My remote internship at Simply Recipes was an unforgettable experience. My mentors have taught me so much, not only about marketing and social media but also about professionalism, recipe testing and developing. There were also plenty of fun moments spent sharing our recent recipes and interacting with the entire team through an online communication platform called Slack.
In the first week of my internship, I wrote email newsletters on WordPress and learned about what style of writing and words email marketers usually use to increase viewer and subscriber engagement. Through these emails, I learned that email marketing is important for many businesses, but particularly for this specific business since Simply Recipes does not have a brick-and-mortar store; they are a blog that posts recipes and other information related to cooking. It is especially important now because of the pandemic with emails getting more popular since people cook more at home instead of eating out.
The way we track how successful the emails are doing is through Campaign Monitor which measures performance by using clickthrough and open rates. Open rate evaluates the percentage of emails that are opened over the total number of emails we send out. Clickthrough rate measures the percentage of how many links are clicked in the email. One drawback of the clickthrough rate analysis is that it does not indicate which specific links viewers clicked on. Thus, one of my tasks was to write a weekly report on Campaign Monitor about possible reasons clickthrough rates may be lower or higher and if lower, why viewers are not clicking on specific links. This analysis is an important tool for the future in my marketing career since I can use this metric as a KPI (key performance indicator) to measure performance in any marketing medium.
Besides using WordPress and Campaign Monitor, I also used Youtube Analytics to track how our Youtube videos were doing. The most important metrics I used when analyzing each of our Youtube video categories was the traffic source, traffic rate, as well as the average watch time duration. Some important takeaways I learned when doing the analysis is that most of our videos do not have a CTA (call to action) which means engaging the audience by asking them questions such as “Please let us know how we can improve our video” or “Tried this recipe? Please share!” There were also some typing mistakes the video team made in the past which I helped to edit. In fact, viewers did notice the typo, so I was able to engage after I changed it and replied back “Thanks for letting us know!”
One highlight from my internship was when I read a very useful book about recipe testing and development that Summer, who is the recipe editor director, sent me. One of my favourite parts of this internship was testing recipes. I have a passion for cooking and this internship was the perfect blend of work, learning, and fun!
