and get a free bag of carrots, a free bag of potatoes, and a free bag of onions. I grabbed my reusable canvas grocery bag and walked to the store that day. 

    The campaign wasn’t personalized. There was no data mining involved. But it solved a problem my family faced every day: what to make for dinner. 

    The promo wasn’t about a pot roast. It was about reducing my mental load.

    It removed one decision from my plate after a long day of making other equally important decisions. And I’m not the only one who feels this way.

    Nearly 40% of shoppers would like their store to be more helpful with meal planning. Maybe it’s because more of us are waiting longer to plan our meals. Maybe it’s because steep inflation and fuel costs have made us rethink how we’ve been doing things. Maybe we’re just burned out.

    To some extent, grocery stores have realized this for a while. That’s how a simple roasted chicken became a $52.1 billion deli category. 

    The promotion got me into the store, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the reality that this was still a gourmet grocery store. The experience solved one dinner. It didn’t change the value equation for every shopping trip. But, if I were in charge of their marketing, I would lean hard into what I knew we did best: quality meats and a lovingly curated selection of local brews and ciders. 

    But more than anything else, I’d help customers decide.

    But maybe I’m an outlier. Maybe everyone is still building shopping lists from weekly sales flyers, and I’m the only one who’s frustrated.

    I honestly don’t know.

    That’s why I’m conducting a survey on how people grocery shop today. Once the survey closes, I’ll share the results publicly on LinkedIn.

  • I Saved 28 Hours on Instacart—and Never Heard About It

    I Saved 28 Hours on Instacart—and Never Heard About It

    Image designed by Freepik.

    What is your free time worth?

    This is something my husband and I spend a surprising amount of time debating. We have very different views on it and on services like Instacart.

    I love a lot about the app: that I can find a recipe and automatically add ingredients to my cart, that I can build my cart over time, and that it helps me avoid impulse junk food purchases.

    But the biggest value?

    Time.

    The time I would have spent shopping can be spent doing literally anything else.

    I stumbled on a post in r/instacart: Instacart actually tracks how much time you save. After some digging, I found mine.

    28 hours saved.

     Here’s what’s interesting: almost every message I’ve received from Instacart emphasizes potential money savings not what I’ve actually saved.

    That value is easy to find in the app. It’s surfaced, calculated, and visible. But it’s not carried through into lifecycle messaging. And the same is true for time saved (except that’s even harder to find on the app).

    This feels like a missed opportunity, but there may be a reason for it.

    It’s likely Instacart has tested different value propositions, and cost savings may outperform time savings at a broad level. That would explain why so much of their messaging emphasizes dollars over time.

    But what works on average doesn’t always work for every customer.

    In my case, the dollar savings weren’t especially compelling because I was a light user. But 28 hours saved even over a longer period is meaningful. That’s a weekend. That’s multiple evenings back. 

    Even that value is below average time savings, it’s meaningful because that’s the reason I signed up in the first place. And, it’s what made Instacart a unique service. 

    And I never saw it until I went looking.

    Even my renewal email leaned on generic averages and projected savings, instead of showing my actual behavior. No mention of what I personally saved in dollars or time.

    When my usage started to drop off, why wasn’t I reminded:

    • “You’ve already saved 28 hours—what are you doing with that time?”
    • “Want to get even more of your time back?”

    Instead, I got generic messaging about delivery fees.

    Low Hanging Fruit 🍓

    Instacart already has the data—they’re just not activating it in their lifecycle messaging.

    A simple shift to personalized, time-based messaging could:

    • Reinforce the real value of the product
    • Re-engage low-frequency users like me
    • Complement (not replace) cost-based messaging for broader audiences

    Because for some customers, this isn’t about saving money. It’s about buying back time.