What's Your Email Strategy? Do More With Less Effort.
A successful Farm business needs a strong email strategy to drive sales and save time. Without an effective and simple email strategy, the power of email marketing quickly fades into a time-consuming process. When it comes to creating your email processes, doing more with less effort is key to generating more consistent Farm orders.
To streamline operations and limit the hours spent developing new emails, marketing new products, and sending emails, Farmers have implemented some innovative techniques to generate up to 80% of their weekly orders from a single email. The most successful Farms have developed their email strategies to be effective, save time, and take the least amount of effort to generate results.
Automatic Order Reminders
Farmers use automatic order reminders to spur consistent sales to remind their customers they exist! Those that send regular order reminders enjoy a +28% higher average order volume. If customers are new to your Farm, they aren’t “used” to purchasing from you regularly - meaning that they have yet to build a habit of purchasing fresh seasonal products from your Farm (versus at the grocery store). Reminding customers that your products are available and ready to order keeps you top of mind in their purchasing decisions.
Even existing customers who have purchased from your Farm previously can still use a nudge now and then to make a purchase. Order reminders are good for promoting orders and for prompting add-on purchases of new products, limited items, or benefits from a promotion. For example, most Americans aren’t familiar with the seasonality of fruits and vegetables. If your Farm sells strawberries, send out an order reminder to customers who love your strawberries that they are now perfectly ripe, in season, and ready for purchase.
One Quick Email Per Week, at a Minimum!
You do not need to send an email to your customers every day. In fact, don’t send daily emails! Think about how often you receive emails from the Brands you follow. Overloading your customers’ inboxes with more than a few emails a week will likely result in your emails appearing in the Promotions or Spam folders or, worse, customers unsubscribing from your emails altogether. Sending one to two emails per week is enough to keep your Farm top of mind, visible in the inbox, and set the stage for customers to build a relationship with your Brand. Here are a few types of emails your Farm should be sending:
Newsletter
A Farm newsletter is essential to keeping customers aware of what’s happening on the Farm. For 90% of consumers, newsletters are the ideal way to receive updates from your business. Sending a newsletter once or twice a month drives consistent orders and creates transparency between you and your buyers. Farmers have seen up to 80% of their weekly orders come through a single newsletter.
Targeted
Targeted emails allow you to send relevant information to specific individuals. Order Reminders can fall under this category. Every customer wants to see something different from your Farm: some are loyal customers who want special access, promos, or to be first in the know. Others haven’t purchased from your Farm in a while and need to be reminded to make a purchase. Pinpointing what different customers want is key and tailoring your message to each customer group is critical to increasing interactions on your emails.
Promotional
Entice customers to purchase from you with promotional emails once in a while! They won’t know you’re running promos unless you tell them! Offer limited-time offers, a limited number of first-come discounts, or limited access to exclusive products that customers can only receive through email. These promos fuel the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) and help attract customers to sign up for your email list.
Leverage the Barn2Door + Mailchimp Integration
The only thing you should spend time on with your email strategy is writing the content of your emails. Everything else can (and should) be automated. For example, manually inputting 100’s of customer emails poses a high potential for errors. With the Barn2Door + Mailchimp integration, Farmers automatically sync their contact list with a click of a button. Customers can be organized into different groups, so it’s easy to send specific information to buyers at different stages (a welcome email to new subscribers, loyalty emails to loyal customers, and re-engagement emails to customers that haven’t purchased in a while).
It’s essential that you’re tracking the outcomes of where you’re spending your time, too. For example, Farmers can analyze the outcomes of email engagement, email revenue, and purchased products. By engaging your customers consistently and leveraging Mailchimp’s Smart Product Recommendations to personalize emails, Farmers generate +28% larger order sizes.
Read: How $11 Can Increase a Farmer's Average Order Size by up to 30%
Listen: A Chimp, Software, and Farming... Let's Talk Email Marketing
Email strategies can be effective and simple. When Farmers take too much time, try to implement overly complicated activities, or spend hours writing individualized messages, you’ll find it’s not worth your time. Instead, simplifying processes to save time and using tools that eliminate the manual work for you is the key to implementing a successful email strategy.
Barn2Door provides an all-in-one solution to grow and manage your Farm business. If you’re curious to learn why successful Farms run on Barn2Door, watch this 5-minute video.