Background
America’s number-one meal kit company has been shipping fresh, pre-portioned recipe ingredients for decades, encouraging families to cook and eat healthy meals together. What started as a small experiment quickly became a household-name subscription service with multiple brands available in nearly twenty countries.
Unsurprisingly, the company’s marketing centered around busy parents and professionals who didn’t have time to grocery shop. For years, the marketing team successfully targeted this audience through email campaigns, podcasts, social media ads, and more. But over time, it became clear that the audience was shifting younger, and the company needed a way to target Gen Z and Millennial customers — a group that was difficult for them to access through their traditional marketing channels.
While influencer marketing was working fairly well, the team needed another way to tap into that audience and convert them into loyal customers before their competition could. The solution? Card-linked offers through the Kard platform.
Goals
With Kard, the meal kit service aimed to:
Get in front of Millennials and Gen Z
The company knew that partnering with challenger banks would open them up to a whole new market of young buyers who wanted to get the most out of their bank’s reward programs and were more likely to pursue and redeem card-linked offers. Converting even a small portion of that traffic would be a win.
Drive more purchases
Card-linked offers (CLO) act like coupons, incentivizing customers to spend. With the right, compelling offers, the company could drive cardholders to sign up for an initial subscription and purchases from their brand stores.
Build long-term loyalty
Newly acquired customers can be auto-enrolled into nurture campaigns to keep them engaged with their meal kits and reduce the chances of churn. With Kard, the company could also push out additional offers for their brands, building affinity across their portfolio.
Results
To kick off its work with Kard, the company launched two offers—one for each of its most popular brands—during two quarter-long campaigns.
Brand 1
Offer
15% all-in
Type
All users, multi-use
Performance
40% of Brand 1’s revenue accounted for 72% of the entire company’s Q1 revenue, demonstrating the extraordinary value of incentivizing repeat purchases.
On a more detailed level, the Brand 1 campaign hit:
- Total Sales: > $920,000
- Total Transactions: > 18,000
- 90% overall revenue growth QoQ was largely driven by new customers
- + 6% market share shift
- ROAS: $6.67:1*
*ROAS is even higher ($8.52) when accounting for the issuer’s co-funded part of the Q1 campaign.
Brand 2
Offer
15% all-in
Type
All users, multi-use
Performance
Revenue nearly doubled during the second quarter, driven by a 157% increase in revenue from new customers — which made up 41% of all revenue for Brand 2. Although Brand 2 isn’t historically as popular as Brand 1, its AOV during the Kard campaign grew to be 49.4% higher than that of Brand 1.
On a more detailed level, the Brand 2 campaign hit:
- Total Sales: > $540,000
- Total Transactions: > 7,000
- 3 peak weeks drove $82,000 in revenue, on average
- + 3% market share shift
- 55% of all purchasers were incentivized to redeem the offer multiple times
Accelerating growth and expanding horizons
Over two quarters, Brand 1 saw a whopping 81% increase in revenue — Brand 2 followed close behind with a 75% increase. These objectively impressive results have led the company to invest even more deeply in Kard’s network and proven CLO strategy.
They’re stepping up their budgets for Brands 1 and 2 and are piloting several other brands to broaden their reach — helping more and more Gen Z and Millennial customers make cooking an easier part of their daily routine.
