HelloFresh Case Study

You can’t seem to walk down the street or watch TV these days without seeing an ad for a food delivery service.

However, no one is more more aggressive with their marketing than Rocket Internet’s brain child and e-commerce food brand, HelloFresh.

HelloFresh’s German counterpart has just topped the list of Europe’s fastest growing companies, increasing revenue by 13,159%. They went from €2.3 million ($3.4 million) in 2012 to €304m ($450 million) in 2015. That did not stop in 2016, with a yearly revenue of €597m ($880 million).

HelloFresh has more than 850,000 customers globally and operates in nine countries across three continents. Its 2,000 employees work to deliver 9 million meals a month.

What They Do

HelloFresh is a meal-kit delivery service, the brand that chooses your weekly meals for you. Unlike other food delivery companies, HelloFresh delivers Fresh Farm ingredients along with recipes designed by nutritionists, opposed to ready-to-eat meals.

WARNING: Read this before continuing

In this review, I will have a look at how they’re doing in the Australian market. The website has a great Online Marketing presence and the success of the company tells us that they are doing things right. But, as we will see in this article, even the best cannot be perfect.

Disclaimer: I do not have access to any of the internal information at HelloFresh. I have not been in contact with any of the HelloFresh staff or have had access to analytics from inside the company. This analysis has been conducted using 3rd party tools and data along with what I can see online. Recommendations and analysis are based on knowledge and how I would optimize their website.

So let’s get started with a step-by-step and channel-by-channel analysis.

UX

The Home Page

HelloFresh Homepage

Let’s start by having a look at the HelloFresh website. The Homepage is clean with a perfect background image. Here are some subtle tactics that HelloFresh is using to start our journey in the best of ways:

  • Keeping things simple: There is only one true option above the fold, and that is to click the call-to-action button in the middle to “View our meal plans”.
  • An oversized background image: Helps focus on the task at hand and increase conversions.
  • The background image itself: The ingredients look fresh and healthy, ready to cook. This puts the visitors in the right state of mind.
  • Colours are no coincidence: Colour psychology is a thing. HelloFresh is right on point; green is a colour that both men and women love. It’s associated with creativity, nature, environment and organic produce. It also happens to be the colour of veggies and greens, symbols of health and well-being.
  • Great variation of colour between the mostly-green and white background and the orange call-to-action button. The contrast makes the button stand out. Again, orange is a researched decision – a “fun colour that can create a sense of haste or impulse” according to Kissmetrics.

This predictive eye tracking attention map shows how the homepage is designed to grab the user’s attention to the centre of the page:

Homepage Attention Map

And so does this predictive eye tracking heatmap:

Homepage Heatmap

 

The Food Boxes

HelloFresh Bood Boxes

In our customer journey, this is an important step. Here we have to make our first decision: Which box are we going to choose?

The boxes are laid out pretty clearly and it’s obvious that we have to chose one of these. One thing that struck me when I first landed on this page was that the three images look exactly the same. Without the text telling me that there is a difference between the Classic Box and the Veggie box, I wouldn’t have noticed. I don’t see the family box as bigger either, which it hopefully is.

Recommendation: make the images clearer and let the user know what they’re going to get with each box.

The contrast between the brown background and the white product background keeps the attention of the user on the boxes. However, the change in colours might not be the best choice for conversion optimization.

HelloFresh were smart in their choice of design and colours on the Home Page. Not as much on this one. Even though the wooden background gives a feel of serenity, brown has shown to have low conversion rates. According to Kissmetrics, it’s a colour that is disliked both by men and women.

Recommendation: Test different background colours for an increase in conversion rate.

Now let’s have a look at the predictive eye tracking attention map and heatmap:

Food Boxes Attention Map

Food Boxes Heatmap

Can you spot the issue?

On the Home Page, the attention was clearly drawn towards the call-to-action button at the centre of the page. Here, attention is drawn towards the boxes, the text, or even the logo at the top left corner due to the colour contrast. You could argue that this page is designed to present the product to the customer before purchase. In this case however, that doesn’t really work. Why? Because we’re not buying a specific product (as in, not a specific box with specific materials in it), but an idea.

Notice how the call-to-action buttons barely make it above the fold? This changes depending on the resolution of the screen but doesn’t change the predictive eye tracking.

Recommendation: Test placing the call-to-action buttons higher on the page, towards the centre, to attract the attention of the user. A good spot would be between the image and the text, for example.

Select A Box Size

HelloFresh Select A Box Size

I’m a meat lover, so I went with the Classic Box. Now, let’s choose the size of it!

Once again, the page is simple and intuitive. HelloFresh are great at keeping things simple by letting us flow from page to page without having to think too much.

In online reviews of this product, one negative that often comes up is that the boxes are limited to two or four people. What if I’m by myself?

I’m going to be picky here, but that’s what an in-depth analysis is for, right? By default, the page has chosen 3 meals for me. The way the page is set up, I’m supposed to choose the number of people I want to feed before choosing the number of meals for my week (but I’m not going to do that, am I? *evil laugh*). However, if I click on “5 Meals” first and then change from “2 People” to “4 People”, the meals automatically go back to 3. Not ideal…

In terms of design and colour, the “Select a Box Size” page is very similar to the “Food Boxes” page.

Let’s have a look at the predictive eye tracking attention and heatmaps:

Select a Box Size Attention Map

Select a Box Size Heatmap

The issues are similar to the previous page. Attention is not drawn towards the call-to-action button but rather, towards the image and the HelloFresh logo.

The reason? Green has a greater contrast to brown than orange. It makes sense that the flashy green logo will attract our eyes.

I have to say that the image is amazing though. Those veggies look incredibly fresh. And that steak?! Let’s not talk about it… Just give me the box!

Recommendation: Get the attention away from the logo. At this point, I’ve understood that I’m ordering from HelloFresh.

The Basket

HelloFresh Basket

We move on to the basket. Let’s buy this thing.

HelloFresh is now back to drawing the attention of the user towards the call-to-action button. With a mostly-white background, the orange button stands out a lot more and becomes virtually the only thing we see on this page. We’ve gone this far into the process – now they want us to convert:

The Basket Attention Map

 

The Basket Heatmap

I like that they remind us that shipping is free. As shipping and delivery fees are responsible for 61% of cart abandonment rates, free shipping will ensure that customers continue the buying process.

The Checkout

HelloFresh Checkout

The Checkout page is great. Simple and to the point. Everything is on the same page and there are no distractions whatsoever for the user to go somewhere else.

I also like that they are breaking the process down into three steps; asking for the e-mail first is a great opportunity for future cart abandonment e-mails.

As a quick side note, this is what their cart abandonment e-mail looks like (notice the grammar mistake):HelloFresh Cart Abandonment Email

There are no added costs when entering credit cart information. This may sound like a given in 2017, but we’re still far from seeing that everywhere.

The Blog

HelloFresh Blog Homepage

Let’s have a look at HelloFresh’s Content Marketing strategy.

The blog has a good feel to it. It’s fresh and has some great images. Content is mostly about recipes, cooking techniques and healthy lifestyle. Frequency of upload is about 1-7 days and could be improved. With more content, they can enhance their content strategy and increase interaction on social media.

Their most popular blog post was written in February 2017. How to Cook Beetroot (& 10 ways to eat them!) ranks #2 in search engines for the search terms “beetroot”, “cooking beetroot” and #3 for “how to cook beetroot”.

I LOVE that they are sharing the recipes not only with the people who are buying the boxes but with everyone. Most blog posts will link back to the website’s “recipe” pages, where I can discover what’s on the menu for the week. It’s completely transparent and I can go and buy my own ingredients if I want to. They’re not just keeping the recipes secret for the exclusive club of buyers, and this is a great strategy; share your knowledge and content and you will earn people’s respect. Earn their respect and they will become customers.

At the top of the blog’s home page, there is a message asking me to add my e-mail to the subscribers list. I barely saw it while I was looking through the blog. They should definitely make it stand out more, as it is a great way to add e-mails to their database. In addition, they could add a “Subscribe to our newsletter for more healthy recipes like this” at the bottom of the page to increase leads.

They could strengthen this by using a high value Content Offer i.e. “32 Tantalising Recipes That Will Have Your Dinner Guests In Awe”. They could use this as a premium eBook/Magazine format, as these types of lead magnets have a more perceived value than simply asking people to sign up to a weekly newsletter.

On the right side, there is a box asking me to download the app. Currently being on a desktop, that is not very convenient. This is when I realized that HelloFresh has a “Download our app” call-to-action button at the bottom of all their pages. This is not relevant and should be changed to something else. Why not a “Subscribe to our Newsletter” button?

I didn’t get any pop-ups asking me to subscribe to the e-mail list. Even though people find these pop-ups annoying, they have proven in the past to dramatically increase chances of people entering their e-mail address.

One thing I loved about these articles – all images are pinnable on Pinterest. What a great move! These pictures are amazing and letting people share them on social media is an easy way is great for free outreach.

Recommendations:

  • Increase frequency of blog posts to bring readers to the blog more often
  • Outreach the content: Content marketing is a great way to increase online presence. There is some great content on this blog (just like this beautiful infographic) – so get it out there!
  • Add a lead magnet (gated content) in the form of an eBook/Magazine to grow email database
  • Make the subscription message at the top of the page more explicit
  • Remove any message regarding downloading an app on Desktop

Mobile Experience

In today’s day and age, it would be irresponsible to carry out an online marketing analysis and leave out mobile experience. Worldwide Mobile market share surpassed Desktop in November 2016, introducing a new trend in website building: MobileFirst Design.

I can tell that HelloFresh was built this way because of one little hint – the Download App button. Why would this button even exist on the Desktop version if the website was not primarily built for Mobile?

The Mobile Website

Let’s go through what the website looks on Mobile:

The Home Page

Similar to the Desktop version, the Home Page is clean with a specific goal.

HelloFresh Mobile HomepageMobile Homepage Attention MapMobile Homepage Heatmap

The Food Boxes

The call-to-action button is much clearer on Mobile. On this page, I realise that the website is much more intuitive and was probably built first on Mobile.

HelloFresh Mobile Food BoxesMobile Food Boxes Attention MapMobile Food Boxes Heatmap

Select a Box Size

Very similar to the Desktop version.

HelloFresh Mobile Select a Box SizeMobile Select a Box Size Attention MapMobile Select a Box Size Heatmap

The Basket

One big difference here: the image has been left out completely to fit the whole basket window above the fold, keeping that important call-to-action visible to the user.

Quick note: The logo on the top of the page isn’t centred. For visual (and slightly maniac) people like me, this will draw my full attention away from the buying process.

HelloFresh Mobile BasketMobile Basket Attention MapMobile Basket Heatmap

The Checkout

Not much to add here. HelloFresh are keeping the users focused on the task at hand.

HelloFresh Mobile CheckoutMobile Checkout Attention MapMobile Checkout Heatmap

The App

The App is a little different from the website as it focuses less on acquiring new clients and more on giving to people who are already part of HelloFresh.

However, they do have a sales funnel for new customers that looks somewhat similar to the websites. Let’s have a look at it for comparison:

The Starting Page

HelloFresh App Starting Page

The Login Page

The Login page entices people to sign up with their e-mail address, which is a good way to obtain users details. I like that I can still continue as a guest if I want to.

HelloFresh App Login Page

The Landing Page

This is where the experience starts. Here, the landing page focuses on the weekly menu and their recipes instead of viewing the meal plans.

The call-to-action button has changed to “Get Classic Box”. Instead of showing an image of the box as HelloFresh did on the website, they are trying to convince the user to buy the box by directly showing the recipes inside.

HelloFresh App Landing Page

The Shop

When landing on the Shop page, we still get to choose from the Classic or the Veggie box. From here on, the experience is similar to the website’s.

HelloFresh App The Shop

The Food Boxes

HelloFresh App Food Boxes

The Basket

HelloFresh App Basket

The Checkout

HelloFresh App Checkout

SEO

Here, I will break down HelloFresh’s Australian domain by having a look at the three great aspects of SEO: Technical SEO, On Page and Off Page Optimization. A full SEO audit would take an article of its own, but let’s have a look at some of the things that HelloFresh are doing great, or could do better.

Website Structure

Let’s start by having a look at the website’s structure to understand how it’s set up. HelloFresh is constructed with a root domain and 3 subdomains:

This adds up to a total of 4 domains with 1412 pages. In this analysis, I will focus on the two main domains: the root domain and the blog.

Setting up the blog as a subdomain instead of as a subfolder is a subject still up for debate. As Rand Fishkin shows us in this Whiteboard Friday, it makes more sense to keep the blog as a subfolder to boost rankings for the keywords. The reason is that Google treats subdomains as different websites and doesn’t pass on link juice the same way. Even though Google engineers have told us that the search engine has evolved to understand subdomains better, evidence shows that keeping the blog on a subfolder is the way to go. Technically, keeping the blog on a subdomain may be easier at first, but I would strongly recommend that HelloFresh move their blog to a subfolder of the main website in the future.

Robots.txt and Meta Robots

Here are two snapshots of the robots.txt files on the root domain and on the blog. These files are preventing robots from crawling the specified pages. This can be useful in numerous ways, such as preventing search engines to index unwanted pages or saving crawl budget for the pages that really matter.

Blog Robots.txt

Website Robots.txt

Disallowing wp-admin on the blog is fairly standard procedure to avoid the crawler going into the backend. I would recommend adding “/wp-content/plugins/” to the list to avoid crawlers following through links that developers have included in their plugins.

HelloFresh could improve both their robots.txt by adding a sitemap. This will help robots crawling the website more effectively to index the pages.

What is the difference between NOINDEX and a robots.txt file? NOINDEX will not prevent the bot from crawling the page, but will ask it not to put the page in the search engine’s index. If a user searches for a term related to a NOINDEX page on Google, this page will not appear. Disallowing the bot from accessing parts of your website will result in the bot not being able to access it. For Google, this part does not exist.

HelloFresh has only used NOINDEX on two pages of the root domain:

Root Domain No Index

Putting a NOINDEX on an account login page makes a lot of sense because the website does not want a user to land on that page directly from a search engine before having had access to the main page or any other page. The account login page does not contain any valuable information and is therefore not important to be indexed.

Not indexing /foodinfo/ is interesting. This page is great for people with dietary requirements, but HelloFresh doesn’t want people searching online to find this page. Probably because HelloFresh doesn’t want to be associated with the negative connotation of allergies and rank for any of those keywords. This is a strategic choice, and they surely have good reasons for it.

On the blog subdomain we find a number of NOINDEXed pages (82 to be exact) to prevent users to access paginations. HelloFresh does not want page 2 or 3 of their blog to appear in the Google SERPs.

Blog No Index

This is perfectly normal and a good move from HelloFresh. They want to keep only the first page indexed to prevent cannibalization and have correctly used the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags to let Google understand that they belong together.

Page Speed

One important thing I realized while carrying out this analysis is that HelloFresh’s Home Page is on a 302 redirect. https://www.hellofresh.com.au/ is redirected to https://www.hellofresh.com.au/tasty/. They seem to have been testing a new Home Page for a while now. According to the Wayback machine, the redirect has been in place since August 2017 (August 21st is the first time we can see the snapshot getting a 302 response).

This is a big thing for one major reason: Page loading speed.

Page speed has become an increased matter in the last few years, and is now known to be an important ranking factor at Google. Even though it’s not as important as the relevance of the page, it carries significant weight. A page that loads faster will allow for easier crawling by the bots and for a more pleasant journey for the users. It will allow the website to get more out of its crawling budget and ultimately better rankings.

HelloFresh Page Speed Pingdom

As we can see from the Pingdom screenshot above, HelloFresh’s page loading speed is very poor. The page takes a whopping 4.68 seconds to load and has a size of 3.5MB. 130 requests are a lot for a homepage and reducing this number will help improve the loading speed.

There are a few solutions to make the page load faster:

  • Removing the 302 redirect and go with the new design will save more than 1 second loading time.
  • Reducing the number of images on the page (or reduce their size). These images are responsible for 1.90MB of the total page size – that’s 53.9%.
  • Reduce the number of Javascript requests. Out of the total 130 requests, 39 are for Javascript files – that’s 37.1%. They take up 1.05MB (29.7%) of the page size as well.

Statistics are slightly different on GTmetrix.com with an even slower loading time:

HelloFresh Page Speed GTMetrix

Titles & Meta Descriptions

Titles & Meta Descriptions Analysis

Why are title tags and meta descriptions important? It’s exactly like the title of a book; if it doesn’t represent what’s inside, what’s the point?

Titles appear in the SERPs as links to enter websites. If that title isn’t attractive, there are chances that users will not even look at it. Titles also appear on top of browsers to describe the tab, helping users keep track of their open webpages. Finally, social networks will use title tags on the display when a page from the website is shared.
Rule of thumb is to keep page titles between 50-60 characters. The reason the range is so large is because Google can show titles that fit in its 512 pixel display for SERPs. Keeping titles under 60 characters long will let titles display properly in 90% of cases. All titles that go over the 512px mark will be truncated with a “…”.

For Meta Descriptions, the display size is doubled to 1024px. With Google using Arial 13px for Meta Description text, that gives us 155-160 characters.

Titles are one of the most important On-page factors. It is the first thing that a bot sees when crawling the web page. On the other hand, Meta Descriptions are not a Google ranking factor, but helps users to understand what the page is about and increase CTR.

HelloFresh SERPs Titles

Let’s have a look at some statistics regarding HelloFresh’s Title and Meta Descriptions on the root domain:

HelloFresh Page Titles Length Analysis

HelloFresh Page Title Pixel Width Analysis

27% of page titles are over 60 characters long and 20.5% of pages have a title with a larger pixel width than 512px. And there is a good reason for that.

80% of pages on the root domain are /careers/ pages. The titles on these pages are created automatically with a placeholder linked to the H1 of the page (the name of the job position). As a result, the titles of the career pages will all look the same, with only the job position changing.

Depending on the job positions available, length of the titles will vary and sometimes go over 60 characters. Because they are a separate type of pages, we can ignore them.

HelloFresh Meta Description Character Length

HelloFresh Meta Description Pixel Width

As we can see in the graph above, most of the Meta Descriptions on the HelloFresh domain are above 155 characters and 1024px width. If the company wants to put their own meta descriptions to improve CTR, they should make sure they remain under the limit.

For the recipe pages, HelloFresh have automatically pulled their Meta Descriptions from the page with a placeholder. It fits the description that we find on the page.

Recipe Page

Recipe Title SERPs

To optimize these Meta Descriptions, they should take the time to describe what’s in their content within the character limit. This would improve their CTR and help users understand better what the content is about in the SERPs.

Traffic & Organic Rankings

 

HelloFresh Organic Traffic

HelloFresh has had a solid growth in traffic since 2014. The graph is somewhat wobbly though, with a huge drop in October 2016. Could this be due to the Penguin 4.0 roll out from Google which occurred during that month? I hope not, but it seems to coincide well.

As we can see on this Referring pages’ graph, the number of referring pages increased dramatically in October. The drop of referring pages in May 2017 also coincides with the sudden boost in traffic in that period.

Referring Pages Analysis

Because the referring domains did not change in any dramatic way during this period, it’s likely that all these backlinks came from a single source. HelloFresh identified this and acted accordingly, helping get traffic back on track.

Keywords Rankings analysis

As we can see on this keyword rankings graph, the rankings took a hit during that same period, before going back up in April-May.

Today, HelloFresh is ranking for 17.9k keywords. Out of those, 123 rank #1 with a total Search Volume of 5,750. Keywords such as “fresh food”, “fresh food delivery”, “eat fresh” or “meal delivery service” fall into this category. In their business, these are great keywords to rank #1 for.

1,267 keywords rank on the first page with a total Search Volume of 291,000. They rank #8 for “recipes”, a highly competitive keyword; #7 for “home delivered meals” and #5 for “home delivery food”.

HelloFresh Total Visits

HelloFresh attracted a solid 220K visitors on the root domain in May 2017, according to SimilarWeb. That is a big decline of 24% from April and a huge 42.1% decline since March. Still, the level remains higher than the months previous to that.

Interestingly, the HelloFresh TV Ad started in February 2017. With a huge increase in traffic in March, it’s reasonable to believe that this Ad had a positive impact on their online traffic.

Traffic Sources Analysis

With 35.93% of their total traffic coming from search engines, we can tell that HelloFresh is doing a great job in targeting the correct keywords. Their rankings allow them to bring in lots on qualitative traffic from organic search for free.

A large portion comes from direct traffic. I believe this is because HelloFresh has a large team of door-to-door sales people in Australia, letting people know about their products. They’re also handing out vouchers to inform people of what they do. When people hear about the brand, they get curious and go online to check it out. In conjunction with TV Ads, a great blog and some strong e-mail marketing, a high direct traffic percentage makes a lot of sense.

Backlink Profile

One thing that most SEOs will agree on: having a strong backlink profile will boost your rankings. Several studies tell us that backlinks are one of the most important factors to rank well in search engines.

But it’s not all about quantity. Quality of backlinks have become increasingly important since the introduction of Penguin in 2012. The more backlinks a website has from high authority domains, the better the chances are that this website will rank high in Google SERPs.

So what are the factors that we are looking at when analysing a backlink profile?

  • Total number of backlinks
  • Total number of referring domains
  • Quality of backlinks/referring domains
  • Do-follow vs No-follow
  • Anchor texts

Backlinks Root Domain

Backlinks Blog

The main website has a solid 603 referring domains with 105K backlinks (most of these come from HelloFresh’s international websites). Because HelloFresh is in its own niched market and has few direct competitors, it’s difficult to compare with other backlink profiles. It’s much higher than competitors in the fresh food delivery space such as Youfoodz, Marleyspoon, Thomasfarmkitchen, Mygoodnessorganics or Cleancutfoods who average around 50-150 referring domains but still quite far from the big general food delivery companies such as Menulog, Foodora, Deliveroo or Eatnow.

The blog only has 48 referring domains and could definitely be improved. As I mentioned earlier, I would recommend HelloFresh work harder on Content Marketing and Outreach to increase this number at a quicker rate.

Out of the 603 referring domains on the root domain, 127 are no-follow. This is an area of opportunity for HelloFresh to get more qualitative referring domains.

HelloFresh Referring Domains

Blog Referring Domains

Both referring domain graphs for the blog and root domain are looking good. With a constant growth in referring domains, HelloFresh are doing a good job taking care of their backlink profile.

Overall, HelloFresh doesn’t seem to have any toxic backlinks in their profile. They should keep monitoring this to make sure they keep a healthy growth in referring domains. With Penguin 4.0, Google is keeping a close eye on backlink quality.

With MajesticBacklink Analysis SEO, we get a visual overview of HelloFresh’s backlink profile. The goal is to be as close as possible to the top-right corner on the graph, while keeping links around the diagonal line shows a healthy backlink profile. Even though there’s room for improvement, for their market and their niche, they’re looking pretty good.

 

Anchor Texts

HelloFresh Anchor Text AnalysisSince Penguin, Google has been very hard on Anchor texts as it became their best way to determine if a website is building artificial links. This is why it’s important to keep a varied anchor text and avoid too many exact-match anchors. Even though these are the strongest, they are the ones Google keep a close eye on.

There are different types of Anchor Texts. The main ones we look at are Branded Anchors (in this case “hellofresh” or “hello fresh”); Naked Links (a link with no anchor text such as “https://www.hellofresh.com.au/”); Generic Anchors (“here”, “click here”, “check this out”) and Exact-match Anchors.

So how do we decide what anchor text we should use when building backlinks? A good rule to follow is to keep 70% Branded Anchor Text, 20% of Naked links, 5% Generic Anchors and 1% of Exact-Match. Percentages vary from one source to another but remain close.

HelloFresh has a very varied Anchor text profile, with 272 different Anchor texts. This looks very natural and doesn’t show any signals of artificial link building. Branded Anchors lie around 40%, Naked links 30% and their most popular Generic Anchor “here” has 5% of the total.

Paid Marketing

In regards to AdWords, HelloFresh are focusing mainly on Search Ads. I haven’t seen any Remarketing Ads even though I’ve spent the last week on the HelloFresh website, going through their sales funnel and stalking their social media.

Here’s a snapshot of what the HelloFresh Ads look like when searching on Google:

HelloFresh Adwords Ad

HelloFresh Adwords Ad

HelloFresh Adwords Ad

HelloFresh are doing some good things here.

  • Promotional text such as “Get 3 Free Meals”, “3 Free Meals” and “Get 35% Off + Free Delivery” are great click-baits. It has been shown in the past that promotions like these really increase CTR.
  • There is a simple technique when working on good headlines that is (too) often neglected: numbers. Adding numbers to your headlines will draw the attention of the users and increase CTR. When looking at the ads of their competitors, not all of them are using this very applicable technique.
  • They are wisely using all the space they have for Headlines 1 and 2 (30 characters each) as well as the description (80 characters)
  • Ad extensions such as the Review Extension, Call Out Extension, Sitelinks, Structured Snippets and Call Extensions are setup.

I would recommend to create Ad texts more specific to the keywords they are targeting. It has been shown in the past that including the keywords in Headlines and Descriptions increase CTR. One reason is that Google puts the words in bold in the description if they match the search query.

Interestingly, they don’t seem to be targeting the home food delivery keywords. Even though HelloFresh is a food delivery service, it doesn’t answer consumers’ request for an immediate meal delivery.

It’s all about intent. What are people really searching for? It’s a smart move from HelloFresh to recognize exactly what searchers they are targeting with their Paid Ads. They have focused their targeting on keywords evolving around “fresh food delivery”, “fresh food online” or “order healthy food”; keywords that are more precise and related to their business.

Their ads are not showing on the top spot every time, which in some cases can be a good thing. They are focusing on optimizing their Cost Per Acquisition by balancing the amount they spend on ads compared to how many sales a click brings on average (Conversion rate).

Social Media

Even though the larger part of our focus has been on search engines, there is no way we can ignore the impact of social media. The intent of users on social media platforms are not the same as they are on search engines, but people are using platforms such as Facebook to research information, interact with people (and businesses) and engage in discussions.

Let’s have a look at their pages across different platforms:

Facebook

HelloFresh Facebook Page

  • The Facebook Cover photo clearly demonstrates HelloFresh’s service.
  • The page provides some vital information in the About section, which is important as keyword-rich content makes it discoverable for potential customers, both via Facebook search and Google search. However, they can further improve this by including a Company Overview, Products and Instagram link in the Contact Details section.
  • HelloFresh has a large Facebook following for its industry size.
  • Engagement is strong, showing that the audience relates to their content strategy.
  • They use mobile-friendly third party apps to create tabs on the left, such as “The Fresh Times” that links to their recipe blog – that adds value to Foodies. This, however, is cluttered with popups inside the tab, which doesn’t make it user-friendly for the Facebook platform.

HelloFresh has an enormous fan base on Facebook with more than 1.2M followers. They can achieve this because Facebook remains a global page. With other Social Media platforms, HelloFresh has to create a new profile for each country. With Facebook, people can like the page from all over the world and receive content specific to their location and language.

For example, the US Instagram has 208k followers compared to only 28k here in Australia. On Pinterest, HelloFresh US has 43k followers versus not even 1k in Australia. Having a US and AU page makes content more localised and relevant to the users, but managing several accounts over different markets is also more time consuming.

HelloFresh are doing a great job with their videos. Just like their recipe pages, they want to share their cooking advice to engage with their fans and potential customers. Because cooking videos have smaller language issues, the same video can easily be shared on the Facebook page across all markets and produce a large number of interactions. These videos then link to the recipe page on the website, enticing the users to buy the HelloFresh boxes to get started with the cooking. Some great social media tactics there!

Let’s have a look at some Facebook analytics to check what HelloFresh could do better:

Facebook Performance Analysis

Facebook Posts per Page

Facebook Posts by Others

Not everything is perfect on the HelloFresh Facebook page. One of the first things that struck me when looking at the page was the “Typically replies within a day” note in the About Section. So if I’m a potential customer looking for information about HelloFresh on Facebook, I will have to wait a day before getting an answer? As we can see in the screenshot above, response time averages 1,244 minutes. That’s way too high.

They’re posting mostly images and links to their recipe pages, leading traffic to their websites. This is great for generating traffic and SEO purposes, but all the great video content they have would make the page more engaging and improve the number of Likes, Comments and Shares. These metrics are not measures of business success, but they prove how much your audience loves what you do and wants to engage with it. It would be great for HelloFresh if people around Australia were sharing their cooking videos to inspire healthy lifestyles and give advice to their friends.

Twitter

HelloFresh Twitter Page

  • Hashtags are used sparingly and appropriately, jumping on trends and adding to the conversation #StateOfOrigin and #InternationalPicnicDay.
  • Engagement is minimal, showing that the Twitter audience does not resonate with their content. They might need to try a different content strategy.
  • They could do more with retweeting good sentiment. They also don’t respond to negative feedback, which is a missed opportunity.

Pinterest

HelloFresh Pinterest Page

HelloFresh shows they are thinking about the type of audience found on Pinterest, providing them with different boards for different types of recipes.

YouTube

HelloFresh Youtube Page

The Australian HelloFresh YouTube Channel shares recipes or videos targeted to an Australian audience, making them localised and more relatable.

Google+

HelloFresh Google+ Page

The Google+ page uses the same strategy as Facebook. Interestingly, they have a very large follower base for an Australian Google+ page, as there are few Australians on the platform.

Instagram

HelloFresh Instagram Page

They could give a personal face to the company with pictures of staff in the office or warehouse – even selfies to make the company more personable. They do have a picture of their office dog though, which is fantastic.

They also repost user-generated photos, showing approval from the community. People are more likely to respond to content from consumers, which appears more authentic.

Social Media Summary

HelloFresh has a channel-specific strategy for each Social Media platform, showing they care about each platform’s different audiences. If people are on different platforms, it gives them a reason to like or follow HelloFresh on other social platforms.

Conclusion

As usual, Rocket Internet are building their websites with a very solid base. Overall, they are doing a great job in their online presence. The website looks great, their SEO is strong but has room for improvement, and they’re doing some good things on their Paid Marketing. Social Media works for them, and even though they are spending a lot of cash on traditional marketing tactics, these platforms helps the company to communicate with their fans.

It’s important to keep in mind that Australia is not the main market and not the priority for HelloFresh. They most likely have fewer staff over here and I wouldn’t be surprised if their entire online marketing is based in Berlin. However, as the rumour mill says, Australia is one of the markets that works the best for them. Increasing their marketing budget in our country would be beneficial and with all the food trends that are going on today, they could do great things.

 

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