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Food and Beverage eCommerce: Creating and Personalizing Customer Value Post-Pandemic

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Uncertainty is the only certainty in 2021, especially in the food and beverage space. When indoor gatherings were limited, consumers moved online and Food and Beverage eCommerce skyrocketed. Last year, online grocery sales grew from $14.9 billion worldwide in 2019 to $22.4 billion in 2020, thanks to both corporate grocers and scrappy, digital-native startups.

Now that Covid-19 is beginning to loosen its grip on the world, F&B eCommerce brands are now speculating what the year ahead might bring and finding original ways to reach their new customer base. How will restaurant reopenings affect 2021 sales? What can online F&B brands do to continue growing after the pandemic ends and life returns to normal? How can start-ups create a marketing strategy that engages customers and competes with larger grocers?

It is going to be a weird year, with plenty of unpredictability. Marketing teams looking to control uncertainty will need to rely on their greater value proposition and personalize their mobile and email communications. In other words, be more than a price tag and treat customers like they are more than a number.

Communicate Your Brand’s Value, Not Just Your Price

While large, local grocers played a part in F&B’s 2020 success, many scrappy start-ups flourished by finding their niche and delivering a new value-proposition to their consumers. Take the grocery brand Imperfect Foods. They create customer value by offering low prices on food that is not visually appealing enough to make it to a mainstream grocer’s produce aisle. 

Imperfect Foods isn’t simply selling to cost-conscious consumers; they are also marketing “real food with real flavor,” partnering with customers to sell quality food that would go unused otherwise. On the brand’s website are real-time stats on the amount of food customers helped save from landfills.

Many start-ups found their niche in 2020, and now is the time to lean into that value proposition. Any small marketing team can create personalized, 1:1 email and mobile campaigns that communicate experience and value, not price. For a brand that prides itself on saving the environment, real-time stats that show how customers are eliminating food waste will create a partnership between brand and consumer.

Create Experience for Food and Beverage Customer in 2021

We have been stuck inside for more than a year now, with everyone doing their part to stay safe and healthy. Now that vaccination plans are in full-effect, people are looking forward to more nights out at restaurants and bars. While grocery sales may not reach pandemic-levels this year, reopening restaurants is not a cause for alarm for the F&B eCommerce space. It means that brands will need to lean into experiential models of customer engagement in 2021. 

While F&B eCommerce companies cannot fully replicate the restaurant experience, many brands are experimenting with interactive ways of engaging with customers, granting space for consumers to be entertained and nourished. HelloFresh teamed up with actress Mindy Kaling to create quick, entertaining videos and offer a little more than a standard recipe card. People want to feel connected–to a brand, to food, to celebrities they love. F&B eCommerce companies have the chance to create connections to consumers this year by organizing and marketing online experience that complement a company’s core products.

Be Front and Center Where Your Consumers are Shopping

Smartphones are the primary way that consumers shopped for online F&B goods last year. With more than half of people under the age of 55 placing an F&B order online last year, sophisticated marketers understand the impact that a data-driven mobile marketing strategy has on a brand’s bottom line. 

Lean F&B start-ups may think they don’t have the capabilities to create mobile personalization at scale. That’s not true. Your martech stack is teaming with data that can be easily utilized to create 1:1 communications that remind them of a scheduled order, let them know how much food waste they’re eliminating, or update them on new and engaging content that they might not get anywhere else.

F&B eCommerce is here to stay, but for brands to continue growing as the pandemic subsides, they’ll need to offer value beyond the transaction and personalize their mobile (and email) marketing, so their customers feel as unique as the food and beverages they’re ordering.

Want to build a leading email and mobile personalization strategy? Download Movable Ink’s eBook Best-in-Class Personalization Across Email and Mobile.

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