Direct Farm Tactics #1: Barn2Door + Mailchimp Customer Journeys
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.
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Cade: 0:26
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 a Growth Marketing Manager at Barn2Door. And I'm super delighted to be joined by Miranda. Miranda, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners.
Miranda: 0:51
Awesome. Hey everyone. My name is Miranda. I am one of the success managers here at Barn2Door leading the account management team.
Cade: 0:58
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 from people who work at MailChimp. So definitely go check those out. But the gist is that, you can sync your Barn2Door 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 has also now MailChimp certified.
Miranda: 1:43
Yes, we are all MailChimp certified.
Cade: 1:46
So real experts here, ready to help out and help you farm be successful with Barn2Door 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 Barn2Door, got my customers syncing over, what is a customer journey? Because that's kind of like the next step, right?
Miranda: 2:05
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 in share customer journeys with our farmers. So what is a customer journey? Basically what that is is it's a preplanned communication way that you can send your customers based on certain trigger actions. 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 lifecycle market event in your business.
Cade: 2:47
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 have done.
Miranda: 3:01
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.
Cade: 3:12
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 Mailchimp account?
Miranda: 3:38
Yeah great question. You know, I know we have never met a farmer who has extra time on their hands and so, you know, let the software do it for you. It's a great way to kind of take another item off of your plate. You know, 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.
Cade: 4:08
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 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. And if it ultimately ends up bringing you sales and 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?
Miranda: 4:46
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 hav-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, you can easily do one in about 5 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.
Cade: 5:20
Right. Yeah. And that totally makes sense. And that's definitely something we've seen at Barn2Door 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, you're definitely more likely to interact with that and engage with that, you know? So same thing with your customers. Keep that in mind. Cause that can really go a long way and you can always expand it out later, right?
Miranda: 5:54
Mhm exactly. You know, more targeted messaging, personalized messages really go a long way.
Cade: 6:00
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?
Miranda: 6:05
What can happen is people are busy on their day to day, you know, lives and they might not see the emails that you're sending out or see your social posts and, you know, 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, you know, kind of that fear of missing out promo code to really grab their attention and boom they're back and re-engaged. 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.
Cade: 6:37
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, you know, no matter what business you look at. Your open rates are never going to be a 100%. There's always people who aren't engaging and it can be really easy. You know, 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 in a sea of emails. But if you can do something like Miranda said with an emoji or a funny question or a promo code, or, you know, some kind of FOMO driving subject line or fear of missing out that can definitely re-engage people and just them reengaging 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, to click on in the future. So definitely a great way to re-engage 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, you know, it's really not worth it. So definitely want to be able to get as many orders through as you can. But Miranda, tell me a little bit about. How someone can actually get started setting up customer journeys, because it's definitely one thing, 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?
Miranda: 8:10
Yeah. So I will say that it is part of the paid version in 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, 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 who 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.
Cade: 8:58
Even though it is a paid MailChimp feature, just after an order or two, you can cover the cost of a month's 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, triggers that 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 up. You can really just start from scratch with the assistance of the templates that they have in there.
Miranda: 9:42
Absolutely. And honestly, it's really fun too.
Cade: 9:44
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?
Miranda: 9:58
Yeah, 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 um starting point. And as we began to build our journey path, we decided there was going to 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. Cause you know, that definitely is going to grab the attention. And then we actually saw a 45% open rate with that.
Cade: 11:00
Yeah In case anybody listening to the podcast doesn't know that is a tremendous open rate.
Miranda: 11:06
Yes, exactly. And so that was you know, one of the journey points. And then the, 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. After that, what we did is we just kind of delay the next emails for about a week, just to give it some time. And then we sent everyone one last email again, what 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.
Cade: 11:56
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. That clearly can kick some people into gear and get them to place that order, which is awesome.
Miranda: 12:18
Yeah, absolutely. I know for me, if I was going to see that email. I'm going to jump on that right away and make sure I secure that purchase. Because again, we're all so busy and you know, maybe we see the first email and then we might forget about it. But then if you remind your customers again, Hey 24 hours left, you will really see that increase in those sales.
Cade: 12:37
Yeah and that's awesome. And those are people now who are reengaged, who weren't opening emails recently.
Miranda: 12:42
Exactly and the best part of it all is he saw a 35% in boost in sales,
Cade: 12:48
Wow.
Miranda: 12:49
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.
Cade: 13:03
What?! 35% increase in sales is easily going to 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. 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. 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.
Miranda: 13:49
So just a quick little recap. So customer journeys, a great feature that MailChimp has to offer where you can build out pre-planned communications that you want to send to your customers based off of certain trigger action. So again, maybe people that haven't purchased in a while, or if they're purchasing certain products or 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.
Cade: 14:14
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 customers 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. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in to the Direct Farm Podcast for our first episode of our Direct Farm Tactics series. And thank you Miranda for joining me and explaining customer journeys to all of us.
Miranda: 14:51
Yeah thanks for having me!
Cade: 14:53
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/resources for loads of content to read, watch, and listen. We'll see you guys next time.