Harvesting Success: Why Email List Building Is the Cream of the Crop for Farms and Ranches Online

It’s time to build a new customer attraction machine! There’s a couple pieces every online seller needs to be successful for years and years to come.

So what is the best strategy (especially in the long-term) for getting fresh customers and selling your products to those customers online? 

Is it social media content creation, silly dancing reels, videos; what is the best way to create a community of people who are interested in buying products that you sell and who are eager to buy you?

This is the most important question any online seller can have, but especially with agricultural products. We produce products that are seasonal and have an expiration date. So it’s important to have a strategy in place for getting, retaining, and converting customers that is somewhat automatic because you already have a lot on your plate as a producer.

The traditional way to market agricultural goods has been checkoff programs and co-ops. You may've never dealt with the sales side of things at all! All the sales have happen in the grocery store, traditionally! To move from that into a direct-to-consumer online model, it is important to keep the sales as easy and automatic as possible because you know even more than I do that producing agricultural products takes so much of your time.

The best thing you can do for your business, especially in the long-term, is growing an email list.

Now, I know what you’re thinking about an email list, and it’s probably the same thing I thought. I don’t know how many email subscriptions I cancel every week. I don’t read many of those emails, so what benefit does it have for me, as a small business owner, to have an email list? 

The research is quite clear that an email list is the way to go.

• Did you know? The average sales value generated from an email is 3x higher than that of a social media post.
• If I have 1000 people on my list then 3% will buy... (because everyone will tell you that between 2%-5% of your list will buy)
• The online marketing world agrees that 1 email subscriber =$1/month in revenue
• It’s time to start your email list

You’re not going to get every subscriber to buy from you. But there will be a percentage of those who subscribe to your email list who will be on pins and needles waiting for your products to be available to them!

Isn’t this exciting news?! This is real business growth with an asset you own!

We love automation! So what are the best strategies here to automate as many pieces of this puzzle as possible so that you have time to produce your high-quality products? 

Lead Generation Campaign -

the number one automation that you need to have in place right now (or yesterday) is a Lead Generation Campaign. These are built out of Facebook Ads Manager and will be the main driver to fill your email list.

• The powerful thing with a Paid Social Ad/Facebook Ad is that you can tweak and test and optimize the ad so that the right people are always getting attracted to your audience. 
• The basic premise is to offer a potential customer something free (a freebie) in exchange for their information (their email). Examples are usually an ebook, checklist, or guide. But you will probably offer a discount code or free add on. Like Butchbox does.

You’re familiar with these ads even if you don't realize it. 

Facebook knows so much about their users, we know this because you start getting ads about things you never even knew that you always wanted on Instagram and Facebook, and that’s because Facebook is constantly learning about its users. We may have qualms with that but it has made it possible for small businesses - under the right budget and conditions - to reach customers they never could have reached before Facebook.

Your budget and what you offer as a freebie will be different for each business, but for a Lead Generation Campaign you want to be able to spend at least $10 or $15 a day on Facebook ads. This gives Facebook the budget it needs to optimize your ads. With Paid Social Ads, you have to give the campaign enough budget to optimize or you'll just be wasting your money. 

You wanna offer something to your audience, or potential audience, that your perfect customer would be so thrilled to get! Look at what ButcherBox does: they offer a free cut of meat with a subscription box. You can offer a discount code for a first purchase, or a discount for your first year, or whatever you think could fit into your business model.

I know it’s intimidating to offer free products, but when we grow up in agriculture, we are used to consuming fresh beef, fresh vegetables, and forget that most of the country has only ever bought beef from the grocery store.

I used to think I only liked my mom‘s lasagna. One time I was at a friend's house and her mom warmed up the frozen lasagna and I realized - everything about the lasagna is fine. It was the meat inside the lasagna that just had an off taste. Just normal Ground beef that people eat from the store and I had only ever had fresh ground beef from our family dairy cows!

What is the life experience of your ideal customer? 

Would a just hamburger of your fresh beef completely change their perspective on the value of your meat?

Would it be worth giving them a free taster box of your produce because just that one bite would convince them easily of the value of your produce?

Our world is so detached from their food and this is a huge pain for your customers even if they don’t really realize it’s there. 

Nurturing Your Email List -

a weekly farm update, a weekly blog about what you’re doing. Anything you can share sustainably to connect with your list.

• I write my blogs on voice recognition in a Google Docs while I’m out walking and you could do something similar while you’re out driving out to the farm or doing a chore here and there. 
• It doesn't have to be long. It could literally just be a quick what you’re doing for the day kind of thing. People want to know how their food has been produced, where it comes from, and who produced it.
• You have to be consistent. Keep it simple.

With these two things in place, you can really start to build a following.

Action Steps

1. What can you offer as a freebie or a discount to your customers?
•  it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can change the offer. Just pick something to build your first offer around. 
2. Pick an email marketing platform. 
• I love Flodesk. It’s very easy to use, has a lot of prebuilt templates, and it’s very inexpensive. 
• You can create a very easy email series with your email marketing that your new list would opt into and 
• every week you can just send out your weekly email on what you’re up to, your new blog post, your new social media video (whatever it is that you’re going to commit to doing every week)
3. Run a Lead Generation Campaign in Facebook Ads Manager. 
• You have to get new traffic trickling into your online audience constantly to get sustainable and predictable growth. You will be so glad you started! 

Let me to it for you

If you are

• Not excited about learning a new tech skill, 
• you don’t know who to target when populating a Lead Generation Campaign 
• you don’t know how to install your pixel 
• you don’t know where to start with a Facebook ad or 
• you’ve ran Facebook ads before and have found them frustrating and hard to decipher 

Let me run my 30 Day Lead Generation Campaign for you! 

Here’s How it Works

1. I'm going to hop on a kick off call so I can learn a little more about YOUR goals so I can create a killer FB Ad Campaign to help you reach those big goals faster.
2. Then, I'm going to write your ad copy AND design your ad images.
3. While you’re looking over all of that awesome copy and ridiculously cool images, I'm going to spend some time finding the PERFECT audiences to target with your FB Ads.
4. I'm also going to set up and install your FB Pixel so you don’t have to worry about it. ;-)
5. Once you say ‘OMG, I LOVE ALL OF IT!’ I'll hop into FB and set up your ads for you. I'm going to do all of the set up, split testing and work my fancy magic on your FB Ads. Easy, breezy.
6. At the end of 30 days, I'm done I'm going to record a Loom video walking you through it all. I'll show you what worked, what didn’t and leave you with a game plan so you can keep those exact ads running.

At the end of 30 days you’ll have…

• A list building campaign that converts and consistently brings in new leads AND sales.
• A list full of your ideal clients that can't wait to learn more from you (and more importantly, they can't wait to BUY from you). 
• Exactly which audiences to target with your FB Ads so you know they’re in front of the right people so you can keep growing your list (this part is HUGE!!).
• More time to focus on the important things in your business (like converting all of those new leads in $$$). 

You have so much going on in your business. Let me take this piece for you, let me test and perfect this machine that will bring in new customers without you having to think about it. 

Learn More Here

This is an investment in your business for the long run and I’d be honored to be a part of that.