This Email Marketing Tool will Help you Grow Your Farm
Recently, Barn2Door had the opportunity to talk with Devin Mercier, the Project Management Owner at Intuit Mailchimp. The Barn2Door + Mailchimp integration offers a range of capabilities for Farmers looking to connect with Buyers through email. Devin shared how the Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder (or “CJB” for short) can save Farmers time and help them increase sales through email segmentation and automation. Prefer to listen to this conversation? Click the Podcast below:
Why is email marketing important for Farmers?
Email marketing is an important tool for any business owner. Farmers rely on the commitment of their Buyers, but that commitment is earned through building their trust and maintaining consistent communication.
Updating your customers on your current Farm products, practices, upcoming harvest and any activities or events will keep you top-of-mind. To keep your Buyers interested and informed, you must know when and what emails need to be sent depending on the customer.
Mailchimp is the best-in-class small business email marketing solution that Barn2Door recommends to all Farmers. By upgrading to a Mailchimp paid subscription (starting at $13+/mo), your Farm can unlock access to Customer Journey Builder - a tool that will help streamline your email automation and increase your sales with the click of a button.
Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder
A Customer Journey is the manner in which you engage specific members of an email list (also known as an “Audience”), with a series of unique emails and calls-to-action. With Mailchimp CJB, your Farm can create audiences based on similar characteristics or attributes. This enables you to target a given audience with a specific message and call-to-action.
A customer will take an action, such as interacting with your Farm store or completing a purchase or email sign-up form, which begins their journey. Depending on the audience, the journey they take will be different. As a result, your Farm can create different journeys for consumers or wholesale buyers, first-time or loyal buyers, or any range of attributes.
After this, your Farm can create ‘journeys’ for those audiences to compel specific calls-to-action or desired outcomes. These journeys are automated based on a customer's activity (or lack thereof). As a result, these journeys can encourage buyers to take an action (such as making a purchase from your Farm), without any effort by you - it’s all automated!
Successful Farms running on Barn2Door have enjoyed up to +28% increase in average monthly sales by implementing Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder!
Since Mailchimp and Barn2Door are integrated, Mailchimp can draw upon actual order history from your Barn2Door-powered store to help segment audiences and automate customer journeys based on purchase activities (or lack thereof). Since these emails are sent automatically, there’s no need to worry about sending emails on a schedule to specific people. Simply let the journey run, and your customers will automatically be sent informational content at a time optimal for receival.
If you want a ‘Thank You’ email to be sent after a Buyer makes their first purchase, Mailchimp CJB can handle it. If you wish to send a ‘Welcome’ email to anyone who signs-up to your email list via QR code, Mailchimp CJB can automate that email, too (before you even know that you have a new contact). Mailchimp CJB includes a journey map for a visual representation of the path a customer will go through so you are free to make edits or view the different steps a Buyer travels.
How Customer Journey Builder Works
The Importance of Audience Segmentation
To build a Customer Journey, first an audience must be created. An audience is a group of customers that share a common set of attributes. This may be based upon purchasing patterns or any groups that you’ve configured in Barn2Door (e.g. CSA or Herdshare Members). It is recommended to start with at least three audiences: first-time Buyers, loyal customers, or lapsed consumers (who haven’t made a purchase in 60+ days). It is also important to look at the products they typically purchase, and in what quantity.
Wholesale buyers may want updates on new bulk offers from your Farm, while a regular consumer, like a family may just want to know more about your monthly Bundle Box subscriptions and recommended Add-ons. Because these buyers have different purchasing patterns, they may need to be split into different audiences for a tailored email experience.
Audience segmentation not only helps you send personalized emails, but also to understand your Buyers and what their purchase history entails. Audiences enable your Farm to better tailor emails and journeys to push them to purchase.
It is important to know your different audiences to personalize your engagement, rather than sending a generic email. Messaging Buyers in a way that feels intentional will raise your open rates, increase conversion and spur more revenue for your Farm business.
What are Email Automations?
Once an audience member takes an initial action, they join the journey, and a series of automated actions follow. For example, if a Buyer makes their first purchase, they will join the first-time purchase audience and will be sent emails from an automated ‘Welcome’ campaign. The first email may welcome them to your Farm. The second email could be sent two weeks later and give them a promo code for their second purchase, and so on.
Email campaigns should first tell Buyers about your Farm, later leading them to sign up for a subscription or other purchase, and lastly give them a call to action. A customer journey can also be configured as a “drip campaign” to send out pre-written emails over a period of time (after an action triggers the start).
You may choose to set time delays so emails are sent out at an optimal time for the receiver to open them and act. These automated campaigns allow for emails to be sent out, audiences to be created, and updates to be issued without any effort by your Farm!
Smart Recommendations for Email Building
Mailchimp’s CJB Smart Recommendations will save your Farm more time using artificial intelligence (AI) to spur add-on purchases. Instead of looking through purchase history to find what products your customers are adding to their cart, Smart Recommendations pulls that information auto-magically to give Buyers specific suggestions.
Using AI, Mailchimp analyzes your Buyers’ purchase habits to see what products you should recommend within emails. These products are based on the audience members’ purchasing habits, so each group has personalized recommendations, making them more likely to commit to the transaction. For instance, a CSA Subscription customer may be recommended to “Add-on” an Egg Subscription (because that's what other CSA members did, too). The more segmented the audiences, the better the email recommendations.
Smart Recommendations also pulls images, links and details from your Barn2Door-powered Farm store to make your emails as informative as possible. The content within your email is important to encourage the audience to make a purchase. Images of popular products or links to best selling items can help bring more traffic to your store.
How to Measure the Success of your Email Campaigns
The best way to measure the success of a campaign is through the open and click-through rates of the emails, and your Farm revenue that is directly attributable to a given campaign. An open rate measures the percentage of people who opened the email versus received it. The click-through rate measures how many of those who opened the email clicked a link within it. Revenues measures the amount of sales for your Farm that originated from that given email.
Customer Journey Builder gives you the data for every email to see what actions were performed due to that specific message, which was led to purchase from your Farm store. Having multiple journeys allows you to compare the data and see what subject lines get the highest open rates, and what links are more likely to be clicked for a given audience.
Tailoring your emails based on the data that drives Farm Sales will help you to create higher-performing campaigns. Every audience is different, so testing, re-testing and analyzing what works best is important. Making emails accessible and interesting to Buyers will lead to purchases, which is the most important final action of a journey. Measuring revenue attributed to your emails will allow you to understand the importance of your marketing efforts.
The Future of Email Marketing
Recently, Mailchimp has rolled out new features for their Email marketing software, including SMS automations. You can now add a text message trigger in a journey so Buyers are getting information from different avenues, keeping your Farm top of mind. Enabling automated messaging to send out over optimal times for Buyers will ensure that they are receiving them when they can actually make a purchase. This allows for further personalization in your Farm messaging to consumers.
The Customer Journey Builder offers many tools that can help your Farm increase sales, access more customers and save time, all while you’re working on the Farm or spending time with your family. These automations that are possible for Farmers utilizing Barn2Door + Mailchimp, can be a game-changer for your business, even while you’re working, playing or sleeping.
Conclusion
The most successful Farmers working with Barn2Door utilize the Mailchimp integration to help drive consistent engagement, grow their base of loyal customers and increase revenue. Now, with Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder, you can tailor personalized messages to any type of Buyer your Farm serves based on actual activity (or lack thereof) in your Barn2Door-powered store.
Use email automations to boost your marketing efforts and productivity, while getting back more time to focus on what’s most important right now for you. Utilize Barn2Door + Mailchimp to streamline your processes and see better long-term results for your Farm business.
Read: Barn2Door + Mailchimp
At Barn2Door, our team readily helps every Farm to set-up their Mailchimp integration and configure Customer Journeys to help attract more customers and boost more revenue.
Listen to Barn2Door’s conversation with Mailchimp’s Product Manager, Devin Mercier, to learn more about the power of Customer Journey Builder:
At Barn2Door, we are humbled to support 1000s of Farms across the country. And, we’re delighted to work closely with fantastic partners like Intuit Mailchimp.
To learn more about the Software, Services and Integrations available from Barn2Door, watch this 5-minute video.