How Hickory Farms Used Search Queries to Learn What Customers Want in Their Gift Baskets

Anyone who grew up going to suburban malls in the ‘70s and ‘80s likely remembers the cubed samples of cured meat and cheese Hickory Farms distributed during the holiday season. That was yesterday’s Hickory Farms. Today, Hickory Farms sells wine and champagne baskets, creates content recommending the best pairings with its charcuterie boards and has a category of keto-friendly and gluten-free branded baskets, all sold via its ecommerce site. It’s part of a rebranding strategy started in 2019, after the Chicago-based company was purchased by a private equity firm. The goal: transform Hickory Farms into a year-round ecommerce destination instead of a catalogue business known for holiday gift baskets. To achieve that, it invested heavily in email marketing campaigns, targeting existing customers whose email addresses it had from online catalogue inquiries. From there, marketers studied search history queries to learn where white space existed in the gift basket categories. That led Hickory Farms to expand into new product categories which drove new customer acquisition. These moves serendipitously positioned the brand well when the pandemic forced physical stores to close and demand for gift baskets—especially ones with alcoholic beverages—increased from consumers wanting to connect with loved ones they couldn’t see in person. The results: growth rates in traffic increased three to four times as a result of the SEO investment and Covid-19 purchase trends, Judy Ransford, Hickory Farms CMO, told Adweek. “Because so much of that was driven by introducing new customers to the business, we've been able to maintain those growth rates in our post-Covid world,” Ransford said. “Retailers started to see consumer behavior shifting back down from that Covid Peak in the spring, but we've still been able to maintain growth rates in the range of 200% over our 2019 position.” Giving consumers what they’re searching for Through that deep dive into billions of search history queries, even before the pandemic, the team learned there was significant interest in wine and wine gifting. To meet demand, Hickory Farms purchased California Delicious in 2019 and launched baskets with regional items from the state. To set themselves apart, Hickory Farms developed evergreen content, like a guide to wine gifting that covers food pairings, taste preferences and specific wines for certain occasions. There’s also a section that features the most popular wines by state. “We identified a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition so we could get people linking to and sharing content, which ultimately resulted in an improvement in search rankings,” Mike Gullaksen, CEO of the online marketing agency NP Digital, Hickory Farm’s agency partner, told Adweek. As a result, there was a 1,000% increase in traffic from searches around keywords like “wine,” “wine gifting” and “gift basket.” Other sharable and usable content includes recipes for summer cocktails and sangria and guides on creating a mimosa bars, building charcuterie boards and the best wine and chocolate pairings. All of that content is being used as efficiently as possible. The marketing team is putting paid promotion behind it and including it in email marketing campaigns. The team is also using Pinterest as a resource to tag the brand and display professional images of the recipes. The search history analysis revealed several other categories that Hickory Farms was able to turn around quickly: champagne, spicy products (think Bloody Marys) and the savory snack collection. And then there were items that just required new branding like gluten-free baskets, since many of the brand's existing products don’t contain gluten; the gluten-free basket is now its top-seller. When the senior manager of merchandising and product development, Vivian Adams, recently attended a trade show, she made sure to source other gluten-free items that can be included in future baskets. Relaunching physical stores Before the spread of Covid-19, Hickory Farms operated 500 mall-based kiosks and stores. Those were largely closed during the pandemic, and the new strategy is opening stores for the holiday season in strip malls. The goal is to drive traffic from the website to stores and vice versa. Like so many retailers, customers will be able to order online and pick-up in the store. Meanwhile, the marketing team learned that gift messages are another source of insights. The team mines the messages to learn why baskets are being sent. It’s a way to ensure the brand has as many sentiment-specific categories as possible, and it's helped drive the creation of new categories like Date Night Gift Basket, which includes several salty snacks, sausages, cheese, Uno and Phase 10. Needless to say, a new popular one during the Covid-19 pandemic tended to sound like this: “You’re in lockdown with kids, so we know you need this wine.” Privacy and the Intersection of Ethics From a Data Perspective