How Bake Club Found Its Recipe for Success with Constant Contact

To Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar and Bake Club, baking isn’t just a career; it’s home. She grew up baking with her mom, aunts, and grandma, convinced they baked because they each had a sweet tooth. But over time, she realized it was more than that — baking was a conduit to community and connection. It’s joy shared over freshly baked cookies.

“There’s a reason a chocolate chip cookie recipe doesn’t yield one and instead yields 12 or 18. We baked because we love to show up for people with baked goods,” said Christina. This inspired her career as a pastry chef in New York City, eventually leading her to open Milk Bar in 2008.

According to Christina, the heart of Milk Bar is showing up for people with dessert, honoring her deep-rooted family baking experiences. So when the 2020 pandemic lockdown hit, even though Milk Bar bakeries remained open, there was a deep emotional gap in how they could continue to be there for people in the way that had always defined them. Aiming to fill that gap, Christina and Milk Bar Director of Brand, Shannon Salzano, began to brainstorm ways to create genuine connections using whatever resources they had at the time.

I connect to the world through baked goods, and it is why I love doing it every single day and will never get sick of it.  — Christina Tosi

“Whenever I was searching for a sense of belonging, want to know what I always did? I joined a club,” said Christina. “I’m going to lean into that and find my people that way … And I put it out into the world.”

That’s how Bake Club, an online baking club for people of all ages, backgrounds, skill levels, and locations worldwide, was born. It became a simple, yet meaningful way to spread joy and bring people together, even from a distance.

Growing their community

Bake Club originally began as Instagram Live videos, where Christina and Shannon would share the ingredients needed to participate ahead of time, but viewers wouldn’t know what they were baking until the day of the live stream. The first live video attracted tens of thousands of viewers. “It was wild,” said Shannon. As they began to notice the attention Bake Club was gaining in the social sphere, Shannon and Christina realized they had something more than just an Instagram series — what they were seeing was the creation of a community.

As Bake Club began to take shape and grow, Christina and Shannon recognized the need for a place to connect with their audience outside of social media. They needed a way to share upcoming ingredient lists and offer a resource for those who may have missed the live videos. Since they were rapidly growing, they knew they needed a tool that could not only meet those needs but also grow alongside them. That’s when they turned to Constant Contact.

“We don’t have a ton of time; we’re doing this on the side of a million other things and really just wanted to find something that felt comprehensive and manageable. Constant Contact checked all those boxes for us since the very beginning,” said Shannon.

Expanding beyond social media

While social media played a crucial role in Bake Club’s beginnings and growth, Christina and Shannon recognized its limitations. They realized to build a truly meaningful community, they needed to expand beyond social media.

“The attention span is different [on social media]. The amount of content they’ll consume is different. The way they’ll live in that content is so different,” explained Shannon. “So when we were growing Bake Club and starting to explore what this looks like in a more meaningful way, in a really wanting to build a community way, we knew we had to move it off of just social media.”

As Christina and Shannon began to brainstorm ways to expand Bake Club beyond social, they realized an email newsletter was the best choice. It was accessible to all age groups and technical abilities, ensuring everyone in their community could stay connected. Their main goal was simple: make the newsletter personal and authentic; they wanted their audience to know it was coming directly from them. They wanted it to be a “weekly dose of joy” in their members’ inboxes. 

“[With Constant Contact] we were able to very quickly make a platform, make a whole profile, and build out a custom template that we could iterate on every week,” explained Shannon.  “It felt very flexible and very easy to use, but also very unique. That’s a combination of things we did not see on other platforms.”

The Bake Club newsletter focuses on building connections. It includes birthday shoutouts, “I See You Bake Club,” which highlights what community members have baked from the week before, tips and tricks, and glimpses into Christina’s life including updates about her dog, Butter.

“Social media helped us get the word out. It helps us put out content, but it’s always driving into the newsletter as a real way to collect these people and to speak to them,” said Shannon. “Showing up in someone’s inbox is such a different privilege.”

Giving the people what they want

Christina and Shannon continuously build the Bake Club community by driving people to sign up for their email newsletter. They use this as a key measure of their audience’s growth. They create landing pages with Constant Contact and actively promote sign-ups through other channels (like Milk Bar), links in their social bios, and any recipes they share: “Our call to action is to ‘join the club, join the club, join the club’”. To encourage signups, they offer exclusive content, including newsletter-only recipes.

As the number of subscribers grew, they began to separate their email contacts into individual lists, starting by identifying people who were really active in Bake Club through posting about it or interacting with them a lot. They then used this active user list as a test group for all their sends. “We would send them special features and see what things worked before we released it to a larger group, and that was really helpful for us to just learn as we go,” said Shannon.

One of the best things about Constant Contact is it’s really yours for the taking. There are so many ways to use it to reach whatever your goal is. — Shannon Salzano

Christina and Shannon immediately saw the power of connecting with their audience through separate email lists. Building on that success, they decided to level up their strategy by using Constant Contact’s auto segmentation tools. By automatically dividing their contacts into segmented groups, they can craft messages that resonate on a more personal level. “Being able to not say things to certain people or to say more things to certain people has really helped us be deliberate with how we show up for [our audience]. And there are so many features in Constant Contact that help us toe that line,” said Shannon.

Segmentation lets them reach out with specific, tailored actions, such as inviting a local group to an event in their city or sending a message that speaks directly to individual interests. This approach has allowed them to nurture different parts of their list, ultimately strengthening and expanding their overall community. 

“We have a hypothesis that not every bakery is the same and not everyone experiences Bake Club the same way. Some people want it more, some people want it less, some people want it longer or shorter, some people are a little bit older, a little bit younger,” explained Shannon. “There’s all of these different people in the community, and having different lists and different segments of lists helps us give the people what they want.”

Planning for the future

Christina and Shannon understand that staying in tune with their community’s desires and attracting new members is essential. The reporting tools from Constant Contact allow them to gain a deep understanding of their audience and ensure they continue to meet member expectations. By using analytics, they closely monitor signups so they can see connections between their key marketing moments (like Karlie Kloss sharing a recipe) and an increase in subscriptions. In doing so, they are able to quickly discern what content resonates and what misses the mark. “There will just be these hilarious moments of life that drove crazy engagement,” explained Shannon. “We can share it, which is really exciting just to be able to be like, ‘Oh, I guess people really like that, we’re growing’. And we really take that seriously.”

Shannon also keeps an eye on unsubscribes and uses those insights as a gauge to ensure their content remains both relevant and engaging.  “We look at our unsubscribe rate very closely to see if we’re not giving them what they want. If it’s not really what they signed up for, they’ll tell us by clicking that unsubscribe button,” explained Shannon.

By analyzing member clicks and behavior, Shannon is able to “look at what moves the needle.” This not only validates current strategies but also helps them tailor future campaigns and newsletters to their audience’s evolving preferences. 

“I could go on all day about the different benefits I get from using Constant Contact’s marketing tools. The ability to measure what’s happening in real-time is something that cannot be valued enough.”

Working on the go with the mobile app

Christina and Shannon lead busy lives — they are often traveling for work by plane or car or spending time at their bakery kitchens. They needed something that could accommodate this lifestyle, so they turned to the Constant Contact mobile app. “Something specifically that I love about Constant Contact? The app. The day the app entered my life was one of the best days of my life,” said Shannon.

The app allows them to log in, edit emails, and even pause campaigns right from their phone or tablet. This flexibility allows them to stay connected with each other and their audience and maintain their email marketing efforts no matter where they are. “I couldn’t love it more. I think it’s so helpful,” said Shannon. “I wish everything had such a great app.”

Bake Club: The Book

Over the past four years, the Bake Club community has flourished, and as it grew, so did its members’ needs. As the group expanded, members began requesting a way to access recipes offline so they could reduce their screen time while still being able to participate. Listening to their audience’s needs, Christina and Shannon decided to take the next logical step: they wrote a book, Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen, which was released on November 12, 2024.

“Our philosophy has always been to keep these recipes as accessible as possible and let as many people have them, and creating a book is really just another way to do that,” said Shannon. “So when people were like, I want these recipes at my fingertips all of the time, we’re like, ‘Let’s make a book, then!’”

To ensure the book included recipes that resonated with the community, they turned to their newsletter and website analytics. By examining what content their audience interacted with the most, they identified the most popular recipes to create a core recipe list that would cover every moment that calls for something delicious.

Shortly after the book was released, Christina and Shannon launched their book tour. This experience transformed virtual connections into face-to-face celebrations — every in-person interaction was a powerful reminder of just how impactful their community had become and how deeply connected the members were to one another.

“Meeting them for the first time feels like a family reunion. It makes me feel more like myself. Like I’m finding pieces of myself on the road by meeting strangers who are not strangers at all,” said Christina.

Expanding Their Marketing Efforts

As they began promoting the book tour, Christina and Shannon focused on spreading the word via social media and their newsletter. As excitement grew within their community, they expanded their marketing efforts by leveraging social ads within Constant Contact. Using this feature, they were able to send targeted ads to specific segments within their contact list. “Being able to pop up a quick social ad when you’re thinking, ‘I don’t feel like enough people know we’re coming to Austin, Texas’ has really helped us nimbly and cost-effectively get the word out,” said Shannon.

To achieve their book tour goals, Christina and Shannon enlisted the help of Constant Contact’s professional services team. “We’re busy gals. We’re writing the newsletter, we’re running the bakery. It’s not just like our main gig is to get the word out about this tour,” said Shannon. “So having Constant Contact’s professional services by our side to help get the word out could not have been more meaningful.” 

The team not only managed the social ads within Constant Contact’s tools but also guided them in building a complete marketing strategy. They clarified the customer journey by helping them to identify what draws people in, the actions they take next, and in what order. “Understanding flow, segmentation, and automation that’s triggered based on the behavior of different customers and members of the community has really helped us reach our goals,” said Shannon.

This support not only eased some of their marketing workload but also equipped them with insights they could apply to other aspects of Bake Club’s marketing.

Rising to Success

Over the past four years, Christina and Shannon have built Bake Club into a lively, engaged community through genuine, heartfelt connections. Their journey has been all about nurturing meaningful relationships and ensuring every marketing effort sees measurable results and strengthens those connections. “The ROI on Constant Contact — the chart is just up and up and up,” said Shannon. “The engagement can be so much for just five minutes on the platform. That’s really wild. And, because it was also so easy for us to learn how to use the platform, we started seeing returns immediately.”

By embracing email marketing, social media, and social ads within Constant Contact and continuously evolving their marketing efforts, Christina and Shannon created a space where Bake Club membership and engagement keep growing. Most importantly, it has allowed them to show up for their members in the best way they know how — with baked goods and a welcoming community that feels like home. 

Christina recognizes the role Constant Contact has played in building the Bake Club community, “Constant Contact has enabled Bake Club to exist in real life, in my kitchen, and in everyone else’s home kitchen, and then on their devices and on their phone. It has been a dream.”