Do you do your grocery shopping online? If you do, you’re in good company with online sales being 12% of all grocery sales. Plus, dairy is the second largest department in the e-commerce grocery channel, and e-commerce baskets are 75% bigger when dairy is included.
American Dairy Association North East is using dairy farmers’ checkoff investment to tap into e-commerce to make dairy more modern, shoppable, and profitable. We’re partnering directly with retailers in our six-state region to help boost online sales — and it’s working. Attributed sales to this year’s e-commerce efforts are more than $3 million, with 26 million impressions, or people who have seen our promotions.
We work together with retail seasonal campaigns while strategically running complimentary paid advertising on social media platforms to promote the featured products and drive traffic directly to the retail landing pages. For every $1 we spend on the ads, we track about $18 in sales.
Our target audiences are dairy consumers, plant-beverage consumers, and “healthy” consumers, or those looking for healthy foods and snacks.
This year’s campaigns included:
- “Fuel their day with dairy” for back-to-school snacking
- Cottage cheese: spread it, dip it, top it, blend it
- Full of nutrition, free of lactose
- “Say cheese” for Cinco de Mayo
- Real dairy, real smoothies featuring yogurt
- Real cheese, real flavor: Taste the difference
- National Farmers Day
- Holi-dairy magic
During National Dairy Month in June, our on-staff health professionals promoted the “Real dairy, real smoothies” campaign that garnered almost $1.4 million in sales of yogurt. We asked retail registered dietitians to share yogurt nutrition information and the smoothie recipes on their social media platforms, as well.
The Holi-dairy magic campaign, “Merry and bright with every dairy bite,” celebrates the versatility of dairy with a vintage aesthetic that aligns with the tastes of Gen Z and millennials — our target audiences who do their grocery shopping online.
We are also promoting dairy through Instacart, the largest third-party online grocery platform in North America, which partners with more than 700 national, regional, and local retailers, including all the retailers in our market.
Last fall, our cottage cheese campaign on Instacart generated $139,000 in sales, with 30% of sales coming from shoppers who hadn’t bought cottage cheese in the previous six months. That shows the ads are reaching new consumers!
“As part of our retail marketing evolution, we’re really excited about our e-commerce programs because we are reaching consumers in different ways,” said ADA North East CEO John Chrisman. “The proof is in the numbers — milk and dairy are still on the tops of peoples’ minds whether shopping online or in stores.”
To learn more about ADA North East’s e-commerce efforts, click here.
Jean Kummer is the industry communications specialist for American Dairy Association North East.
