Steph de Sousa
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Case study · Ecommerce

From 3 million followers to a business that converts.

4,307 leads in 44 days.

Steph de Sousa, of Easy Recipe Gang and What’s for Dinner, is one of Australia’s most-loved food creators: millions of followers, a bestselling cookbook, an SBS show. Enormous reach. The owned business wasn’t keeping up.

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  • 4,307leads in 44 days
  • $0.33cost per lead
  • 57.97%email open rate
  • +2,431%landing-page traffic

The brand

Reach for days.

What’s for Dinner is a meal-plan subscription for budget-conscious families, the answer to the nightly “what do I cook?” for someone who’s already done all the thinking that day.

The audience was there in the millions. The problem was after the scroll: nowhere for that attention to go, and no easy first step.

“The reach was always there. It just needed somewhere to go.”

Steph de Sousa

The challenge

Famous, but not converting.

  • An overloaded website doing everything at once, with no clear path to convert.

  • An email list not growing in step with the organic reach.

  • 1,500 new Facebook followers a day, none funnelled into owned channels.

  • No low-barrier way for a new follower to try the product before subscribing.

The work

Give the reach somewhere to go.

Strategy · Meta ads · email

  • Found the real audience

    We wrote to the “exhausted default parent” carrying the mental load of feeding a family on a budget, not to everyone.

  • Split the journey across three sites

    Three focused websites, one per stage of the customer journey, instead of one site doing everything.

  • Built a low-barrier entry point

    A “Free 5 Night Dinner Plan” lead magnet: a genuine taste of the product that turns a follower into a subscriber.

  • Turned reach into leads with Meta

    A paid Meta campaign (launched 11 Feb 2026) pointed the existing audience at the lead magnet, for cents.

The results

Cents per lead. Thousands of them.

  • 4,307leads generated in 44 days
  • $0.33cost per lead, vs an industry $2 to $15
  • < $1,500total ad spend
  • 53,013total email subscribers
  • 57.97%email open rate, vs ~25% industry
  • +2,431%landing-page traffic

7,934 of those leads came through the free dinner plan from 61,100 visitors, turning reach into a 53,013-strong owned list that opens more than half of everything we send.

Sound familiar?

Big reach, nowhere to put it?

An audience but no system turning it into leads, subscribers and sales? That’s exactly what we build.

Work with Birdcage