Overview:

From day one, Ithaca Hummus' mission has been to make eating well effortless, with minimal ingredients and maximum taste. When they started selling their products at the Ithaca Farmers Market in 2013, they knew that once someone tried their product for the first time, they’d be a buyer for life. Over the last decade, they have scaled their business from a local vendor to one of the fastest-growing premium dip brands sold across the country and on shelves at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Publix, and Target, to name a few.

Challenge:

The Ithaca team relied on word of mouth to expand from local markets to retail shelves. As they expanded their product line and increased their retail presence, they recognized the urgent need for a platform to effectively launch new products with incentives and amplify the word-of-mouth efforts of their brand advocates through referral programs.

Ithaca constantly seeks to increase awareness, trial, and repeat purchases with new and existing retail customers. Without a direct-to-consumer side of their business, their marketing initiatives have historically been focused on brand and product awareness. As a result, their team needed a solution to help them track the return on investment with these marketing efforts. 

Quotes:

“A big part of why we signed on and continue to use Aisle is how great [the Aisle team] is in listening to our pain points and figuring out ways to help us hit our retail goals. We won’t be able to accomplish our referral program with physical couponing or any other software we have previously tried.” - Mia Serritella, Social Media Manager

Strategy:

After initially configuring Aisle with a focus on driving velocity for their line of staple Hummus products, the Ithaca team wanted to explore Aisle’s capabilities further to find ways to boost sales of their new product lines (e.g., salsas) with both new and existing Ithaca consumers. They also wanted to build a custom referral program they could use to amplify the voices of their brand advocates at scale. 

Ithaca has largely used Aisle to test free offers using geo-fenced paid social campaigns, dark ads, and organic social content. They have also started testing Aisle as a customer experience tool to boost community engagement and improve customer satisfaction. They are building out on-package QR codes, leading to a referral program using Aisle’s built-in capabilities. 

Results:

Depending on their goals, Ithaca can scale up or scale back marketing spending while continuing to drive retail velocity, even without active marketing spend, through organic social posts and community engagement programs. 

Across all Aisle campaigns, the Ithaca team has converted over 6,200 new consumers, averaging a 45% redemption rate. It has also seen a 43% conversion rate on repeat offers, which has helped influence consumer behavior and aligns with its goal of getting Ithaca products into the mouths of as many new consumers as possible—to create new long-term consumers and brand advocates.

While their use of Aisle has historically been more limited and intimate, Aisle's flexibility has allowed them to start building programs that go beyond initial product trials.

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