Grow your email list and return traffic and build a community around your brand by adding a meal planner with nutritional information to your website
How can a recipe box feature help my website visitors and grow my business?
One of the hardest things is to get new email subscribers for your food blog or wellness website and build return traffic. Everyone is offering free recipe ebooks but not many food blogs are offering a free recipe box service where site visitors can save your recipes to their own personal recipe box. At the end of this article you will have a full understanding of how a save to recipe box feature can benefit your website visitors and your business.
Chef Billy Parisi a very successful recipe developer and blogger recently added a recipe box feature to his website. Here's the link to Chef Billy's website launch video on Facebook. What is very interesting is to read the comments if you are unsure whether you need a recipe box this will no dough change your mind. People absolutely loved it. Some of the comments were ''I don't need to have print outs of recipes everywhere'' another person loved it they said ''I was saving all your recipes in the browser and it was a mess''. The recipe box solves all these problems for your food blog visitors and lots more.
Chef Billy is using a service called SlickStream but I believe the WP Recipe Maker save to collections feature is a much better solution as you will see in the following videos how you can engage with your website visitors.
The great thing about the recipe box is that once it's set up it runs on automation to build your email subscriber list. It's not adding to your workload running your business, all you have to do is keep adding recipe which makes it a great investment.
Recipe Box benefits for your website visitors
- Save recipes in their personal account unique to your website
- Create meal plans
- Display nutrition facts per column for your collections
- Generate and save shopping lists
- Save their own custom recipes
- Save important notes about individual recipes in the recipe card
- Create reminders in recipe collections like an organizer
- Recipe box users can access their account on any device. This is extremely useful as they can use their saved recipe box on their mobile device as they shop in the supermarket, great feature instead of using print outs and better for the environment.
Discover how the recipe box works on mobile devices
Here's how website visitors sign up to become a recipe box member
In the next videos we'll see how we can have default recipes and blank templates in the recipe box when members sign up to get them started. There's lots of options for different use cases.
How to use recipe collection meal plan templates
You can provide your website visitors with meal plan templates when they join that either have recipes for the week or are blank that they can fill in themselves.
A blank template has the columns and groups arranged for them so they don't have to do that themselves and only have to select the recipes that they would like for the week and then generate their shopping list.
Users can create their own recipe collections
Recipe box members can create their own recipe collections. This is an extremely useful feature they could create a collection of recipes for a planned special occasion such as a birthday party or create a collection of favourites that they can add to any meal plan shopping list at any time.
Members can name the columns what ever they like and have as many as they need and have different groups in each column, and even add notes as reminders making it perfect for organising a party or function for an occasion.
Recipe box members can save their own personal recipes and notes to any recipe collection
The recipe box is more than just a meal planner. Members can save their own custom recipes and add notes and reminders to their weekly meal plans to use it as a personal organiser making it extremely useful for their weekly shopping and keeps them super organised and enjoying your service.
These features can be turned on and off in the WP Recipe Maker recipe collections settings if you feel its not needed for your website visitors.
* If a user adds a custom recipe they have to add the nutritional data themselves
How to check the nutritional information for recipes in the recipe box
If you are running wellness programs or similar and your recipe box members are concerned about nutritional information in recipes there is an option to show the nutritional information of a recipe underneath it and you can choose which nutrients to show.
The nutritional information is automatically generated for you through an API using the Spoontacular online nutritional data service. You can also input your own nutritional data instead of using the automated API.
This feature can be activated and deactivated in the recipe collection settings in WP Recipe Maker.
* If a user adds a custom recipe they have to add the nutritional data themselves
How to use the recipe collections shopping list generator
After adding the recipes to the recipe collection all that the recipe members have to do is click the generate shopping list button. Users can delete items they already have and add their own items. They can even share the shopping list by email to someone else that has access to their account. Members at home can build the shopping list. Delete items they have and add additional items and email it to someone else to collect their shopping for them, ideal for families.
Once a user saves the edited shopping list and logs out it will be available for them when they log back into their account from any device. A feature I love to stay super organised is that users can check items off the list as they purchase them in the store.
Benefits of the recipe box for your blog or website
- Add new members to your email marketing platform and build relationships with email marketing
- Better engagement with your audience
- Gather information on sign up forms for email marketing personalisation.
- Connect directly to any ESP email marketing provider. No need to use expensive services such as Zapier to connect services
- Generate more return traffic
- Monetise your email list - sell products related to meal planning
- Advertise products in the members area based on surveys
- Sell advertising space in the shopping list page
- Earn money with equipment and recipe affiliate links in the recipe card
- Option to charge for meal plans
- Sell one off meal plan programs
- Use the recipe box along with Zoom classes. When someone registers for a Zoom class they get added to your email marketing system provider and they get access to the accompanying recipes in the recipe box for the Zoom class. They can then use the recipe box shopping list generator to go shopping for the class. A great way with Zoom classes to get more traffic and sales to your website with the recipe box and build relationships with clients through email marketing. See how this works here.
- Use meal plans along with courses
- Start a healthy eating fitness weight loss club
- Turn your recipe blog into a membership site and generate monthly reoccurring revenue.
- Add to your members feeling of community by having a members profile page that they can easily update with their details and preferences.
What do we need to build our recipe box feature?
WP Recipe Maker Elite Version
For the recipe collections feature to build the recipe box.
WP Fusion lite
To connect your food blog to your email marketing software.
Fluent CRM Email Marketing Plugin
Build your email marketing campaigns in WordPress instead of using expensive services such as Convert Kit, Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Active Campaign
Which page builder to use?
My preference is to use the Beaver Builder combination with WP Recipe Maker to build the recipe box because it's commonly used with Genesis themes and is recommended as compatible on the Beaver Builder website and also very easy to use in comparison to other builders.
It's what I have used in the recipe box demo with the most popular Genesis food blogger theme Foodie Pro. You don't need a Genesis theme to use Beaver Builder it will work with mostly any theme. If you are unsure if it will work with your current set up get in touch with me on the contact page and I'll answer any questions.
Beaver Builder has great support and a proven track record of well tested and stable updates.
Beaver Builder Page Builder
To import the templates I have supplied along with this tutorial here
Ultimate Beaver for Beaver Builder
To build the log in and register new account forms.
Beaver Themer for Beaver Builder
To add account personalisation which is optional you need Beaver Themer, I explain in the course here what account personalisation is. In either free or paid membership websites 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions and 76% said that they get frustrated when that doesn’t happen. Source pressgazette.co.uk/first-party-data-strategies-the-independent
If you are using a different theme and page builder than I have mentioned in this tutorial and you are not sure if it will work for you get in touch with me here and I'll research if it will work with your current website.