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Increase Buyer Loyalty with Barn2Door + Mailchimp
582 Plays1 year ago
A Deep Dive on Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder.
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Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast and Barnadore
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the go-to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business. Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers, and save time and money. We'll also speak with industry experts, business leaders, and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. I'm James Mayaco, your host for today's episode. I serve as the chief operating officer at Barnadore, where I've been fortunate to work for the past five years. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barnadore has a deep partnership with Mailchimp, the best-in-class marketing solution for small business owners to manage their customer relationships, to increase loyalty, and cash flow.
00:00:51
Speaker
With thousands of farmers utilizing Barnadore and MailChimp, we have a lot of data and a lot of insights to discuss today.
00:00:58
Speaker
Most importantly, we're going to dive into how to leverage MailChimp for your farm business to build and access a wider audience of loyal buyers who purchase your products more regularly using customer journeys.
Mailchimp's Features for Farms
00:01:12
Speaker
We'll explain more about this feature and what it means during this podcast and why MailChimp's customer journey builder is probably one of the most effective, lowest cost options to help your farm increase sales, save time and access more customers
00:01:26
Speaker
with great automations from Barn to Door plus MailChimp. To dig in on this topic, we're delighted to welcome the product management owner at MailChimp of the Customer Journey Builder, or CJB for short, to discuss the features, capabilities, and powers that this tool can offer your farm. Without further ado, let me introduce Devin Mercier of Intuit MailChimp. Devin, welcome to the Direct Farm podcast.
00:01:52
Speaker
Thanks so much, James. I appreciate the warm welcome. Super excited and happy to be here to discuss Mailchimp and all things CJB with you. That's awesome. I love it that again, we're going to come back to this acronym CJB multiple times. So that's customer journey builder. So we'll dive more into that in a few minutes here.
00:02:09
Speaker
Before we get started, for our listeners who might be unfamiliar with Mailchimp, can you share a little bit about Mailchimp's story for our listeners? Yeah,
Intuit's Acquisition of Mailchimp
00:02:19
Speaker
for sure. Mailchimp was founded over 20 years ago. It feels very small when you're working there, but it's been a company in this tech sphere for a while.
00:02:28
Speaker
It's founded by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kirsias with the goal to solve a very small but super important problem of email marketing for small business owners. And 20 years later Mailchimp has really expanded the products that we offer significantly, which we'll get into throughout the rest of the podcast and has really become this best in class marketing solution for small and medium sized business and advanced marketers too.
00:02:57
Speaker
Well, I'm really excited to dig in because I know a lot of times people don't think about email when it comes to marketing or think it may not necessarily be the most effective tool, but candidly, we know it is one of the most effective tools for farmers in terms of building their business. Now, some of the folks may or may not be aware that MailChimp was actually acquired by Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks back in 2021. Can you share a little bit more about what was the motivating factor for that merger?
00:03:24
Speaker
Definitely. QuickBooks is seen by so many small and market businesses as the source of truth for their back office needs. Obviously QuickBooks more of the accounting side of things. And it handles all of those back office tasks extremely well. But over the years Intuit realized that QuickBooks wasn't able to help small and medium sized businesses with their biggest problem, growing and retaining their customer base.
00:03:49
Speaker
We ran studies after studies trying to understand what the biggest pain points were for small businesses and the number one thing repeatedly was growing their customer base. And we just didn't really have a product in our portfolio that helped small businesses with that point in particular. And so that's where Mailchimp came in and it was the glowing example of how small and medium sized businesses can grow their customers and we wanted to kind of bring them into the family.
00:04:17
Speaker
And so since the acquisition, we've been working towards that mission of creating an end to end platform that grows small and mid market businesses.
Importance of Customer Communication
00:04:27
Speaker
Well, we're, we're customers of both at barn to door as well. Right. So we're huge advocates. We use QuickBooks to manage our books and we use MailChimp for mailing people. Right. And so to your point, it's like, that's one thing to manage the finances, but you have to communicate with your customers and not just once, but on an ongoing basis. And obviously there's a lot of nuance. How do you communicate to your customers effectively, which I know we'll dive a little bit more into before we get into all the features and capabilities of customer journey builder.
00:04:55
Speaker
Why don't we talk a little bit about you specifically, Devin? You've got a really interesting background. I love your, you know, when we prep for this meeting, I loved hearing more about it, but maybe for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about the evolution of your role at Intuit, given that you initially started as a product manager on the payroll team, correct? Yeah, that's right. So I started at Intuit a few years ago on the online payroll team. It was my first experience trying to solve really complex problems for small businesses.
00:05:25
Speaker
I think from my experience working on payroll,
00:05:28
Speaker
I learned that there is little more complex problems and stressful problems than dealing with all things related to payroll. Am I paying the right person the right amount? Am I on top of paying my payroll taxes? What happens if my employee wants to work hybrid from a different county a couple of days a week? Should this in person be a contractor or a full-time employee? Do I even have enough capital to pay my employees? These are all very complex and nuanced questions
00:05:56
Speaker
that I heard constantly from customers when using and working on QuickBooks Payroll. I think what I loved about working on that team was the breadth of customers that I worked with, nonprofits, ad agencies, retail stores, and yes, of course, farmers. And it was amazing to work on a tool that so many small businesses found super simple to manage their employees and contractors.
00:06:21
Speaker
It was just a really amazing experience. And I felt like I learned so much and felt like I was really able to, again, solve a really complex problem in a really straightforward way. But then payroll is super, super fun, but I was excited to see what was on the, the Mailchimp side of things. Well, I'm excited that you've taken over that role and customer journey builder. You must be very talented for Intuit to take something as complex and as important.
00:06:47
Speaker
as payroll and then I'll have you move over to managing the customer relationships, right? Because, candidly, those are probably the two most important things for small business, right? Can I pay my employees? And number two, can I keep my customers happy? Those are the kind of the two constituents every small business owner has to think about.
00:07:04
Speaker
They're so interrelated too. You grow your customer base as your customer base increases, you need more staff to actually manage all those customer relations and everything else that needs to occur when you grow your customer base. And so I see these problems as super interrelated. Well said. So now after your success on the QuickBooks payroll team, now you've recently obviously had the opportunity to take over responsibility for a customer journey builder at Mailchimp. What attracted you to the opportunity to work on CJB specifically?
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, I absolutely loved working for small businesses on the payroll side and knew that that is something that I wanted to continue to do. But again, I kept hearing time and time that small business owners needed help growing and MailChimp was a place in the company that I thought I could drive the most value and work towards living that growth in a very tangible way. Growth in the sense that I'm talking about here is not just growth in list size, but it's growth in revenue driven by engaged and loyal customers.
00:08:04
Speaker
And I think I got extremely lucky working on the CJB team.
00:08:08
Speaker
because I see that tool as a superpower for small businesses driving that growth of engaged and loyal customers. CJB works on the behalf of small business owners to engage new and existing customers at the exact right time with the exact right content. And it would take someone doing this manually hours of work to do the things that CJB can do for a small business owner on a daily basis.
00:08:35
Speaker
The amazing thing about it too is that you don't just have to take my word for the impact either. You can see as soon as you start like an automation, just how much revenue is attributed to the workflow through its lifetime. And so we really care about our customers seeing the growth. And I think it helps me to see the growth that we're able to drive for customers. So exciting and helps drive my passion to work on a product and make it better for our customers by seeing how we're able to tangibly impact the folks that are using the product. Well, it must be really rewarding to be in your seat
00:09:04
Speaker
because you not only get to work with folks who are farmers at Barnador, but with small businesses across all sectors, right? Helping them realize their dreams of not just no longer managing their accounting, their payroll, but like you said, actually growing their business, growing their revenue, bringing more income in, which can create more jobs and create more wealth for these small business
Automating Customer Engagement with CJB
00:09:25
Speaker
owners. Huge, huge deal. And I know at Barnador, we have seen enormous success among farmers who utilize CJB,
00:09:33
Speaker
to build a loyal base of recurring cash flow. This is the beauty of software. Like you said, it can automate so many things for a farmer to save them time so they can focus on what they do best. So for the listeners who are unfamiliar with customer journey builder, let's start unpacking a little bit of some of the basics before we get into some of the more sexy features. So to begin with, when we talk about lists, what is an email audience? And then secondly, what's a customer journey?
00:10:03
Speaker
Yeah, these are both super, super important foundational keywords to know before we kind of dive into everything else that we're going to talk about. So an email audience or your list is just a group of customers that share a common set of attributes. And so this is important in terms of how you message and engage your audience. It is almost the highest level form of segmentation, if you will, within the Mailchimp platform.
00:10:32
Speaker
Then when we talk about a customer journey, that is the manner in which you engage members of an audience with a series of emails and call to action. So a customer journey workflow is triggered based off of an action. And then a series of actions follows that trigger based on whatever you've configured within the application. And so it's a really simple way to map out visually.
00:10:57
Speaker
a contact journey that is triggered based on some action that that contact takes. So for instance, a produce farm may offer a seasonal box of fruits and vegetables to families who pick up those products once a week. Obviously after school, after grabbing their kids, of course, priorities. The audience, the email audience for this customer journey is families with school-aged kids.
00:11:22
Speaker
The journey, however, may be a welcome campaign for anyone who signs up for a seasonal box for produce. As a result, with Customer Journey Builder, a farmer could build a simple campaign when a family is added to that audience to then automatically welcome them to your farm.
00:11:41
Speaker
The welcome campaign could be tailored specifically. It could include messaging and tone that appeal specifically to families with kids. It can include a number of emails. In this example, we can go with a three email series, the first one, telling them about your farm and serving your local community.
00:11:59
Speaker
kind of a learn more sort of a situation. The second one could encourage sign up for subscriptions by talking about your commitment to feeding healthy foods to your children. And then the third one could be another calls to action asking folks to sign up for a subscription with suggestions for family lunchbox ideas or dinner recipes. And the beauty about this is that this campaign, this drip series, if you will, runs automatically.
00:12:25
Speaker
Every time someone, a new family gets added to that audience, they would automatically enter that customer journey builder and run through that flow without you needing to do any additional work.
00:12:34
Speaker
I absolutely love this. I often use the term automagically because like it is like magic. It is so cool. We use that too. We use that term too. Because candidly it's like, you know, we know the audience of buyers, these other families, and you know how moms are. They're going to share their ideas. And one mom's going to see another mom with all this great fresh food that they've picked up from a local farm. And maybe even the pickups proximate to the school. So they're seeing the brand of the farmer. They want to learn more, right?
00:13:01
Speaker
So they sign up, maybe they scan a QR code or they just follow the farm on social media. They sign up for this product. But now that farmer, like you said, they don't have to do anything. It's going to give them a personalized, tailored set of messaging that's going to be tailored to families with kids, right? Cause you've created this audience and that's going to bring them on this journey to bring them closer to their farm, right? And understanding why they do what they do and why they're so committed to feeding their families. So that's really cool. So is this true with all campaigns they can just,
00:13:30
Speaker
run when you set them up like this? Yes, absolutely. That's the magic of it. These campaigns just run and more importantly, it's measurable. As these families open the emails in this journey, as they click on the links in the journey and ultimately sign up for subscriptions to a farm, you get real time data on your conversion rates, which email within that series is doing the best conversion. How well is that journey in general converting customers?
00:13:59
Speaker
And like I mentioned before, you get to see how much revenue is being generated from your email campaigns and from those journeys, making it kind of a no brainer to set one of these automations up and let it run and see the money come in. That's absolutely epic. And I can speak from experience like having helped farmers set this up at Barnador.
00:14:22
Speaker
Seeing that ROI, it's like a no-brainer, right? You know, you think about the cost of what it is to upgrade to CJB. It's nominal in contrast to the amount of revenue and time savings for the farmer, right?
00:14:34
Speaker
because like you said, it's completely measurable. They're gonna see these emails going out, they're gonna see people clicking through them, and they're gonna see people signing up for their farm products. So if a farmer is interested in doing something like this, like how many audiences do you suggest a small business owner set up with when they get started with Customer Journey Builder?
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, you can set up as many audiences as you need and you can also segment those audiences more specifically to get even more targeted. But I would suggest at least three to begin with. First time buyers, your loyal buyers, almost your VIP group of buyers.
00:15:12
Speaker
And then your lapsed or laggard buyers. So the folks who were purchasing your products for a time and then some time has passed and you haven't seen much activity from them. Those are kind of like the power triplet that are super, super important. And those are the ones that I would suggest targeting with CJB.
00:15:28
Speaker
And with the integration of Bardadora and Mailchimp, the actual order history is synced automatically so we can take care of identifying these groups of customers on your behalf. So your farm can set up campaigns to different audiences based on the actual purchase habits or lack thereof, and this can help spur more re-engagement
00:15:48
Speaker
particularly with that really powerful group of laps or laggard buyers who may need just a gentle nudge, a reminder of how amazing the products were from your farm to just get that re-engagement going again. I think this is awesome that it's just automatic, right? That it just runs in the background because that is the beauty of software, right? Like you said, what farmer has time to go through and comb through if they've got a thousand members or even 500 or 100
00:16:16
Speaker
to go through and see which customers have purchased one week or which one forgot. And like you said, they might just need a gentle nudge and a reminder, Oh yeah, I should make a purchase from this farmer, right? Or they have a new product available. Why have you? And I think that's actually a super important point. I think like sometimes the customers that I speak to think, Oh, my list size isn't big enough to segment. Like I just need to send the same communications to everyone. And that's not
Measuring Campaign Effectiveness
00:16:41
Speaker
true. Any little segmentation, any,
00:16:43
Speaker
little personalization you can do to a specific group pays off in dividends. So like you mentioned, James, if it is a farmer who only has 100 contacts, you can still identify which ones are first time buyers, which ones are lapsed, and which ones are loyal, and be able to have those three, I don't want to call them basic, but those three most crucial segments to use for your customer journeys, no matter how big your list size is.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, I know for us that we set those three customer journeys up for every farmer that we work with. At Barnadore, it's a really big deal. If anyone who's upgraded from just a Mailchimp free version into Essentials or Standard where they have access to a more robust customer journey builder capabilities, it's a big deal because those are foundations, like you said, because it's just so obvious to treat your new buyers, your existing loyal buyers, and then any Lager or Laps buyers.
00:17:36
Speaker
with specific messaging, right? And so I'm really curious, you know, speaking to those audience differently seems obvious to a lot of people, right? So I love the fact that, you know, Customer Journey Builder has this ability to set up multiple audiences, right? And yet at the same time, like you said, you can actually see the effectiveness, you can see the outcomes because of the integration between Barnadore and Mailchimp.
00:18:01
Speaker
of the actual outcomes when it comes to purchases, right? Cause it's one thing to send a lot of emails. That sounds nice and keeping my brand present, but is it actually driving sales? Is it driving revenue? Yeah. And I feel, I feel like I'm almost a broken record, but that measuring of that outcome is so, so important. Again, you're paying for a software and you want to make sure that that software is doing work on your behalf. And honestly, James Kudos to Barnadore for providing the assistance to farmers to help.
00:18:28
Speaker
configure these customer journeys because they do do that work for them while they're sleeping quite literally. And I think it can really be a game changer for any small business seeking to save time and just spur more engagement from their customers.
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big deal. I know we see a significant percentage of lift in terms of sales, even from existing buyers, just by being more present and prompting them to make more purchases or become aware of new products that they may not even been aware of. So let's talk a little bit about this, right? Let's shift gears and talk some more about some of the intelligent features that customer Journey Builder can offer to a farmer, specifically smart recommendations, right? So that's a really fancy term. I like it. What are smart recommendations?
00:19:15
Speaker
So oftentimes when assembling a campaign as part of a customer journey, a business owner can feature products in their email using customer journey builder and using our email builder. And the great thing about the Barn to Door and Mailchimp integration is that product catalog is automatically synchronized and pulls in all of those images, details, and links to your farm store automatically.
00:19:41
Speaker
And this, again, does the work on your behalf for those top level calls to action. It allows you to feature products that are the best return on investment for your business. Those subscription buses, those things that get customers engaged over and over again, month over month.
00:19:58
Speaker
And a nice add-on to this whole suite of features that we have are the smart recommendations of this product recommendation block based on what other members of the audience have purchased. So for instance, that audience we were talking about, about families who purchased a particular produce box, we can know that they also bought a weekly flower subscription and then recommend that flower subscription
00:20:24
Speaker
to other members of that same audience. It's kind of spurring those additional add-on purchases. I mean that just sounds absolutely amazing that you not only can have your featured products but other products that are automatically recommended to a buyer
00:20:42
Speaker
that will spur further add on purchases. How does that work specifically?
AI-Driven Product Recommendations
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah, we spent a lot of time and resources investing in our product recommendation blocks in our email builder because we know just how powerful it can be. And so these these recommendations work by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning.
00:21:00
Speaker
to analyze the purchase habits of other members of the same audience. So someone who's getting sent an email, other members of your list who look like that person who have done this thing, we're able to take that information and be like, oh, this other person who looks exactly like them who
00:21:18
Speaker
did this add-on purchase, we want to suggest that to them because they look like someone who has done that add-on purchase in the past. And as a result, your farm can have multiple audiences with different types of recommendations. They're personalized to that end customer. So the more audiences that you have, the more you segment your audiences, the better that those recommendations ultimately will be.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so if your farm sells to families, which is more of the consumer group and to restaurants, the wholesale category, then those two different audiences may have very different recommendations. You might suggest the bulk products to the restaurants versus the subscription boxes to the consumers, for example. The key here is that your farm doesn't have to do anything. MailChimp is using the data on the purchase history from bar to door.
00:22:09
Speaker
to analyze and make these data-informed suggestions to SPUR, again, those add-on purchases.
00:22:16
Speaker
The intent is to, of course, help make suggestions that can spur add-on purchases, but there are no guarantees. So for instance, someone who purchases a produce box may actually be allergic to flowers, so they're gonna pass on that no matter what. However, another individual may absolutely love flowers and had no idea that your farm even offered them until they saw the recommendation and email campaign as part of Customer Journey Builder. That is just so cool, right? I mean, it's just so fun to invest in this partnership with
00:22:45
Speaker
You know, MailChimp and just be able to synchronize our data from front door with this again, powerful engine that you guys have on the backside. So that way can just help small business owners again, sell more products and more importantly, delight the buyers. I know I gave my wife a flower subscription one year. She loved it, right? And in fact, she loved it so much.
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, what did I do? I went and got one from my mother and my mother-in-law, right? So it's like, why make me have to go find that? Why not just recommend it to people like me who also had that same experience?
00:23:18
Speaker
And the best part about it, like you said, the farmer doesn't have to do any work. It's just looking at the data and other people like me to recommend, hey, you might want to purchase a flower subscription and they can voluntarily opt in or choose not to. But I know from our data, looking behind the scenes, boy, this just works, right? It helps farmers really increase the average order value.
00:23:37
Speaker
with each one of those buyers. It's a big deal. Before we wrap up, I know Intuit Mailchimp is continuing to invest a lot of money in terms of R&D and development. There's just a lot of new innovations that are coming to the market. Are there any in particular that you'd like to share with our listeners that you're particularly excited about?
00:23:56
Speaker
Oh man, there is always so much that we're working on over here. So many really cool and exciting products. So happy to share some of my favorites. There are two that I've personally been really excited about that I'm sure the farmers listening would also be super excited to hear about as well. The first is our native SMS solution. And so directly within the Mailton platform, our customers can now embed SMS into their existing email automations or social campaigns.
00:24:26
Speaker
It's a whole new channel that we're really excited for our customers to get value out of. And yes, of course, like I alluded to, you can automatically send SMS messages now as part of customer journey automations, which is super, super exciting. That's huge. It's amazing. We are super, super excited about it.
00:24:43
Speaker
The second solution that we just announced last month was Intuit Assist. And so Intuit Assist is the new financial assistant that will use the power of generative AI to give intelligent and personalized recommendations. We love this concept of smart, personalized recommendations. And now with the power of generative AI, we can do a little bit of that a bit more smartly, and we can do more work for more folks at more scale.
00:25:11
Speaker
And so Intuit Assist will be embedded throughout many Intuit products, but obviously we care the most about Mailchimp here right now. And so within Mailchimp, Intuit Assist will be able to generate targeted customer segments on your behalf, personalize emails as part of customer journey workflows, and create these entire automations on your behalf
00:25:33
Speaker
that you only need to review the content and click send and turn on. So tapping into the power of AI to tackle these manual parts of marketing is really what we're trying to do here is automate anything that we can. Automation is the name of the game. Automation is what saves farmers' times. And so we're really leaning into AI to do this.
00:25:57
Speaker
Well, I think that's a huge call to action for a lot of farmers to really lean into what Intuit Assist can offer them. I know we use a lot of artificial intelligence here at Barn to Door and generative AI to help us generate great content, right? And like you said, it can get you 90 to 95% of the way there, and then you can go in and personalize it for your farm, right? Save a lot of time, right?
00:26:20
Speaker
You don't have to be afraid of these new tools and technologies. What you want to do is uncover and identify the power that they can offer you and then figure out how you can leverage that to your advantage so you can grow your small business.
Conclusion and Resources
00:26:33
Speaker
Well, Devin, I want to thank you for joining us on this week's podcast episode and Intuit Mailchimp's ongoing contribution to help support small business owners. The work you're doing really does matter because it is changing the lives of these small business owners when they can increase their revenues and their sales and build more loyal customers. That's really important work, so well done.
00:26:54
Speaker
Here at Barnadore, we're really humbled to support thousands of farms all across the country. And we're honored to get the opportunity to work with fantastic partners like Intuit Mailchimp who share our values. For more information about Intuit Mailchimp, check out their website at www.mailchimp.com. That's www.mailchimp, like thechimpansi.com. For more information about Barnadore, check out our website at www.barnadore.com.
00:27:23
Speaker
That's www.barn2door.com. Both Mailchamp and Barnadore offer a whole litany of free resources to help your farm increase sales, access customers, and save time. Thank you again for tuning into the Direct Farm podcast. We look forward to seeing you next time.
00:27:45
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms use to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the direct farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.