A Chimp, Software, and Farming... Let's Talk Email Marketing
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we sit down with Joelle from Orem Farms to discuss how she went from no email marketing to teaching Barn2Door's Mailchimp Academy. Hear her tips on growing a customer list, engaging your buyers, and not working yourself into the ground in the process.
Learn more about Orem Farms: barn2door.com/fan/orem-farms
Connect with Joelle: barn2door.com/connect
Learn more about Barn2Door's Integration with Mailchimp: barn2door.com/mailchimp
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[00:00:00] Rory: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our Marketing Development Experts and a member of our Farm Advisor Network. Joel Orem of Orem Farms located in central Indiana.
[00:00:14] Welcome Joelle it's. It's been a while since we've had you on the podcast with us. So could you maybe just start by introducing yourself and your farm and what you guys produce?
[00:00:23] Joelle Orem: Yeah, thanks. It's really great to be back. Just a little bit about myself, my husband, Jared, and I farm with his parents and our two small kiddos in central Indiana. We raise and sell pastured beef, and we have a growing custom hay operation along with some typical grain crops. We own Orem farms and we sell pastured beef direct to our consumers and we use multiple channels to do that.
[00:00:48] We've been customers of Barn2Door for a couple of years now, and it's completely changed our business. And so with that, we're currently working on scaling and trying to maintain the relationships that we do have with our customers.
[00:01:02] Rory: That's awesome to hear. Definitely great to have those set goals in mind. You guys did sign up with us back in 2020. And so I was curious what were some of the primary reasons you chose to come over to Barn2Door at that time?
[00:01:14] Joelle Orem: So 2020, obviously it was a big year for a lot of people, but when our farm started this growth journey, I'll call it. We were in a really weird place where we couldn't maintain it anymore. We couldn't maintain our customers. We couldn't maintain the inquiries that were coming in.
[00:01:32] So at that time, we were using PayPal. And we were just, piecemealing our online presence. So I had a website and we had nowhere that you could log in or make a purchase online, but we were taking orders through PayPal and sending invoices then calculating things manually and using spreadsheets.
[00:01:50] And we were doing most of our marketing through social media, but it was not on a professional scale. It was more through my personal account which is a no-no. And it also makes it really difficult. So we were posting that we had freezer beef available and we would, I remember one day I came home from my full-time job and we had 50 messages in my personal Facebook account and we had to go through each one of them and answer them manually and try to give consistent information to each customer about what we were doing. And so it just, it got out of hand. So we looked into it, we did the research and we found Barn2Door and it's never been the same.
[00:02:34] So it's been awesome.
[00:02:35] Rory: Yeah, definitely. And especially if somebody's looking to purchase a whole or a half beef that's something they probably want some information on. So you can't really blame somebody for wanting to reach out, but if it's easier to have a description on your web store, then that definitely helps mitigate the 50 messages coming into your inbox. That definitely sounds like one of the main problems. Would you say that's the primary reason you decided to sign up for Barn2Door, just to help better manage those customers at that time?
[00:03:02] Joelle Orem: Yeah, so the customer management side, but also just the convenience of being able to make purchase online and not have to go through, a phone call and then a text and then a follow-up and an invoice and then a follow-up to the invoice, and there's just way too many steps in our process that we had. Using Barn2Door has been really great for streamlining, but it's also really solidified our online presence.
[00:03:25] I actually come from a background in web development and graphic design. So to me it was very difficult to give someone the job of helping us with our website, but I'm learning, through being a business owner and a busy mom, that it's important to clear up your workload and do the things that you can focus on and not have to do certain things. So I, gritted my teeth a little bit, but I gave Barn2Door, all of our information and we did brand basics worksheets and they did such a great job. And so we're really proud of our website. When we tell people to go to oremfarms.com, we smile.
[00:04:07] And so we're not ashamed of it. We have full confidence that they're going to be able to go there and find what they need really easily.
[00:04:14] Rory: That's awesome to hear. That's definitely the goal. I know our design team, they produce a lot of farm websites, but every single one looks unique and is so beautiful.
[00:04:23] I was kinda curious, you started to get into it there with kind of the website building process and things like that, but what was that initial setup like for you and getting started with Orem Farms on Barn2Door.
[00:04:35] Joelle Orem: It was really great. And I'll say it was very unlike anything I've ever experienced. Typically if you sign up for something online or you sign up, to use a new software, something you get your login and kind of have to figure it out, but we got an actual person and it felt like they worked for our farm. I kept calling them my marketing department. So it was really great. We would be able to kind of take it one bite at a time and just give her all the information that Barn2Door needed, but also be able to provide feedback during that design process. And, now I can log in and I can make some changes to our website as I need to. But they're still there and I can, make a quick phone call or send a quick email and they're really available to help with whatever we need.
[00:05:18] Rory: So after you got your store up and going, and you spent some time with Barn2Door, you actually joined the team as a Market Development Expert and a Farm Advisor in the Farm Advisor Network. Could you maybe talk about what you do in those roles?
[00:05:30] Joelle Orem: Yes, I am really fortunate to be able to take what I've learned over the past several years and be able to contribute to other farmers through the FAN network. So this is basically a community of other Barn2Door farmers that are actively using the platform for their own farm. And they're able to offer insight to other farmers that may be new to Barn2Door or just need to figure out which direction to go.
[00:05:55] I think it's such an interesting industry, being in the farm industry because not everything is online and digital. There's such a tactile element to what we do. And being able to bridge that gap can be difficult unless you're actually doing it. Being able to hear from other farmers, how they're using Barn2Door to sell their products is really helpful because you know they're doing it. And so they've learned the lessons and they've gone through things and they've maybe adapted something in a different way. That's really fun to be a part of, the network of other farmers. But I also get to help with the Social Media Academy as a Market Development Expert.
[00:06:37] And so this is a really great space if you, maybe don't know where to start with social media, if you maybe are actively using social media to promote your business, but you just feel stuck or you just need a refresh. The beautiful thing about it is it's actually a live class. I teach it and I love when people are really engaged and get to talk to each other because it's basically a room full of farmers and we're from all over. And we have different products and services that we offer. So you're really learning from each other and it's very collaborative and interactive.
[00:07:15] Rory: Yeah, the academies are awesome. The last couple of months, I've gotten the chance to sit in on those and watch you teach in those courses. And it is really cool to see the farmers connecting being able to ask you questions in real time and get answers. And like you were saying that perspective of somebody that's actually living this life and doing it and managing a business.
[00:07:34] While taking care of kids and running their farm is it's a lot. And so it's great to be able to talk with people that have the exact same experience and kind of pick their brain about how they've made it work. So in this episode of the podcast, we are highlighting our Farm Advisor Network favorite features on Barn2Door. And so Barn2Door has a lot of different software integrations. They're all specifically built to meet the needs that farmers have. Like tools in the tool belt, I guess. There's delivery routing with Routific, there's money management with QuickBooks, so I was curious, what is your favorite integration on the Barn2Door platform? You're certainly an expert you've been using it for awhile now. Which one stands out to you?
[00:08:12] Joelle Orem: Hands down, I would say Mailchimp. So Barn2Door will integrate with our Mailchimp account, which if you don't know what Mailchimp is, it's for email marketing. And so we're able to basically pull the customers that we have in Barn2Door and tie them to our Mailchimp account.
[00:08:30] Rory: Probably one of the most widely used integrations on Barn2Door, just because that line of communication can be so important. But I guess to backtrack a little bit before diving too deep into Mailchimp what was your email marketing like before Mailchimp and before syncing that with Barn2Door? What were you doing to communicate with your customers that way?
[00:08:48] Joelle Orem: Well, do you remember this Facebook messenger I was telling you about? That's what we were doing. It was our email marketing was non-existent. It was text messages and a phone call, which, those things are great, but when you're using them for the correct purposes, so we had no email marketing.
[00:09:07] It was intimidating to jump in because, you feel everybody has been doing this. We're really behind and we should have hundreds of email subscribers. We just have to start with one. Thankfully we've been able to grow that to, hundreds now, but that takes time and it takes consistency.
[00:09:24] One of the first things that we did when we were doing this individual messaging thing is I thought to myself, man, I'm repeating a lot of the same information. Why don't I just make a graphic? And they can just attach that to the message and, so it really just started there at the ground level.
[00:09:43] So now having the ability to send one message to all of our customers helps us be consistent and keep them informed of things without being afraid of, not communicating the right message to one person or forgetting someone, things like that. So it's been great.
[00:10:01] Rory: When you first got, started with Barn2Door and you're onboarding manager's like, "Hey, there's this thing called Mailchimp. Email marketing is going to be huge for you and your farm." Was there any sense of like, that wasn't what you were expecting? Cause you, you have some marketing background, you were using social media at the time. Were you like email, like why would I need to use that?
[00:10:22] Joelle Orem: Yeah, it took us a while to, to get on board with MailChimp at all, because we were like, we just need a website. We're fine. And we did that. And then I think as our customer base grew, we've realized that it was just a no-brainer we just had to do it. I can't imagine not using email marketing right now.
[00:10:41] Rory: Yeah. definitely. And it certainly is something that you have to keep adapting. So I was curious, how has your kind of strategy with email marketing, how has that changed over time since you first started sending emails to your customers?
[00:10:54] Joelle Orem: We had to start, like I said, we started with one subscriber, which might've been myself but really we've just gotten more intentional. So we had to send that first, scary newsletter out, and click and pray and hope that it does something. But Mailchimp has a whole bunch of analytics and things that you can see your email health and how you're actually doing when you're sending these out.
[00:11:17] Over time it's really evolved where now I can look at one specific campaign and see the dollar amount that I brought in. So it definitely makes me feel. A lot more. Confident about my abilities with using Mailchimp. And then it also helps me understand that my time in doing this is worth this amount of money, plus, more customers and more loyalty.
[00:11:40] And so like I said, it's just gotten more intentional. We try to be really strategic on how we use our email marketing because we are spammed all day long. Right now, we're trying to be very simple with it and use it in a way to build our customer relationships and not just sell all the time.
[00:12:03] Rory: You mentioned spam there, but currently, how often are you contacting your customers with email and is it like a newsletter or what is your strategy there?
[00:12:12] Joelle Orem: Yeah. So right now it is a monthly newsletter, and it goes out whenever I get a chance to send it out. I don't have a day. I started with that. And, I found that I just have to do what I can actually do. And a monthly newsletter is something I can do. And so we've just done that.
[00:12:30] It started out at the first of the month. And then I was like maybe the middle of the month is okay. And then I was like maybe the end of the month is okay. And then now we're back to the first of the month. It kinda just depends on the month and when our restocks happen. And now we're able to look at our calendar more and plan out, "Oh, if we're having a restock, this day, then let's send our email out, on this day instead of, what we did last month."
[00:12:53] So we really try to be flexible with it because I think if you detach yourself too much from it and just make it a job it's hard to be intentional with that.
[00:13:04] Rory: Definitely. And so once a month, I'd imagine this, maybe doesn't become too big of a problem, but how do you kind of balance that you want to stay top of mind with your customers, but without being too spammy,
[00:13:16] Joelle Orem: Yeah. So I don't know if you've heard of the book. There's a book called Jab, Right Hook, and it's by I think it's Gary Vaynerchuk. So it's basically a concept of, giving more than you ask. So we do touch on this in the academy in a really strategic way that you can use on your own farm we make it really easy and simple to apply, but it's called the three E's . Entertain, educate, and e-commerce, these are three like categories that you can use to mix up your content in order to diversify what you're putting in your newsletters. And it really helps give your audience, a nice cadence of content. So they're not always being sold to.
[00:14:00] Rory: And I was curious too, cause you you talked about, your release date is fluctuated a bit with when you get that email out. But how do you. Make sure that you do maintain at least a consistent email strategy, because I think there can be some variance throughout the month, but you're staying on that monthly track.
[00:14:16] And So I guess maybe for a farmer who is, "Oh man, I know I, need to do a newsletter either monthly or weekly, but I just can't get myself to stay on that track." What would be your advice there?
[00:14:27] Joelle Orem: This is a really hard thing to find a balance with, but like I said, just start out with something you can do and can do easily. Don't do what everybody else is doing. Don't look in your inbox and say they're sending me an email every day. Think what can I do and what can I do well, and consistently.
[00:14:43] So for us, that was a monthly newsletter. And then we do send the occasional like informative email message if there's like a change in delivery date, or if we do have a surprise restock and those filets finally came in that everybody's wanting there's a balance between trying to batch and plan and do all the stuff that you hear these buzz words nowadays, but you do have to find the balance between doing that and actually being intuitive to your customers and, feeling the need for information to go out or looking around at what's going on in your community and being able to react to things and maybe answer some questions that you've gotten in lately. So you can over-plan. And so I think I'm a last minute person, which is terrible, but I think it's worked well for us in some aspects because I'm able to be in tune with our customers a little bit more.
[00:15:40] Rory: I like that idea too of maybe including some like local community events, because I think a lot of times that is who you're selling to. And if there's news or things going on locally, that's a great thing to throw in there. I was curious too, I guess I just asked you for some advice to farmers, but if you had two other pieces of advice for just maintaining a simple but effective email marketing strategy what would those be?
[00:16:01] Joelle Orem: So I think the first one would be: be intentional. Don't just put something out there because you feel like you have to. It's really helped us to step back and say, what are our goals for this month? Do we want to get new customers? Do we want to sell more product? Obviously, that's what you want all the time, but you know what specifically for this month are we looking to accomplish?
[00:16:24] So being able to step back and create some goals will help you not only in email marketing, but also in your social media and just any communication that you are putting out there. If you don't have a goal, you won't be able to determine if it was successful or not. Being intentional and then something that we do is this could be a little bit contrary, but we use our email to provide exclusive content to our audience that maybe we don't share on social media. We have some lengthier stories. We share recipes through our email newsletter. Some of those things, we just try to keep to our close-knit loyal customers because they're the ones that care. It's just a special place for us to be able to communicate the longer pieces of information or something more special.
[00:17:09] Rory: Definitely, that's great. And I love the having goals being intentional, because that does make a huge difference. And not only does it allow you to track things, but you kind of get to feel the the fruits of your labor a little bit there. If you said I was trying to do this much in sales this month with my email marketing and you actually get to see that reflected at the end of the month, that's got to feel good.
[00:17:28] You started to touch on there. Some of the stuff that you put in these emails, and I know that can be a common struggle. For farmers as well. It's like what? I want to send out an email every week or every month, but what am I supposed to put in this, that people are actually going to care enough about to open and read?
[00:17:42] So what types of content do you include in your email newsletters that make customers excited to open those and look over what's going on at your farm?
[00:17:51] Joelle Orem: So obviously other than the usual photos, videos, links to your blog, things like that, they expect that. They expect a link to your shop. We really try to make our emails rich, and like I said, they're a little bit exclusive, so we've we've scanned in some photos, some old photos of my husband's grandfather, I have a recipe that I'm going to pull out of our family cookbook and scan that in and things like that are a little bit more unique that we like to include. But we also like to include exclusive updates that maybe we don't share on social media. Maybe it's we have a limited amount of inventory of a certain item, and we know that if we just blast it on social media, then our loyal customers that order from us every single month, they'll be really bummed if they don't get first dibs on that. We'll do like a first dibs email, and we'll say we got a restock of rib-eyes and we know that those fly off the shelf. We'll send those to our email subscribers first because we know that they'll appreciate it more. Obviously it's great to have new customers, but they're the ones that are purchasing from us every month and every week, and we have a consistent relationship with them and want to be able to take care of them.
[00:19:07] Rory: Yeah. That was a couple of really good ones there, maybe to go over them again, but there was like some exclusive kind of content about the farm, with pictures and videos. You touched on recipes. That's a great one that I know people love to get, especially if you're maybe selling like a piece of meat that maybe people aren't super familiar with or some kind of vegetable that people don't know what to do with. The recipes can be super helpful.
[00:19:29] And then your third, the what's new exclusive access to the new cuts and things that are in the store. That's a great one, too.
[00:19:36] If you're looking for content to put in your emails, that's three great ones.
[00:19:38] So I was kinda curious, too. You talked about starting with one email subscriber and it might've even been yourself. How have you gone about growing that customer list and maybe what are some of the tactics you could share for farmers that are just trying to collect emails and start growing that list themselves?
[00:19:54] Joelle Orem: So this is something that we're still working on, you know how to grow our email list. You should be promoting that across all your channels. But something that we did is at our farmer's market, we printed out an actual sheet of paper with lines on it because we knew people would be walking past, our table.
[00:20:15] And maybe their husband was talking and the wife is standing there with the kid. And so we'd just put a sheet out and on the sheet we had the lines where they could put their email address, but we also put a QR code on that actual sheet of paper. And this is something you can do in Mailchimp is create a QR code that links to your signup sheet or your signup form.
[00:20:36] And if they did have their hands full or they're trying to, hold a melting Popsicle, they could scan it with their phone and and do it that way. That's just one way that we've learned to grow our list.
[00:20:46] Rory: And that's really useful too, because a lot of times, and we've recently put out some other resources on this, but a lot of times people that go to the farmer's market, they might not be there every week. But if they're on your email list then you can at least be pinging them in your case every month.
[00:21:00] And reminding them that your farm is there and that it exists and that they can get really great food from you.
[00:21:04] Joelle Orem: And something else that's been really helpful is, we are able to segment these customers that are signing up at the farmer's market. We can segment them and tag them in Barn2Door. We can group them into a farmer's market category, so we're able to easily open up a list of our farmer's market customers and separate them out from our other customers and be able to send them different messaging through email.
[00:21:31] Rory: That's really helpful. That's definitely a really great use of Mailchimp that one of the features that they have. And I was curious too, if somebody is walking by your market table or you just run into a customer or a potential customer and you're trying to get them to sign up for that email list, what do you tell them, what are the incentives for signing up? I know you've touched on some of the content that you include, but what would be the main reasons that you pitched to them for why they should join your email list?
[00:21:55] Joelle Orem: A lot of people will ask when are you getting more of this, or how often do you get this? And they'll have a lot of questions. And so we try to tell them sign up for our email list. We would love to answer your questions more, and every month we actually send out a newsletter and it has a lot of exclusive content and a lot of updates that you know we don't push out out to our social media channels.
[00:22:17] We try to let them know that they're going to be able to interact with us more personally, through our email, then maybe they would be on our website just visiting. You know, We try not to be pushy about it, but we also really want to take care of them. So if we're out of something, we want to help them.
[00:22:33] And so we, we let them know, we won't know how to get ahold of you if we don't have your emails. It really is helpful for both of us. We really do want to get you some ribeyes.
[00:22:43] Rory: Yeah, what a great incentive too, who's going to turn that down? I think another part of that too is some people use they'll use like a promo or some kind of incentive like that to get people to sign up for their email list. Whether it's like 5 or 10% off or something like that, but you guys have decided not to do that. And you and I have talked before about your decision not to use promos or to use them very sparingly, and I was curious if you could talk about what promos you do offer and then maybe some of your reasoning for being very careful with those.
[00:23:11] Joelle Orem: We've really had to step back and take a look at this and see what we wanted to do with, how we market our products. So I think this has a lot to do with your positioning in your community and your industry. So it's going to be different for everybody, but we decided to have very limited promo codes and not really run a bunch of sales all the time, because, we have a high quality product and I think people appreciate that.
[00:23:39] And we feel that if we run a whole bunch of deals, specials, weekly special, all this stuff, or have promo codes floating around in there, we're just training our customers to look for a deal. We really just want to focus on getting high quality proteins to our community, and we're not trying to really compete with anybody. We're not trying to compete with the local grocery store. We're just trying to do what we do and do it best. And so we do offer a military and first responder discount. My husband is really passionate about that, so that's something that we chose to do. That's something that our customers appreciate when they are able to use that.
[00:24:19] Rory: I like that idea because I'm guilty of that as a consumer, with any brand that emails me a lot. I'm only going to really open the email if I see something that says 20% off or flash sale or something like that. I think that's a great way of looking at it and being careful when you include that in your messaging.
[00:24:35] Another really great tool that Mailchimp has to offer is customer journeys. Could you maybe give a little bit of an overview of what a customer journey is and how those can help farmers increase their sales and get the right message to the right person?
[00:24:47] Joelle Orem: So customer journeys are a great way to automate your email marketing. Maybe you want to do the work one time and walk your customers through an onboarding series or welcome emails. This is a way to take every new customer and send them a series of emails, in a consistent way. So you know that every new customer is going to get the same experience and you're not going to have to do it five times. It'll just be automatic. Maybe you want to send a first email and just say, thanks for signing up, here is a background of our farm, here's our history, don't forget to check out our website. Here's maybe a welcome promo code for $10 off your order. And then maybe, the customer journey allows you to choose the amount of days that go in between these emails. So then you could send one out maybe a week later or less than that. That, maybe gives them a tour of your farm or shows them, the animals that you have, and maybe your family and things like that.
[00:25:45] It's just a way to automate your email marketing and give your customers a rich experience that is basically just set up and you don't have to touch it after you set it up.
[00:25:57] Rory: Which is really nice. We all have our different levels of capability with technology, certainly, but you can sit down and bang one of those out and then you're set for a long time. You don't have to worry about trying to send every new customer an email. It just does it on its own, which is really nice. There's a lot more that come with the paid versions of Mailchimp, but customer journeys are one of those things. Because Mailchimp alone, just to sync it with your store is free, which is awesome, but if you want some of those added features like customer journeys, you have to upgrade. What would be maybe some of your main reasons for recommending a farmer upgrade to a paid version of Mailchimp?
[00:26:29] Joelle Orem: Oh, there's several reasons. I've found that. Just, being able to use that customer journey has been helpful from a time management standpoint. If you have a certain number of subscribers you have to upgrade. Giving yourself the room to scale, that's been helpful as well. I think there's some more analytics that you can have as well which are really helpful. And like I said, being able to determine whether what you're doing is working or not. For us it was really a no brainer to just go ahead and upgrade.
[00:26:57] Rory: That's great to hear. And yeah, those analytics are really helpful. You've talked a few times today about how it's really important to be goal oriented with a lot of these marketing things and actually measuring if what you're doing is working and that's the best way to do it is with those analytics.
[00:27:11] Joelle Orem: Yeah, I believe if you upgrade, you can also do A/B testing, which will allow you to, basically, send out two versions of the same email message or change one thing about it, maybe the subject line, and you'll be able to test it on your audience. And like I said, we can talk about best practices all day, but it's really, what's working well for your specific audience.
[00:27:35] So maybe you have a different age group. Maybe you have a different demographic altogether. A/B testing has been helpful for us. We've been able to see, oh, our customers don't open emails after a certain time on Sunday, or they really like when we have a picture of us in it or something like that.
[00:27:51] Rory: Super helpful too, to be able to send half your audience, one email and half your audience, the other one, and see which one performs better. It can get you a lot of that kind of analytical help you need. I was curious, over time, what are some of maybe the biggest changes you've made to your email marketing strategy or are there any kind of big screw ups that you were like, oh man, I'm not going to try and do that again, over the time of using Mailchimp?
[00:28:13] Joelle Orem: I would say our process has definitely gotten easier. We typically have a monthly farm meeting with my husband and his parents and, it's everybody around the table. We're eating pizza and we're talking about what's going on, what's happening this month, when are we going to the butcher? When are we restocking? So I think, being able to discuss it with the entire farm team has been really helpful. So it's something that I just used to do by myself. And I used to have a very rigid outline and I would say we have to give something that's educational and we need to write a sentence about our farm practices, which is all great, but it felt very constricting.
[00:28:55] And so I was really overwhelmed and it felt like a whole bunch of work and I had to write all this stuff. And then I think as we have grown and we've gotten more in touch with our customers, it's almost like I have to get the newsletter out. Like we have to let our customers know. It's just organically morphed into something that is, it's a lot more fun now for one thing.
[00:29:19] But instead of it being like a job that I just need to check off, I need to get the newsletter out. We have to let our customers know that our delivery date has changed this month. And we have to let them know that these are our farmer's market dates, and it's more exciting now.
[00:29:32] Rory: Definitely. And I think that's where the magic is, to create content that your customers want to read. If you're excited about it, they'll be excited about it for sure. So on top of some of those changes that you've learned and changes that you've made over time.
[00:29:45] What are some of the things you're looking to make improvements on in the next year?
[00:29:49] Joelle Orem: I think I would like to get better at actually batching our content. I know I just talked about that and how you can get a little bit rigid, but I do find that I'm trying to come up with content on the spot a lot. So I'd like to be able to map out the next six months or something of content and be able to have a better plan.
[00:30:09] I feel like a lot of our marketing right now is reactive and I'd like to be a lot more proactive. Maybe that's, just taking a day and shooting some photos around the farm, maybe it's scanning in some more of those recipes and being able to show those, but I'd like to be better at just, planning better, batching.
[00:30:27] I would also like to improve on tying some of our content in with our website. We're writing up all these newsletters, but they don't exist except for in their inbox. So I'd like to be able to convert some of those and put them into a blog format where people can access them later and be able to refer to those.
[00:30:45] Rory: That's a great idea. And that's just more content for your website for people to go and see if they're not on the email list, they can catch up there and then say, "Hey, if you want these as they're coming out, sign up for our email list." That's awesome. I guess just to wrap things up what would be your one piece of advice for a farmer just starting their email list, trying to get that newsletter out to a smaller, growing base of customers?
[00:31:07] Joelle Orem: I would say, just start, you can really over plan and work yourself up and feel intimidated, but we all have to start somewhere. We all started with one subscriber, maybe it's yourself, but the thing with email marketing is you won't be able to track your email health if you don't have any data to track.
[00:31:28] So you just have to start. Even if it's terrible, just to start with one maybe, get a few weeks out and then reassess, step back, look at your trends, look at your open rates and see what's working and what's not. And then you can always switch it up. And every email is a blank slate.
[00:31:45] Rory: Definitely commit to the learning process, for sure. I guess on the other side of that, then what would also be one piece of advice for a farmer who's managing a lot of contacts and maybe they have a more consistent email marketing strategy. What would be your advice to help them kind of fine tune that?
[00:32:04] Joelle Orem: I would say, don't forget to be in touch with your customers and listen to them. I think a lot of times we're very, one-sided when it comes to our marketing and we just push out what we think we should be pushing out. Listen to them and hear their questions and try to formulate your emails to keep up with your audience's demands.
[00:32:25] Again, if it's something that's really overwhelming to you, because you are doing a lot more of that, just make it easy. Maybe you need to cut back on how many emails you're sending out. I don't think your customers would argue with that. Just be very transparent with them.
[00:32:39] Maybe you need to explain to them. In order to better serve you, we're going to limit our emails or things like that. So don't be afraid to be transparent and show people that you're trying to serve them better.
[00:32:52] Rory: That's great advice. Mailchimp I think is hands down one of the most utilized integrations that Barn2Door offers, and so it's been great to go through all this stuff with you today. Joel, you've covered a ton. So this is a super great podcast and resource for people looking to either improve how they're managing those contacts or just getting started.
[00:33:10] So thanks so much for doing this today, Joelle.
[00:33:12] Joelle Orem: Yeah. Thank you.
[00:33:14] Rory: I want to extend my thanks to Joelle for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door we are humbled to support thousands of farmers across the country, including farmers like Joelle, who implement sustainable agriculture practices and support their local community.
[00:33:28] If you would like to ask Joelle any questions directly, you can meet her and other Farm Advisers in Barn2Door Connect. To learn more and register to attend, go to barn2door.com/connect. Sessions occur weekly. For more information on Orem farms, you can visit oremfarms.com and lastly, to learn more about Barn2Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, you can go to barn2door.com/resources. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week.