Jen Hansard from Simple Green Smoothies had one goal in mind. To make the habit of drinking green smoothies accessible, easy, and SIMPLE for everyone.
The best way to do that? Through an app!
“Here at Simple Green Smoothies, we believe you’re meant to do amazing things in the world. Drinking a daily green smoothie will give you the kickstart you need to feel your best physically, mentally, socially… and beyond!”
Simple Green Smoothies is about much more than a green drink in the morning. Jen’s passion for health and wellness has had her introducing other plant-based recipes and meal plans that can help her community achieve incredible health benefits.
As Jen would say: #KaleYeah!
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Why Create an App?
As you can tell from the title, Simple Green Smoothies is all about keeping things simple. We are a society of phone users and apps are the preferred method for many people for finding and managing the information they want.
Jen Hansard knew this wasn’t something she could ignore:
“Allowing our community to easily access recipes and resources through their phone, is another way for us to make adding this healthy habit even easier!”
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Utilizing an app-based platform also allowed her to reintroduce their original green smoothie challenges through the bundles’ portion of the app. After receiving community feedback about missing these challenges (the challenges were updated to a shorter challenge at the start of 2017), Jen knew that an app platform would give her the flexibility to introduce and expand on this feature that was important for her customer experience.
The app also had the added benefit of being able to communicate with her growing audience and community through push notifications.
Previously Jen had steered away from developing an app for the business as she found the prices too high, and it just wasn’t something she could stretch to. However, an introduction to Jarrod at The App Match and their affordable prices gave her the chance to rethink this aspect of the business:
“The App Match allowed us to create our app vision at a very affordable price!”
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Developing a Simple Idea
Jen Hansard knew it wasn’t going to be a quick and easy process to develop the app. Taking the time to really think about the functions, recipes, and categories was important to her.
Jarrod from The App Match provided her with a template to use. It was then a case of simplifying and adjusting to make sure it really fits with the vision for the Simple Green Smoothies app.
Jen is grateful for Amanda Frisbie for her role as App Director.
“She really helped bring this dream to life and did most of the heavy lifting.”
It really takes a village to create and build something this extensive and valuable, and Jen feels that without such a team as she’s had, none of her success would even be possible.
Alongside deciding which recipes to include, there was a whole host of other considerations including creating the different graphics for the in-app categories, the bundles, the recipes, and resources. All of this required careful planning and developing before finally getting to the stage of entering everything through the backend of the app.
Then came the next phase:
“Review and edit, review and edit, review and edit!”
Once everything was right, it was a few quick steps from creating push notifications to scheduling and finally launching the app.
During our launch, we ranked #1 in the Food and Drink category and #7 overall in the iTunes store!
Although it was a long process, Jen was delighted with the results and the simple process of working with The App Match:
“Jarrod has a wealth of knowledge on app development as well as the app launch process and what has worked best for his previous companies!”
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Next Steps for Simple Green Smoothies
For their initial app launch campaign, Jen utilized an email and social media strategy to coincide with promoting the new app itself. One of the biggest campaigns they ran was a live smoothie challenge across social media with the recipes and shopping lists only available through the new app as part of a challenge bundle.
“We’ve continued to promote the app through emails as well as highlighting what we’ve been adding to the app (new recipes and new bundles) through social media.”
Jen Hansard is keen on continuous business growth and building her Simple Green Smoothies community as well as monetizing the app – and she knows just the way to do it.
In-App purchases.
Leveraging on the success and demand of the smoothie challenges, the largest strategy for monetizing the app has been through in-app purchases of the challenges:
“We host a four-week green smoothie challenge with recipes and a weekly shopping list. We’re currently updating the app to add an Autumn, Winter, and Spring Challenge. As well as new and exciting recipe bundles!”
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It’s pretty clear that there’s no stopping this simple idea! Find out more about Simple Green Smoothies and join in one of their challenges on their social media:
- Simple Green Smoothies Facebook
- Simple Green Smoothies Instagram
- Simple Green Smoothies Pinterest
- Simple Green Smoothies YouTube
If you want to bring an App to life for your audience, sign up for The App Match and make it happen.