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#93 Neha and Bryan from SwitchGrocery: Building a Brand from the Ground Up
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#93 Neha and Bryan from SwitchGrocery: Building a Brand from the Ground Up
If you’re new to e-commerce, where should your priorities be? SwitchGrocery is a Canadian online health food store for keto, paleo, vegan, and gluten-free diets. And at just four years old, it’s thriving.
For this episode of The Ecom Show, Daniel invites the Co-Founders of SwitchGrocery, Neha Charnaliaand Bryan Horsley, to tell us all about their e-commerce journey.
Shout out to the Co-Founders of Keto Chow, Chris and Miriam Bair, for introducing Daniel to Neha and Bryan!
Tune in to hear Daniel, Neha, and Bryan discuss:
✔️ How SwitchGrocery Began
✔️ When to Invest in Email Marketing
✔️ High Converting Email Campaigns
✔️ Raising Funds for SwitchGrocery
✔️ Being Human with Your Customers
How SwitchGrocery Began
Neha laughs,
“I don’t think anyone starts a company with a plan, and we fell into that bucket.”
Much like Chris and Miriam from Keto Chow, Neha and Bryan discovered a low-carb lifestyle first. Bryan’s trainer introduced them to the ketogenic diet, and it did wonders for their health. However, at the time, there wasn’t a huge availability of keto, paleo, or gluten-free products.
Neha and Bryan saw a ‘great need’ for a store that specializes in high-quality keto, paleo, vegan and gluten-free products. A store with founders that are invested in the lifestyle as well as what goes into what they’re selling.
And so Neha and Bryan founded SwitchGrocery. They’re four years in and as a company that was built on social media, they have a great relationship with their customers and US and Canadian suppliers.
When to Invest in Email Marketing
Neha and Bryan began heavily investing in email marketing in 2021. Not doing so earlier, Neha says, was a ‘lost opportunity’. In SwitchGrocery’s first two years, Neha and Bryan underestimated and underinvested in email marketing. They weren’t collecting emails via pop ups, and they only launched email campaigns for sales and product promos.
Investing in email marketing has led to a ‘significant increase’ in revenue, and strengthened their relationship with their customers. Neha can’t stress enough the importance of email marketing.
“If there’s anything I would say, just stop and invest in today, it’s email. You can either spend 100 bucks a day on ads or you can nurture the customers you have.”
Neha and Bryan now use Klaviyo. They’ve set up the necessary flows, (welcome flows, abandoned cart flows, new customer flows etc), and send three campaigns a week.
“The flows really allow us to customize. We don’t send mass emails anymore, we really customize to our customers.”Their campaign emails now also include trust and content emails. These will include Neha or Bryan’s favorite piece of user-generated content (UGC) that week, or healthy recipes.
High Converting Email Campaigns
Bryan says that ‘contextual’ email campaigns are highly effective. For example, when there was a snowstorm, they sent out a hot chocolate recipe for everyone locked inside. While email campaigns are mostly planned in advance, Klaviyo also allows you to quickly respond to relevant day-to-day events, such as snowstorms.
For this reason, Bryan and Neha have planned emails as well as space in their campaign schedule to connect with customers in their day-to-day experience. These contextual emails tend to have higher open rates, click rates, and conversion. As Daniel points out, attribution is a surprisingly underrated topic in e-commerce.
Neha says that blog campaigns also tend to do very well. She recalls an email campaign she wrote titled, ‘What Makes a Good Business’. It had a 44% open rate and around 23 responses.
Founder emails are especially valuable for increasing engagement and strengthening that brand-customer relationship.
Raising Funds for SwitchGrocery
Bryan and Neha have done a few different things to fund SwitchGrocery over the years.
The first was using Clearco, a company that provides funding for ads in exchange for revenue royalties. This enabled to SwitchGrocery to grow with ad funding Neha and Bryan otherwise would not have had.
From there, Bryan and Neha moved to Clearco’s angel investment program. ‘Clear Angel’. This is invested in for longer-term smaller royalty on revenue. Clearco Clear Angel, Bryan allowed SwitchGrocery to scale beyond ads and into inventory.
“Growth is great, but you need the money to order the inventory to then get the growth. It gave us some funds to scale and grow to get to a new kind of level for the business.”
Over the COVID pandemic, Bryan and Neha also were able to take advantage of governmental support. Funding to the Business Development Bank of Canada offered low-interest loans that Bryan and Neha quickly applied for.
These funds have been used to grow SwitchGrocery’s inventory, build their customer service team, and hire developers.
Being Human with Your Customers
Neha and Bryan always remind their team and contractors to:
“Treat people like people”
That’s been SwitchGrocery’s approach from the very beginning. Neha wrote their first 100 customers thank you cards. The next 1000 received thank you messages on their invoices.
Taking the time to write a unique message for every customer became incredibly difficult to maintain as SwitchGrocery grew. Neha and Bryan wanted to maintain a close relationship with their customers, but they had to change their approach.
So they launched SwitchGrocery’s private Facebook group.
The Facebook group consists of people that have bought from SwitchGrocery, having been invited in their post-purchase thank you email. As of early 2022, there are over 3000 members. If you’re thinking about starting a private Facebook group for your e-commerce, Neha says that you should go for it.
“I can’t recommend this enough. It just has to be genuine.”
For more incredible community-building ideas and entrepreneurial inspiration, follow Bryan and Neha on LinkedIn.
Visit SwitchGroceryfor keto, paleo, vegan, and gluten-free groceries, recipes, and resources.
Thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!
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