With her debut cookbook, food creator Jamie Milne of Everything Delish is using Kit to launch her book and send her audience more of the recipes they already love.
Jamie’s life changed 12 years ago because of cheesecake on a stick.
It started with an Instagram account called Everything Delish that she created while working as a substitute teacher. Her friends were always asking her for restaurant recommendations and she wanted to have something easy to point them to.
She almost didn’t film the cheesecake. It was raining and she was tired after a long day of work. But she went to the Heirloom Toronto food truck and filmed a reel of their cheesecake on a stick being smothered in chocolate and sprinkled with nuts.
At that time she had about 2,000 followers, but the next morning she had 80,000. An account with 96 million followers had shared her video. “There was no algorithm at this time,” she explains, “so when someone with that caliber of audience posted, it was being seen by most of their audience instead of the 2% like now.”
Jamie carried that momentum to TikTok where she hit 1.5M followers in 6 months developing and sharing her recipes. To date Jamie has over 4M followers across platforms and has a cookbook coming out this September. To help launch her cookbook, she signed up for Kit. This is how she’s moving her most engaged fans from social to email.
Why she’s using email to launch her cookbook
Jamie grew up in a house where “everyone was welcome no matter the day, time, or occasion.” Her childhood friends were so excited to see her mom’s strawberry poppyseed salad they grew up on in the cookbook.
Jamie hopes her book gives people that same feeling. “It’s meant to get dirty and dog-eared,” she says, “I want the page splatters.”
She also wants to share her book with as many people as possible and hopes to make it a bestseller.
To do that, she knew she needed to expand beyond social media which is great for discovery but difficult for sales.
My friends were like, ‘You have an amazing community and all these people want your recipes. Why don’t you have a newsletter?”
She saw other food creator friends launching newsletters, and thought it would be a great way to build more personal connections and sell her cookbook in a way that people could access on their own time instead of in the scroll. “I think even sometimes asking people to click on a link in your story is too much,” she says. “They’re seeing so much on social media. Every other story now is like a discount code or a link. I think with an email being straight in your inbox you’re not being forgotten. And I think with email you’re reaching your audience in a really personal way that you can’t on social media.”
She was nervous to start an email list at first. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “For someone who has never done this before it can be really daunting. But Kit has been seamless and the team has been amazing. And I really mean that. It’s very accessible and everything I need in terms of an email newsletter and getting subscribers is just all in one place.”
She started with zero email subscribers and grew to over 13,000 in just a few months. “For email that’s huge,” she says. Because email is where the most dedicated fans show up and buy. And she’s hoping it will lead to an incredible book launch in the fall.
The social media to email workflow growing her list every day
She’s growing her email list quickly by connecting Gro to Kit. How it works:
1. She posts a recipe.
2. Her audience can type “recipe” in the comments to get the recipe in their DMs.
3. In their DM, they have the option to “save to email.” (“In the last month,” she says, “we’ve sent over 200,000 DMs).
4. When they click that, they share their email addresses and are automatically added to Jamie’s email list on Kit where she can contact them anytime.
“Most people are saving to email,” Jamie says. They tell her they love the ability to save the recipe in their email so they can search for it anytime. “It’s been my most incredible engagement,” she says. “People love it. And then because I’m already in their inbox with the recipe, they reply and send me a photo of what they’re making and we’re having that personal exchange.”
How she keeps emails personal without spending hours
Jamie uses Substack too but sees it more as a social media platform; she imports her subscribers to Kit and is planning to run her primary newsletter content on Kit going forward, especially because she loves how she’s able to make the email templates more tailored to her brand.
“The color scheme, the fonts, it’s just my voice in newsletter form,” she says. She’s also made it a point to not overthink her email content. “I’m a busy mom, so I just want something that’s short, sweet, and to the point. Like an exclusive recipe, a giveaway, or a sneak peek of the book. The newsletter via Kit is going to be a lot more storytelling, first-hand looks, and just reaching my audience in a more personal way that I wouldn’t be able to do on social media.”
She’s also planning to use tags and automations to send people more of the kind of recipes they’re interested in on autopilot.
She’s excited to finally launch her cookbook and hopes it sells well, but what matters more to her is what happens when the book lands in people’s kitchens. It’s their stories that mean the most to her. “I got an email from someone who said she and her husband were having marriage problems,” Jamie says, “and she wrote ‘We actually used your recipes to get back into the kitchen and find a spark again between us and I just wanted to say thank you.’ That is why I do what I do.”
