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Getting Tactical with Easy Email Marketing to Maximize Your Farm Sales
196 Plays5 years ago
People check their email inboxes even more often than they check their social media accounts. This being the case, a Farm’s earning potential increases with the utilization of an intelligent email marketing strategy.
In this episode we are joined by Cade Midyett, Growth Marketing Manager at Barn2Door, and Sam San Nicolas, Software Development Manager at Barn2Door. They will help unpack why emails are so important, how to leverage different types of emails for your customers, and also how to implement and master Barn2Door’s latest email integration with Mailchimp!
Show Notes:
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction to Farm Success
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers to save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
MailChimp Updates at Direct Brand Conference
00:00:24
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. I'm Cade, growth marketing manager at Barnadore, and today I am joined by Sam.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hi, I'm Sam. I'm a lead software engineer at Barnador. Today we're going to be talking about some really exciting announcements. Back at the direct brand conference, Janelle, our CEO, announced some pretty exciting updates to our MailChimp integration that are now actually live. So Sam is going to be walking us through what some of those features, some of those updates actually are.
Roles at Barnador
00:00:52
Speaker
And I'll hopefully be adding some context to the importance of email marketing and why these updates actually matter.
00:00:58
Speaker
But before we dive into it, just to give you a little bit more context about who we actually are at Barnadore and what we actually do. Like I mentioned, I'm the growth marketing manager at the company. So my team works on a lot of really targeted marketing efforts from email marketing itself to running ads on social media. And so we've gotten a really in-depth look at what actually goes on behind the scenes with marketing and how important it really is for a brand and for a business.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, and as the lead product software engineer, one of my main responsibilities is managing a team of people to build out the products that affect farmers and their customers. So everything that you interact with while using Barnador is built out by my team.
Email Marketing Benefits
00:01:41
Speaker
Awesome. So diving into some of this MailChimp stuff, obviously just to set the stage, MailChimp is an email platform. Great for email marketing. You can set up newsletters, email drips, everything from there, track your metrics, all of that stuff. Really powerful platform for any email marketing that you do. So obviously a great choice for farmers who are looking to do more email marketing to their customers. And why would you even be interested in doing email marketing in the first place?
00:02:09
Speaker
a few really strong reasons. For one, a lot of sales directly come from newsletters. Around 35% of people actually click through and place sales from those newsletters themselves and those emails themselves. It's a great way to guarantee that you get directly in your customer's inbox. Unlike a social feed where sometimes you'll show up, sometimes you won't, you will always end up in their inbox. And that can be a really powerful thing, especially when you have a list of customers who are waiting to hear from your farm on a regular basis.
Integration of Barn to Door with MailChimp
00:02:37
Speaker
They also are really highly trackable too, so you can tell when people open them, when they click on them, and also even more now, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But it just makes them overall really powerful tools for all those reasons. Guaranteed to get in front of your customers, you can tell how well they're working very easily and very quickly, and it's a great way to just engage with those customers over time, very consistently.
00:03:03
Speaker
More specifically, for farms that have a Barn to Door store, and they've got their customer list uploaded, they're selling online already, and they also have a MailChimp. Tell me more about how that actually plays together. How does MailChimp work with Barn to Door Sam?
00:03:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. The way it all ties together and syncs up is everything that is created in Barn to Door. So that includes your contacts and customers that you've imported into the platform or that you gained through selling products on Barn to Door and all of your inventory items and any promo codes you have.
00:03:34
Speaker
All of that essentially gets uploaded into MailChimp. And what that allows you to do is, A, keep all of your contact lists consistent across, barn to door, and then whenever you want to do email marketing in MailChimp itself. So things like customer groups and pricing sheet access, all of that gets imported in as well. And then by linking your items and your promo codes into MailChimp, that allows you to do conversion tracking for any of your marketing campaigns.
The Importance of Segmentation
00:04:03
Speaker
And that is something that gets me really excited, a huge thing. And actually my talk at the direct brand conference that we recently had on measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts hit on something very similar to this being the purpose of all your marketing efforts should always be to increase sales or to get sales for your farm. If you're marketing and not getting sales, ultimately it's just a waste of time, frankly.
00:04:25
Speaker
So actually being able to dial into your email campaigns and really directly see, did this email I sent get anybody clicking through? Did it get anybody purchasing? It's huge. It makes a world of a difference for farms doing that email marketing. I am very excited about it. But let's back up a step and talk a little bit about that contact syncing because I know a lot of farms out there have their email lists. They've collected their customer names and emails and barn to door uploaded them all. And that's great. They can re-engage those customers market to them.
00:04:54
Speaker
But now there's even more information that actually flows between the two spots, between Mailchimp and Barnadore, right? Exactly, yeah. So essentially the way it works is all of the work that you've done in Barnadore to groom and curate your contact list up to this point. So that's things such as adding customers to a specific pricing sheet so that they can see your private wholesale or retail items in your web store, all the way through to adding
00:05:20
Speaker
specific customers to contact groups so that you can segment your reach to specific customers
Inventory Sync and Store Credits
00:05:27
Speaker
all at once. All of that work gets uploaded into MailChimp as tags and you could do the exact same thing in MailChimp now. So if you wanted to send an email marketing campaign, instead of blasting it to everybody, you can specifically target one pricing sheet or one contact group or a combination of all of them.
00:05:44
Speaker
And that's awesome because segmentation has become over the recent years such a major part of digital marketing, especially when you have a diversity of customers. They don't all live in the same area. They don't know shop from you, maybe in the same zip code or at the same farmer's market. Maybe you have wholesale customers and retail customers. A lot of the time the content that will be relevant and interesting to one of those groups won't be quite as much to another one.
00:06:08
Speaker
There's value in sending a newsletter to everyone who is a customer of your farm. But maybe if you want to do some kind of promo code to just your wholesale business, might not make sense to include the retail customers on that email. So it's really never been easier to do that since all that information is stored in Barn to Door and then synced over to MailChimp. And you can really break that down in some pretty interesting ways. And we definitely do that same kind of segmentation at Barn to Door. And that's hugely helpful in really dialing in those marketing campaigns.
00:06:38
Speaker
And then there's even more that gets synced over now besides just your contacts as well and those groups and tags. Now, even with the inventory and the store credits. Yeah, all of the inventory items that you have in Barn to Door get uploaded into MailChimp as content blocks.
00:06:54
Speaker
so that you can then use those inventory items in your marketing campaigns without having to do any additional work. So it includes things such as the image of the item, the description, the price, and you can tailor that a bit more specifically into MailChimp if you don't want to use the exact image you used in Barn to Door. And then on top of that, as you mentioned, store credits also get synced up now as well. So if you do offer store credits in your Barn to Door web store, then those credit amounts get uploaded as one item and you can send an email marketing
00:07:22
Speaker
campaign out about your store credits. Wow, that sounds really easy.
Tracking Customer Purchases
00:07:27
Speaker
So if I just go into my Barnador store, I add one pound of tomatoes as an option in my store and then I load up an email campaign from MailChimp and I want to send that out to my customers. I can just drop the tomatoes into my email campaign that easily.
00:07:43
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, it's that easy. And one of the cooler things is as customers purchase those items through your web store, Mailchimp actually tracks how much money you generated for each product. And then you could even do things such as automatic bestseller newsletters. So you don't even have to know which items are the best sellers. Mailchimp will just pull that information in for you.
00:08:04
Speaker
Wow, that is crazy. The automation is really helpful in marketing. You can have marketing essentially a lot of time with automation like that just run on its own without you even really needing to interact, which can be amazing. Obviously everyone wants to save time, right? So not having to go in there and do even more work can make a world of a difference.
00:08:23
Speaker
But what's super cool about that is you can include these inventory items in your newsletters now if you have like a new item that you want to feature or like you mentioned those top sellers to let your customers know that maybe you'll be selling out of that stuff soon. Then you can even see how many more people purchase from that newsletter.
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. MailChimp has a really awesome reports feature that shows not only how many items are purchased, but who purchased those items. And then thanks to the new promo syncing feature that is also a part of this MailChimp integration, if farmers, any promo code that you have in your bar under door account will automatically get synced up into MailChimp as well. And then as customers use those promo codes, and if it's included in a newsletter, it'll also show up in those reports that MailChimp generates automatically.
00:09:12
Speaker
Wow. So yeah, going back to the idea of maybe you have a promo code specifically for your retail customers and not your wholesale customers. You can segment the list first off, create an email just for your retail customers based off that tag. And then in that newsletter, include your promo code within the newsletter and it'll track it for you. How many people are actually placing orders with that promo? Exactly. Yeah.
00:09:34
Speaker
That is really cool.
Holiday Marketing with MailChimp
00:09:35
Speaker
And again, all kind of ties back to the importance of really measuring your marketing and knowing when it's working or not. Because if you realize that promo code isn't really getting a ton of people to place orders, then you can reevaluate your strategy. Maybe it's not really targeted at the right group. Maybe you need to make it a little more enticing. All sorts of stuff like that. Same thing with those items too. You can get a gauge of
00:09:54
Speaker
what gets people's attention the most. Is it the tomatoes or is it something else that you have that makes people really want to click through? Maybe you have a really cool new bundle box, like a breakfast bundle box. I know people love stuff like that with bacon and everything. So maybe you post that in your newsletter and that gets way more conversions than something else. And that can be really helpful, not only for your marketing, but to know what you actually should be producing as a farmer.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, so more specifically, we've got all these great tools now for farmers to use with Mailchimp. Absolutely fantastic. It, you know, never been easier to run marketing emails with your barn to door store and great tracking on all those, but headed into the holiday season. There's a lot that you can use with that too.
00:10:35
Speaker
think about the promo codes that you could be sending based around the holidays. The idea of giving and even presents as well. What's better than giving the gift of local food, right? So giving people that opportunity with a nice promo code, maybe some nice holiday imagery in your newsletter, that can go a really long way. And people love the holidays and love to celebrate. And thinking about those opportunities to work in whatever's going on currently, whether it be the holidays or anything else,
00:11:01
Speaker
to your marketing and drive those conversions through even more. So yeah, think about those ways you can utilize those promo codes or those items to always bring those into your newsletter. Even if your newsletter isn't specifically about your store, it could be just about updates from the farm, including some options to purchase down at the bottom. Never a bad idea. You can always drive in some more orders that way.
00:11:22
Speaker
people love hearing about your farm, but they also love
Conversion Tracking Details
00:11:24
Speaker
eating your food too, right? So MailChimp, obviously we can drop our items into those newsletters, it syncs our customers and everything, but it actually has that full history of the orders coming through as well, which kind of enables a few different things. Correct, yeah. So every time an order is placed on your barn to door store, that order
00:11:42
Speaker
the order details get uploaded into MailChimp as just a running history of all the orders on the platform and it gets associated with who purchased the items and if they use any promo codes and which items they purchased and all of those details. So what that allows you to do is see things like which items are selling the most
00:11:59
Speaker
and make specific marketing campaigns for those items and MailChimp will actually automatically generate if you just drop in a top selling items content block. You won't even have to add anything. It'll choose the top three or four items that you have in your web store and then automatically you can send those newsletters out to your customers.
00:12:19
Speaker
And then the second piece is if you are already running a marketing campaign that included links to some of those items, what will actually happen is we will automatically track any of the sales that have been placed that originated from those marketing campaigns.
Analyzing Reports for Strategy Refinement
00:12:34
Speaker
So that's essentially the automatic convergence tracking that happens in the background, which allows you to at some point evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign as a whole.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, I'm already thinking about all the ways that people can use this just thinking about sending out like a weekly newsletter from your farm and just dropping that top selling items block in and you can just have a weekly update or a monthly update on what's selling on the farm and people would love that being able to see those hot items. A lot of the time people like to buy what's popular that kind of
00:13:01
Speaker
creates some some FOMO and gives them a little bit of excitement about buying something that everyone else is interested in. Definitely not a bad way to go with your weekly newsletters or your monthly newsletters from MailChimp. And then also that conversion tracking is really cool as well. So not only can you see overall that MailChimp is driving those orders, but you can see even more specifically if it's that specific email drip you sent last week or that newsletter you sent last month that's actually bringing those orders in.
A/B Testing with MailChimp
00:13:30
Speaker
And you can even see what items were purchased from those emails, is that correct? Exactly, yeah. What items were purchased and then Mailchimp also lets you see in the emails where the user clicks. So you can see via heat map. So you can see if they clicked the item image in the email campaign and you can then maybe market the effectiveness of using one image versus another or if they clicked the call to action button instead and that'll allow you to see all of the various aspects of your marketing campaigns.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic for dialing in even further on what's working. Something that we love to talk about at the marketing team at Barn the Door and a lot of marketers really focus on is A-B testing. So actually sending two versions of your email with one key difference, changing one variable. That could be like Sam mentioned, using one image or two, or maybe just swapping out the images you use, trying one with a really strong button, maybe another one's just a link in your text. But then you can see what do people click through on most? What do people convert on most?
00:14:30
Speaker
And that can be really effective, you know, like we mentioned before for gauging what items might be the most enticing, what kind of imagery people like to click on the most. So you can really dial in running those AV tests, running those campaigns and pretty quickly figure out what is working the best for your farm because it will be a little bit different for every farm and it'll be a little bit different for each of your customer segments too.
00:14:52
Speaker
Really don't be afraid to get in there and try some things. Like if you have an idea, what if I used two images here instead of one image? Or what if I used a picture of my bundle as is or after it's cooked? Try both of those and see what people think. See what people click through on the most. And that can be a super great way to quickly figure out what works in your marketing. And then once you figure it out, you just go full speed ahead, leverage that tactic and bring in the orders.
00:15:17
Speaker
Okay, Sam, so say I'm doing my A-B test and I put in one of the emails I'm linking to my breakfast bundle box. I'm really excited about customers ordering that. I send out the email and my customer list, they all get it. Someone clicks through, sees the breakfast bundle box, gets excited, clicks on it, opens the store, but then they get distracted by something else and maybe they close the tab, leave their computer.
00:15:39
Speaker
but then later they actually come back because they do intend on purchasing that and they come back a couple days later and they place the order i'm assuming that'll get lost right like how could we track that at that point no actually one of the great things about this integration is we've
00:15:54
Speaker
worked hard to ensure that the tracking works for up to a two week, at least a two week period. We actually store some information about the user when they click on the email that this person accessed your marketing campaign. And then if they were to purchase, even if they left their computer, quit their browser,
00:16:12
Speaker
restarted their computer anything but they were to come back after it within that two week window and make a purchase it will actually track as a conversion for that marketing campaign and hopefully keep every keep all your ducks in a row well that is really cool though even if people aren't immediately just placing the purchase right off of the email even if they open it and
00:16:32
Speaker
they're at work and they don't place the purchase right away. Even if they do later, it'll still track,
Encouragement for Farmers to Use New Features
00:16:37
Speaker
which is great. So you really can tell even further, even if it's not in the same browser, even if they close the browser, reopen it, then you'll still be able to track that information. So that's great.
00:16:47
Speaker
All of this has been really exciting so far. I think that this could easily be a game changer for our farms marketing efforts. If I'm a current customer, I've got my store and I've got my MailChimp account and I've been sending out my newsletters and I want to start dropping inventory items into my newsletters and tracking that stuff. How do I actually do it? How do I get started?
00:17:04
Speaker
The great thing is the engineering team has done all the heavy lifting for you. We've actually automatically already synced all of this information from everybody who's integrated with MailChimp up into MailChimp. So no work required by you as the farmer, just your inventory item should be in MailChimp and you should be ready to go.
00:17:22
Speaker
Well, that's great. So, you know, if you're listening right now, you've got your Mailchimp account integrated, you've been sending out those newsletters, you can just go in there right now and you'll see those inventory items and be able to take advantage of everything that we talked about today, whether it be sending out those newsletters to the segmented lists or actually using those promos, sending out those items and tracking the conversions.
00:17:42
Speaker
Very exciting stuff. And if you want to learn more and dial in more on measuring your marketing efforts effectiveness, go to the directfarmconference.com website. You can view my talk, my session on measuring that effectiveness. We dial in on not only email marketing, but also social campaigns, all with your barn to door store and how those work together. So definitely go check that out to learn more.
00:18:05
Speaker
Also, if you are a current Barn to Door customer on an annual plan, you can also attend the Barn to Door Academy, which talks a little bit more about MailChimp best practices along with social media best practices too, which can be a great resource to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
00:18:21
Speaker
Well, Sam, thank you and the engineering team for all of your hard work and these amazing features that are going to help our farmers so much with their marketing efforts and ultimately make everyone's lives easier and save a ton of time. It'll definitely make a big difference and we're really excited to hear how all of you are going to end up using it and how effective it's going to end up being for your farm. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to the Direct Farm podcast.