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Direct Farm Tactics #1: Barn2Door + Mailchimp Customer Journeys
209 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to launch a new series focused on delivering strategies that Farmers can immediately implement to help grow and manage their business.
SHOW NOTES:
Customer Journey Blog Post: Give Your Farm Revenue a Boost Up to 35% with Barn2Door + Mailchimp
Podcasts: Getting Tactical with Easy Email Marketing to Maximize Your Farm Sales; Save time and boost sales with practical email marketing tactics by Jamal Miller from Mailchimp
To Learn More: https://www.barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Four Levers for Farm Success
00:00:02
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 save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
New Series on Farm Strategies
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us for the direct farm podcast. Today, I'm really excited to be introducing a new series where we dive into more hands-on strategies that you can apply for your farm business. So welcome to direct farm tactics. By the way, I am your host today, Cade. I'm
Introduction of Hosts and Topic
00:00:43
Speaker
a growth marketing manager at Barn to Door and I'm super delighted to be joined by Miranda. Miranda, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners.
00:00:51
Speaker
Awesome, hey everyone, my name is Miranda. I am one of the success managers here at Barn to Door leading the account management team.
00:00:58
Speaker
And I'm really excited for today's topic, which I know is one that you and your team have been focusing on a lot recently of MailChimp customer journeys. But before we get right into the nitty gritty, if you're unfamiliar with our integration with MailChimp, we do have other episodes of the direct farm podcast detailing what's in it, what's involved and what you can get out of it for your farm. There's some great episodes. I did an interview with one of our engineers talking about the integration as well as a couple episodes
00:01:24
Speaker
from people who work at Mailchimp, so definitely go check those out.
Syncing Barn to Door with MailChimp
00:01:28
Speaker
But the gist is that you can sync your Barn to Door customers and products to Mailchimp to use in your emails and your newsletters. There's a lot more to it than just that, but that's basically the overview. Miranda, if I'm correct, your team is also now Mailchimp certified.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yes, we are all MailChimp certified. So real experts here ready to help out and Public Farm be successful with Barnadore and MailChimp. So to get into it, MailChimp, you know, you can send newsletters and emails. Let's say I'm a farmer right now. I've got my MailChimp integrated with Barnadore, got my customers sinking over. What is a customer journey? Because that's kind of like the next step, right?
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You definitely want to get familiar with sending out, you know, newsletters and getting really comfortable with emailing your customers. But then what's maybe that next step? So we like to really showcase and share customer journeys with our farmers. So what is a customer journey? Basically what that is, is it's a pre-planned communication way that you can send your customers based on certain trigger actions.
00:02:29
Speaker
So for instance, you know, if somebody has a first purchase or if they've purchased a certain product or maybe they haven't interacted with you in a while, you can build out these trigger actions and plan out a series of messages that can help them get to maybe that next life cycle market event in your business.
00:02:47
Speaker
Instead of me just sending out my newsletter every week to my entire customer list, you know, as I have been doing already, that actually empowers me to be able to take that list and break it into different chunks of people effectively based on different things that they've done. Yes, absolutely. And you can target different customers as well, different groups to give them the certain messages to, you know, in turn, open that email from you or obviously, you know, get that purchase.
00:03:12
Speaker
And that's actually something that we do at Barn2Door all the time because obviously if we're communicating with farmers, for example, all of you great farmers signed up with Barn2Door, we couldn't just send out a blanket message in many cases to everybody. Being able to trigger those emails based on those different things that can happen like a purchase is definitely a huge deal. But why should our farmers out there be thinking about setting up customer journeys for their mail to account?
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah,
Automating Emails for Farmers
00:03:39
Speaker
great question. I know we have never met a farmer who has extra time on their hands. And so let the software do it for you. It's a great way to kind of take another item off of your plate, set up automations where emails are going out when you're out in the field doing your daily chores. Believe it or not, that's a huge time saver for you. Yes, you might have to dedicate some time in the beginning to get this all set up. But again, have those emails go out while you're working out on the farm.
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, and that is huge in marketing. Anything that you can do, even if there's that bit of initial investment, because any marketing you do will take that a little bit of, you know, initial work to get it set up. But anything that you can automate, anything that can just keep running for you in the background, and you don't have to hit send on every single email or pick out each of those individual customers whenever they place an order or whatever it may be, then that is just huge from a time saving standpoint.
00:04:34
Speaker
And if it ultimately ends up bringing you sales, then that's just money in your pocket, right? So that's great. Is there a certain size or type of farm that this is made for or can it really be used for any type of farm?
00:04:46
Speaker
Honestly, I think it can be used for any type of farm. No matter how big, no matter how small, you can decide how complicated you might want to make the journey. Even if you just want to make a simple one, maybe people who haven't purchased in the past 30 days or if they purchased maybe a CSA and you want to build out a specific journey for those customers.
00:05:06
Speaker
you can easily do one in about five or 10 minutes. And if you have a bigger audience and kind of a longer journey that you want to create for maybe a bigger size farm, you can do so too. So it's up to you and what you're looking for to get out of this journey.
00:05:20
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And that totally makes sense. And that's definitely something we've seen at Barn to Door with our marketing as well. Even if you have a small audience to start, even if it's just, you know, a single customer journey or whatever the example may be, that can really make a huge difference because, you know, think about it yourself. If you're receiving emails in your inbox and they're personalized to you based on things that you have done versus if it's just a generic email blast that could get sent to anybody.
00:05:45
Speaker
you're definitely more likely to interact with that and engage with that.
Personalized Messages for Engagement
00:05:48
Speaker
So same thing with your customers. Keep that in mind because that can really go a long way. And you can always expand it out later, right? Exactly. More targeted messaging, personalized messages really go a long way. How does this really help farms at the end of the day? I set up my customer journey. What can I expect to get out of it?
00:06:05
Speaker
What can happen is people are busy on their day to day lives and they might not see the emails that you're sending out or see your social posts and targeting those customers and putting them in a specific journey to really grab their attention. I know it sounds cheesy, but having a fun question or emojis in your subject line.
00:06:23
Speaker
you know, kind of that fear of missing out promo code to really grab their attention and boom, they're back and reengaged. And so it's really cool to be able to get your customers back and you know, it might be a while and then in turn to you, you get those sales coming through again.
00:06:37
Speaker
And if you think about it, if you are listening to this podcast and you do already send out emails and newsletters to your customers, think about that percentage of people who don't open up your emails. It's always a big percentage. No matter what business you look at, your open rates are never going to be 100%. There's always people who aren't engaging.
00:06:54
Speaker
And it can be really easy if you think about it from your customer's perspective just to scroll past or maybe they don't even open their email at all or just scroll past those newsletters you're sending because it's just another email and a sea of emails. But if you can do something like Miranda said with an emoji or a funny question.
00:07:12
Speaker
or a promo code or some kind of FOMO driving a subject line or fear of missing out, that can definitely re-engage people. And just them re-engaging from that one email can make them actually be re-engaged with your future newsletters as well because they know that you have exciting, maybe funny or promo or products that they'll be interested in to click on in the future.
Setting Up Customer Journeys in MailChimp
00:07:37
Speaker
So definitely a great way to re-engage
00:07:39
Speaker
and also love the call out and bringing in more sales for your farm because at the end of the day, the big thing to keep in mind is that all marketing is ultimately to put more dollars in your pocket to sell more of your products. So if you aren't getting those results, it's really not worth it. So definitely want to be able to get as many orders through as you can.
00:07:57
Speaker
But Miranda, tell me a little bit about how someone can actually get started setting up customer journeys, because it's definitely one thing to have your newsletter up and be sending that out once a week. But then how do I take that step to set up my first customer journey?
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, so I will say that it is part of the paid version and MailChimp, but it is definitely worth it to see those results come through. Sometimes you just have to put in a little bit of time and a little bit of money to really see a big return. So how you kind of get started with MailChimp is you just are in their automation section and you're in the customer journeys.
00:08:30
Speaker
But the really cool thing about MailChimp is, especially if you're going to set up your first customer journey, they already have pre built ones, which is really helpful, you know, welcoming new contacts or sending to repeat customers or people haven't purchased in a while. So that's a great start. But then if you have ideas of, you know, maybe more advanced levels, you're able just to create a journey and kind of click and drag different triggers depending on what you're looking for and things like that.
00:08:58
Speaker
Even though it is a paid Mailchimp feature, just after an order or two, you can cover the cost of a month subscription to Mailchimp, no problem. So it easily pays for itself really quickly and is more than worth it to set up some automations like customer journeys. You know, you can start with these templates that Mailchimp has created, even just run them straight out of the box. But if you want to start getting creative with it, you can kind of just adjust things like building blocks, like move things around different, you know,
00:09:25
Speaker
triggers to set up different emails and everything and just kind of build up your own as well as building up on top of the templates that Mailchimp already has. You don't have to be any kind of marketing expert to set it up. You can really just start from scratch with the assistance of the templates that they have in there.
00:09:42
Speaker
Absolutely. And honestly, it's really fun, too. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's even more fun when you start to see the sales come through. Right. That's that's ultimately the best reward you can get for your marketing efforts. Do you have any examples of farmers who have been able to implement this and get any results from it?
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah,
Case Study: 35% Sales Boost
00:09:59
Speaker
no, absolutely. Actually, one of our farmers in California, he sells produce and we decided let's maybe target customers who haven't purchased in the past 60 days. And so that was kind of our main starting point is how can we re-engage these customers again? And so what we decided to do after that is as we were building out our journey, that was kind of the first starting point. And as we began to build our journey path,
00:10:28
Speaker
we decided there was gonna be one path with customers that have opened his past five campaigns and then another path with people that hadn't. And so what we did there is people that had opened his past five campaigns, we did a different sort of message for those emails with the subject line. We kind of said something fun along the lines of caught you looking with fun eye emojis, because you know that definitely is gonna grab the attention.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then we actually saw a 45% open rate with that. And so... Yeah, in case anybody listening to the podcast doesn't know, that is a tremendous open rate.
00:11:06
Speaker
Yes, exactly. And so that was, you know, one of the journey points. And then on the other side, for customers who we really wanted to reengage with, who hadn't opened any of the past campaigns, we created a subject line with a promo code letting them know, hey, this week only 10% off. And what we saw with that was a 34% open rate, which was really great, especially for those people that haven't purchased, you know, in the past 60 days.
00:11:32
Speaker
After that, what we did is we just kind of delayed the next emails for about a week just to give it some time. And then we sent everyone one last email again with the subject line with the emojis, hurry 10% off and then the other one 24 hour discount left. So really to create that fear of missing out from that great deal. And we saw again, a 45% open rate on those.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, for those people in the branch of your customer journey there who weren't engaging, you know, it's easy to get in the rhythm of, you know, not today. I was busy today. Maybe next week I'll place my order. You know, I'm too busy. But then when you get that email that says there's a promo code that's expiring in 24 hours, you better place your order now.
00:12:14
Speaker
that clearly can kick some people into gear and get them to place that order which is awesome yeah absolutely i know for me if i was gonna see that email i'm gonna jump on that right away and make sure i secure that purchase because again we are also busy and you know maybe we see the first email and then we we might forget about it but then if you remind your customers again hey twenty four hours left you will really see that increase in those sales.
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah. And that's awesome. And those are people now who are re-engaged who weren't opening emails recently. Exactly. And the best part of it all is he saw a 35% boost in sales with that customer journey that we built out. And the awesome thing about MailChimp too is because we created this customer journey. So we are now able to have it ongoing. So this is going to go out to all customers who don't purchase in 60 days.
00:13:04
Speaker
What 35% increase in sales is easily gonna pay for the cost of a MailChimp subscription. And then some, of course. And on top of that, now this customer journey, like Miranda said, is just running. You don't have to go in each week and manually send the emails or it's just going on its own. And you can just see the open rates increase and just see the money to come through. So this is marketing gold right here for sure.
00:13:30
Speaker
And if you want to hear more about this specific example that Miranda shared as well of our produce farmer from California, we will have a blog post in the show notes of this podcast. You can just go down to those, click on that link and you'll be able to actually read more about this specific example and how it was able to increase sales by 35% if you're interested.
Benefits and Encouragement
00:13:49
Speaker
So just a quick little recap. So customer journeys, a great feature that Mailtrimp has to offer where you can build out pre-planned communications that you want to send to your customers based off of certain trigger actions. So again, maybe people that haven't purchased in a while or if they're purchasing certain products or if they haven't interacted with you in a while, you're able to build out a journey for them to receive certain messages along the way.
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're listening to this, you're sending out your weekly newsletters and you're using MailChimp to send out those regular emails, but you haven't taken this next step to that automation, those customer journeys, seriously consider it. And I'd highly encourage you to play around with it because even if you try it out and you find you don't like it, you can always go back. But if you find out that it works for you really well, then hey, that's a whole new marketing automation that you can set up and leave running and you won't even have to think about it. It'll just bring in sales for you.
00:14:41
Speaker
Well, thanks everyone for tuning in to the direct farm podcast for our first episode of our direct farm tactics series. And
Episode Wrap-Up and Resources
00:14:48
Speaker
thank you Miranda for joining me and explaining customer journeys to all of us. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
00:14:53
Speaker
Absolutely. And again, for anyone listening who wants to learn more about customer journeys, we're going to have that customer journey blog post linked in the show notes below, as well as many other resources that you can check out on Barn2Door and MailChimp and how to get the most out of that integration. If you're eager to learn more about any other tactics that we have to offer, go to Barn2Door.com slash resources for loads of content to read, watch and listen. We'll see you guys next time.