Corinna Bench (0:00)

If you're a CSA farmer like myself and you are interested in learning how to put together a promotion that gets your current members to renew their shares now or whenever you want them to, then this is the episode for you. I'm going to walk you through my early renewal promotion process, the steps that I take so that you can write this down and and build your own promotion campaign. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product, you've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 283 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my regular listeners, my binge listeners, and if you're new to the show, I'm really glad you're here. Welcome to the community. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast. You're going to want to do that and then go check out some of my back issues you can scroll through. I've got over 250 of them now, and I'm sure you can find something there that piques your interest. If you're really new to the marketing space, though, and you need kind of a 101 crash course, I recommend that you go listen to the first 10. Or even better, get onto my email list because when you do, I'm going to send you a weekly email for like three months. That's going to walk you through the marketing jungle and kind of get you onboarded into what you need to know. And you can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. I get really good reviews for that, so definitely take advantage of that. Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. Switch to Local Line and grow your farm to new heights this season. Localline is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs Its features include e commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, a website builder, point of sale, and more, helping you increase your sales and streamline your processes. So whether you're a CSA farmer or you sell meat, you run a food hub, or maybe you sell wholesale or offer a herd share, localline has the tools and features that you need to to succeed. We're a big fan. Are you looking to switch to a sales software that does it? All subscriptions start as low as $49 a month with no setup fees or sales percentages. That's huge for me. Plus, if you join localline today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost so you can be up and running in no time, even in the middle of the season. As a bonus, if you are a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code MDF2024. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter the coupon code MDF2024. Make the switch today. And now back to the show. Well, hello everyone, I'm back. This coming weekend is a big weekend for me on the farm because it's the day that my early bird promotion campaign for my CSA opens and for seven days my members have a chance to renew their share. I have been using the same exact launch plan for the last six years and, well, actually maybe it's seven. And every single year I get wickedly good results. Like I'm talking between 75 to 85% of my people coming back. And I think that's predominantly because of how I run this promotion now. It also matters that I have a good product and I've built a strong community and they love being a part of our farm. For sure, that matters. But I think that the way that I do the promotion is also part of the reason why I have such good results and I wanted to share my basic process with you today. So if you are a CSA farmer that has the kind of CSA membership where you have to create promotions from time to time, like you don't have the one where people subscribe once and then they're just subscribers forever and when they want to stop, they go in and unsubscribe. This is for you farmers that have a set amount of time that people are signing up for. You have to create a promotion plan to get them to sign up and then you have to ask them again to re up at the end of the year or at some point. In the year this episode is for you. And if this is something that has always been a struggle for you or you feel like your retention numbers have hovered around a number that you're not really happy about and you want to see them climb a few percentage points, I might be able to help you today. My goal is to share the overarching plan. The way I go about this, I'm not going to go super into the weeds, but I'm going to give you the basic step by step framework and let you know these are the things that I work on and hopefully you can take down this information on a piece of paper and you can try building out a similar campaign yourself. A lot of this is actually strategy and it does require a little bit of prep time. So I hope that I'm getting this episode into your hands with enough time to spare. For me, I started working on this around the end of September and it took me about six days to get it all together and I. I spent a about 90 minutes to 2 hours on some of these elements that took a little bit longer. So that kind of gives you a sense of, you know, how. How long does it take to actually do this if you're doing it for the very first time? I think it's probably a longer process. But one of the things I love about this framework that I'm going to teach you is that once you have built the structure and you've done it your first time, you can rinse and repeat it from year to year. And I have been doing that for six or seven years now, taking the same emails, literally the same emails, switching out a few of the words, maybe switching out a picture, but for the most part it's the same exact thing. And so it goes a lot faster when you start doing it the second, third, fourth time, and you can kind of tweak it and optimize it to make it better every year. So hopefully this episode is getting into your hands early enough that you have time to put this together. It's why I wanted to try and put it out there in the middle of October and you can promote this to your own members by the end of the month. So without further ado, I am going to jump right into it. I think I have eight or nine different steps. Some of them are really quick, some of them are a little bit longer. And I will make sure that I write out the steps in the show notes. If you want the crib sheet right. So you can go there@mydigitalfarmer.com 283 if you want to print out the list and use that to guide you. Okay, so I, like I said, start planning this process out about two weeks before my first kind of quote unquote event that is in the the launch period. So for me, that was around September 20th of this year of 2024 that I began the process. I recommend that you give yourself at least two or three weeks. And I think it's important for us to talk about when to do early renewals. This is a very divisive topic. I think best practice, if you can swing it, is to try and run it at the very end of your season so that it lands on the second to last or the last week of the actual season before people maybe take a break from you for a little bit or before you have to switch over. Now, if you have the kind of CSA where you literally don't have a break and you're just rolling people over from one season to the next and you need them to renew, well, then you're going to want to do that a little sooner. But I think it's a good idea to try and run this promotion at the end of the season as opposed to waiting until March or April or February when CSA Day or CSA Week typically is held. I think it's best practice to try and do it at the end. And the reason for that is because you have a captive audience that's still riding high from the whole CSA experience. You can strategically end your season with a bang by doing some of the things I'm going to talk about in this episode so that there's a lot of emotional high. A lot of times people buy with emotion. And so we can do some things to remind them about why they love this so much. We can point to aspects of the membership that draw out the community and the connection features that are so valuable to most CSA members so that they realize, yeah, I really do love this and I want to get behind my farmers again and I can't wait to support them now. If you just can't swing it because you're exhausted and you're tired and you can't imagine finding energy right now in the heat of harvest the end of the season because you've got so many other fires, you know, irons in the fire, then I would say try and place this at the beginning of the year. So after Christmas, when there's been sort of a mental reset for people, I don't think it's a good idea to run this during the month of December. That's just anecdotally what I've heard from a lot of the students who are in my online course where I teach how to do early bird campaigns very step by step. That's been sort of the consensus among many of them who didn't take that advice and tried to do it in, in December and then discovered that, yeah, it actually is really hard to sell them in December. So resist that urge and try to do this. Like October, November, I think are really good months. And if you have to wait, then January is okay. I think there is also an. A certain period of time where you're not going to get a lot of sales if you try to use this strategy. And honestly, I really feel like the month is in February, February and maybe early March. Not super great months to do this just because people are not thinking about vegetables. Especially if you live in a part of the country where it's still cold. There's a. There's this concept in sales where you want to try and give people the right offer at the right place, at the right time, at the right price. And the timing of the offer does matter. So think about, you know, when. If you were a CSA member, when would you be triggered to even think about getting vegetables? When would you be most excited about it? It's gonna be in the month of April, May, Right when it starts to get warm, or it's gonna be at the end of the season when your mind is still thinking about it. So that's why I just wanted to spend a little bit of time here on the front end. Talking about the timing of this is important. Okay, so let's dive into the quick list. I don't want to spend too long on all of this, but I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. The first kind of decision that I make that I spend about 20 minutes on is I set dates. These are all the important dates for the promotion itself. The key ones that you need to identify on the calendar are what's called the cart open date. This is the date when your CSA early bird renewal offer goes live. And then you have a cart close date. This is the day where the offer disappears. Where it ends, you close the cart. Now, I want to make sure that I say here that I'm not. I'm not telling you that you have to stop offering your CSA share after this launch period and people can no longer buy it. That's not what I'm saying. You probably won't sell out. If you do, then you're a rock star. I've only sold out once in my 15 years during the early bird period, and that was the year of COVID So you probably won't sell out. What I am suggesting is that you have a really great offer that is so fantastic. And that offer is only good for this period between the card open and the card close. And after that, you take it off, you change the offer. It just goes back to a different price or a different bonus or no bonus. And now that particular product offer is in your point of sale. So people can still buy the share after the special period after special promotion period, but they're just not getting all the perks that come with the early bird offer. Okay, so that's. I just want to make sure that I distinguish that. Okay, so those are the two most important dates that you gotta lock down. And I encourage you to make that period at which you offer this particular launch to be seven to 10 days. Now, some of you are gonna freak out right now and you're gonna think that's not enough time. I have tried doing this before for three months, offering a special price for three months. I have tried doing it for 14 days, and I have settled on seven days because I'm just exhausted. Like, even 14 days, I was exhausted. It's really hard to keep the energy of the offer going and get your people excited to hear about it. It's hard to come up with things to talk about for that long too, to make it sound exciting. Part of the power of these early bird promotion campaigns is because you can create a bunch of buzz and energy for a short amount of time. And so the minute that you extend it and say, well, I'm going to offer this for two or three months, it's just really hard to spread that out and keep that same energy going. So this is a trust fall. I know, but it's actually really empowering. It gets you really focused. You can do anything for seven days with a lot of energy, and you'll find that that energy that you bring to the table translates to your customers and they'll get behind it and want to sign up. The other date that I want to bring up here that I think is an important one is what I call the pre launch start date. And the pre launch period refers to the week or two before the cart open date. So typically this runs for me around 10 days. It's like a week and a half. This is the period of time where I am building momentum for the offer and I'm starting to do challenges and contests and I'M talking about how the offer is coming and here are the key elements of the offer and here's the bonus and here's some of the changes we're doing this year and here's a new product that we're adding that we're really excited and here's a, a pickup site that we're dropping and we want to make sure that you have enough time to know about that so you can plan. And Here's a special 24 hour bonus that's only going to be available on the first day and here's this, the, the product that's probably going to sell out in the first 30 minutes. So you need to make sure you get it on the first day. Like all these talking points that are key to helping a person understand what's, what's going to be in the offer happen during the pre launch period. Because the first day of cart open is the first day they're actually able to go and say, yes, I want to buy. That means that we want to have as much time as possible. We want to use that 10 days to two week period before the pre launch Runway period to make sure we've communicated everything we possibly can, the important talking points of the offer so that a person has made their decision on whether they want to renew by the cart open date. No one should be showing up to your cart, open to your, to your actual cart and wondering, hmm, which shares should I get? I wonder if I should do it this year. That is not what's happening. If you do your job right, if you have a strong pre launch Runway with marketing messages going on in the two weeks before, then your person is showing up five minutes before the card opens with bated breath hoping that they'll get what they want and they have a list in front of them of their, you know, top choices. And if they can't get those, they've got their plan B. Because you've created such a fear of, you know, fear of missing out and just this like excitement in them that they are showing up there to make sure they take care of it. So the pre launch Runway is all about coaching the conversion. We're trying to get them ready to say yes. We want to give them all the information so that the deciding is taken care of. Many of your customers will probably want to renew their share, but the reason I started doing these early bird promotions is because I wanted them to make that decisive moment, that decisive decision earlier. I didn't want them to make it in May. I wanted them to make it in November so that I could have that peace of mind going into Christmas. I didn't have to sit there and go, oh my God. I only have like 50% of my people who said yes, that's like 200 people that I have to somehow give me commitments and that I'm going to have to run some, some all kinds of like crazy promotions to try and get more to come in the next few months. And I would just think about it all during my quote unquote vacation, my months off in the winter and so getting this taken care of, having a system built so that I can get most of the sales in the bag. I just feel so much better going into my vacation months. I don't stress out knowing I have, you know, 50 to 70 shares to sell left over. Well, that's a whole lot more comfortable for me. I really just let them dribble in over the course of the next five months. I don't have to run another major promotion to get people in the door. So to me it's totally worth it. Okay, so those were the three key dates. And like I said, I have this kind of now in a formula. So the hardest part is just figuring out when do I want the pre launch to start? Because I just look at when is my last week of my csa. That's the week that the launch is open and then I just back out from there. Two weeks. Okay. Once you've set your dates, the next key part of this process is to build your irresistible offer. This is something that takes a little bit of time for me and it's not actually something that I often sit down with a pen and paper and write out. This is something I'm sort of thinking about over the course of several days, maybe even weeks, before I finally decide to start working on this. It's just always in the back of my mind I'm like, oh, it's coming up. I need to start thinking about how I'm going to get people to be decisive. And a few things I want you to think about here is this has to be the best offer of the entire year. You might end up running additional CSA promotion campaigns to try and fill out your shares if you haven't sold out. But this offer has to be the best one you ever offer. You cannot be tempted later on to sweeten the deal even more to fill it. This has to be the best one because you need to train your current members to remember that they'll look back and they'll compare all the promotions and then they'll see that this one was by far the coolest one, the best one, the one where they got the best gift, the best bonus, the best price. And the next year if you hold the line, they will remember that lesson and they'll make sure that they sign up the first time you give them the chance. Okay, so what are some of the things that we think about when we're building an offer? Well, urgency and scarcity are some of the first elements I try to imagine. How can I manifest urgency? One of the key ways that I do that is by making the offer live for seven days. That right there is, is doing a whole lot. But I'm also trying to think of what can I put in this offer just besides saying oh come back and buy your share again for this price. Like that's, that's gonna motivate a few people but it's not going to really make them want to do it necessarily right now. So I am thinking about can I give some kind of a perk? Maybe I can offer a bonus gift. That's usually my primary way of motivating people. I find some kind of a early signing bonus that they will receive on the last pickup of this current season. So when they actually come and pick up their final box, I can pass it out to them and that becomes a selling point. Like hey, if you sign up before Tuesday, which is the final pickup for some of these people, if you sign up on Sunday or Saturday, Sunday or Monday, then I'll be able to actually hand you your bonus gift at your last pickup. So there's immediate gratification that happens when they perform the desired action when I want them to, right in those early first days. So I really recommend you think about a bonus. My bonuses are usually priced around $5. That's usually my cost. 5 to 6 dol. I never go over that. So you would be surprised. You know I have a five hundred and ninety dollar product in many cases. Most of my people are spending around $800 as their average cart value for this promotion. And you know, they're motivated by, to do that by a six dollar product which I find kind of amusing, but it works. I have done things like a free pint of ice cream. This year it's going to be a six pack of chicken sausage. And that's because we are going to be talking about how we're adding on a chicken share to our csa. So we're adding meat for the first time. We're going to try it next year. I'm not actually going to sell the meat until January and there's a reason for that. But I'm going to start talking about how we're going to be offering it. And so this is a way for them to try out some, some of the product and get them excited about it and that may lead to more sales later. So that was sort of an arrangement I made with our new vendor and they're, they are splitting the cost with me. So it's, I think going to be a really strong bonus for us. So this is one example of an item that you could add to make your offer irresistible. Another thing you could think about is like a VIP perk. So is there something that you could do if they pay a certain amount or achieve a certain order value, they achieve the status of VIP and then you create some sort of perk level or perks. Yeah, some sort of benefit of being at the VIP level for a certain amount of time. Maybe they get a coupon code for a discount on a share if they buy early. Or maybe they get a discount code if they pay all at once instead of breaking it up into two payments or monthly payments. And don't forget that you can also create bonuses from your add on shares. And this is something I'm going to be doing as well. The cheese share this year I think I only sold like 60 of them. And that's partly because it's been a rather repetitive artisan cheese share for many years. But this year I changed it up and I had different vendors every single week. And so my customer base was seeing all these different cheeses coming through the Facebook group and they're like, oh, is there any way that I can get a cheese share? And I had to say, no, I'm sorry, they were already pre sold. Can't do that for you next year. So I know I have a lot of people who now probably want the cheese share now that it's changed. One of the things that I put in this year's first week, I put in a third product. Like I usually only put in two cheeses, but the vendor that I was using was Boss Mouse cheese up in Traverse City and she kept talking about her smoked butter and I'm like, well, but it's a cheese share so I need to give him cheese. But yeah, I'll throw in the smoked butter as like a bonus. Let's just, let's just do it. And so I paid a little bit extra cogs for it and it went crazy. People were like psycho for it. So shout out to Boss Mouse Cheese now everyone is going to try and get her, her, her smoked butter but everybody loved it. And so I have been thinking that I'm going to create a bonus for the cheese share this year because I have a really good profit margin on that product and I want to try to get 30, 30 to 40 more people to buy it. And so I think that that's possible especially if I tantalize them with the bonus of you will get a smoked butter with your first week if you pre order early, otherwise you won't get it. Yeah, so just food for thought there that sometimes you can use bonuses for your add on shares to get people to go to the store on the day you want to renew their share. Maybe they're actually more excited about the cheese share offer and that's actually what's motivating them to go that morning and take care of purchasing the share. They would still get my vegetable too. But the motivation is going to be that bonus with the cheese share. So just kind of realize that sometimes you can add bonuses that have more to do with your add ons than with your main offer. So just be asking the question like what, what do you want more of when it comes to sales? And that is actually going to help you try to figure out what this irresistible offer is. But getting this down is really important and you're going to know once you're finished and you look at what your offer is, you're going to be like, oh yeah, this is, this is good. I want to encourage you to try to stay away from offering like a discount on the price. I don't know if you have to do that. Every year I raise the price a little bit and what I'll often do is just tell people this is the price for you for this promotion and just be aware that I am going to raise it for next year. But that won't happen until after this promotion period and that will become the new price moving forward. And that's kind of how I get around it. But just try not to automatically think, oh, I'm going to do a discount because I think you can, I think you can motivate people perhaps more with a free gift that's valued at less than what you were going to do the discount for. Just something to think about. At least test it. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly membership where farmers can come in and build marketing assets one at a time in special 30 day build projects that I've created for you. There are currently over 14 different projects inside of Farm Marketing School, including your website homepage, building a promo calendar, building a promotional email challenge testimonial and reviews how to build a better offer. Your email nurture sequence. Your lead magnet There's a sales funnel audit. There's a ton of good stuff in there and I'm adding new material every couple of months. Plus you get a monthly zoom meetup with the whole group in the middle of the month and we'll be doing some book studies off in the fall. I'm really there just to try and empower you and help you get your marketing assets built. So the way this works is you subscribe from month to month, you can cancel whenever you want. You go in, you take the assessment. There's also a crash course in marketing that you can watch to just learn the lingo and the vocabulary and the framework and then you get started building your first marketing asset. Every project includes a hour long tutorial, a resource folder that gives you lots of templates and examples to help make the process of actually building your own version really fast, and also a project planner to help you time it out and make sure you get everything done. If you want to learn more about how to join Farm Marketing School and try it out, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS this is my new kind of flagship offer. My community that I'm going to really be pouring myself into over the next six, six to 12 months. Really excited about it. So I'd love to interact with you. Join@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and now back to the show. Okay, I also spent some time as a separate step here to make sure I review my changes for the season. This is more like logistical stuff and this is where I'm asking myself, do I need to reset the price of my shares? So I'm looking at my numbers, I make decisions about how how many shares I want to try to pre sell. This is actually a key point that I want to make here. You get to decide what your goal for sales is for this early bird promotion. Maybe like in my case I have 400 spots, but I ideally like to keep about 25 of those spots open to fill them with sampler shares with trial memberships that I kind of fill in after I'm sold out because those people end up populating and replacing the customers that naturally fall out every year. So I actually want to save some spots for that type of customer for later. So really I only want to sell like 350 to 375 during this promotion. And so I could sort of define to my audience like this is how many are going to be in the store. I know there are 400 of you, but I'm only going to put in 350 for this promotion at this price level with this bonus offer. And right there you've also created additional scarcity and urgency. So just because you're eventually going to have 400 spots or 200 spots or whatever it is for you, doesn't mean you have to decide to pre sell all of them. Keep that in mind. And that also allows you to play with the messaging and say, oh, we're sold out in our pre sale, you know, we hit our number and that's all we're going to do for right now. And we'll do, we'll release another 50 shares in, in April. So another way to create scarcity. But I am thinking about like what are changes I want to make. Do I want to drop a pickup site, do I want to switch a pickup site, do I want to add a vendor, do I want to renegotiate something with a vendor? Do I want to add to add on delivery? Right. So you are thinking through those questions. You're checking with your pickup site locations before you do this sale again to make sure that they want to do it again. You're checking with your add on share vendors to make sure they want to do it again and that their prices are still good. So that's also definitely part of this process, kind of spiraling around the building of the offer because you don't want to price your offer and then find out later that you underpriced it and then you're kind of in some trouble. Right. So make sure you do that work. Okay. The next step is setting up the tech and I'm not going to really go into detail here, but this is where I go into my online store. I use local line and I have the feature on local and I pay for a second price list which is worth its weight in gold because I'm allowed to go in there and basically build out the product list for the CSA on that page and I'll update my product descriptions, I change out my images, I change the price. I can set the payment options differently on that price list, which I personally don't use. Credit card payment option for the csa I do for everything else, but not for csa. I'm not sure I recommend that for you guys, but that's how we've always done it and we've trained our Customer to pay with check. And so we're just going to keep doing it that way because we don't have trouble with that. But I'm not sure that I would put that point of friction in another farmer's funnel if I were coaching someone else. But I bring this up because I do have the option within this second price list to adjust the different payment styles. I go and I create the tags within my email service provider so that when a person purchases this product, they can quickly be automatically tagged as a purchase CSA member, which will trigger the onboarding email sequence and confirmation emails. So that's a step that usually takes me 30 minutes. I go and reset all the the pickup site locations just so that at some point you do have to go to the point of sale and readjust or all of the different features so that you can test out the actual process of buying a share and make sure that it makes sense on the store and that it flows easily. Right, okay. So that is a part of the process. Another key step. This is actually something I do a little bit earlier. I should have put this earlier in the list. This is where I map it all out. I map out my strategy for the year or for the launch, the messaging and the strategy. And the way that I do this is I print out a calendar, monthly calendar, at a glance, the 30 day version, right? So that I can see the different days of my pre launch and the launch itself the week that the card is open. And I get some post it notes and a pencil and I start jotting down ideas on each post it note and I plot them on the calendar. So it's like, okay, I know I want to do a giveaway every day the week before the card opens. And so we're going to do the daily question giveaway. So I'll just kind of put that on the calendar and then I'll say, okay, I know that I want to have an email marketing element going through the whole time. And so on this day the email is going to be about this topic. Boom. And I write that on a post it and I stick it on that calendar day. And then I might be like, oh, on that same day I'm gonna make sure that same messaging element that goes in the email is also going in my Facebook group audience page. And so I'll have a post about that as well. Boom. So I'm just like putting it all out there. And this really helps me see. Here are the key messaging elements from the launch that I want to make sure are highlighted. Because remember the goal is that you want your customer to have been told all the important stuff. The key changes, like if you're changing a pickup location, that should be like one of the talking points. If you're adding on a new share, definitely that's a talking point. Your bonus should be a talking point. Maybe once or twice in this process. If you're doing a fun contest, talk about how it works and get people excited about it, you might want to have that as a talking point. Right. So you're, you're identifying. These are the, these are the things they need to know so that they are ready to make a decision so that they can figure out what they want to buy again. And all of those pieces of messaging are happening during that pre launch period and then some of them are happening after the card is open. For the stragglers who are still on the fence, maybe there's some stuff you need to be saying to coach their conversion to kind of get them off the fence. So that is a, that is about a 90 minute to two hour process where I'm brainstorming, I'm looking at my past notes and I'm using a lot of the things that I did last year and just redoing them again. And sometimes I'm switching out the contest a little bit, but for the most part I just replay everything. So again, the goal of that is to build energy, to create clarity about the offer, to make sure they know all the information before for card open day. So that come card open day they're taking care of it. There's no question in their mind of what they want. Because you've done such a good job of explaining it all in small little bite sized pieces over the course of the two weeks prior. Okay, so that's sort of the map out session. The next thing I wrote down on my list here is I build my social posts. So this is, I'm sort of assuming maybe I should back up and make you just ask the question, where are your marketing channels going to be for this promotion? In my case, my primary marketing channels are email. I email my list and my Facebook group. Now I also have a public facing business page, but I'm talking about my private Facebook group. That's only for my CSA members. That's a captive audience. It's only those members and a few other people that I've let in. But I know that if I post something in there it's, it's going to make sense because it's only about CSA stuff. Right. It would be a little Weird to be posting this promotional launch stuff out into the big public sphere because not everybody out there is actually able to access this offer and it would just confuse them. So in my case, it works really well that I have a private page that's very active. So I do have a social media strategy I'm thinking through on that giant map. Like what are the things of the offer that I want to point out on Monday? Okay, what's going to be said on Tuesday and what's going to be said on Wednesday? And I am going into Canva and I am literally building the images. So sometimes it's just a photo with some graphic over it. Sometimes it's a funky colored background with text on it that goes along with the post copy. I'm not actually writing the posts, but I'm building the graphics. Okay. That usually takes me an hour and I'm using that map to help me do it because I already know. Okay, these are the images I'm looking for. Okay. The next step is for me to write my email onboarding campaign. This is usually two or three emails that drop out as soon as somebody buys and renews their share. And each email use the same one from year to year. These emails are designed to help them know, here's your next step. The first one is always just like a yay, you did the right thing. I'm so excited you're in the family again. Very celebratory. Gratitude, thankfulness. And then there's like a P.S. hey, don't forget to mail me your check. And then I have some follow up emails after that where I need them to do a few things to make sure that they get into the my email service provider the right way and that they're in the Facebook group. So, so I have some other calls to action. I also deliver the bonus to them and remind them how to get that to pick that up and so forth. So writing that email onboarding sequence is like really fast. It's under an hour for me. I, I don't have to do a lot of scripting or I've even used ChatGPT to help me with that. Like I'll write a basic one, then I say help me make this sound better. And ChatGPT helps out. Okay. The next day I write my email sales copy. This is the part that takes a long time if you do it for the first time. I'm not gonna lie. And that's why I think it's helpful if you have someone else's template to look at because then you can just be like, oh, that's how you, that's how you mean you write it. And then you can kind of use that as a guide. The email. I send out an email every single day of the pre launch. So that's about, I want to say that's 10 emails in the pre launch and then the week of the launch itself you're only getting an email if you still haven't bought. And I think I send out four during that week. Okay, that's a little, that's a lot. I usually coach people to aim for 7 to 10 emails and I warn people before I begin this process that they're going to get a lot of emails and that I only do this once a year. And remember, these are my super fans and my customers and I give them the option in the email to, to opt out of future emails that have this, that are under this topic. So that's in every single email. It's in the P.S. like it's, hey, if you don't want to keep getting emails about the Early Bird promotion, just click here. And that doesn't remove them from my list because I can set a rule up in ConvertKit to do that. It doesn't remove them from my list, but it does tag them a certain way so that future emails don't get sent to them because they have that tag. Yeah. So the email sales copy, again, I'm talking each day about one specific thing and the thing that I choose to talk about is based on what I've put into the map, those key talking points. Again, the goal is just to be educating them. Right. I'm making sure they know, hey, this is why if you want eggs, you've got to go and buy within the first 20 minutes. Because historically they sell out in 20 minutes. I want to make sure they know that. Right. Like I'm not trying to be salesy, I'm just like literally care about the people who get angry when they don't get eggs. And I want to be like, hey, I warned you, like I'm serious. They sell out. So if you want them, you've got to go at 7am and you'll probably be okay as long as you're there at 7am I want, I want people to be aware of that. So what are those things that you want them to know so they can make the right decision for them. And each of those topics gets its own email. And then I kind of figure out which, what's the order? Like what does it make sense to start with? And that's all based on what was in that strategy map. Every single call to action in that email is put this day on your calendar. Be there at 7:00am you know, put it in your, in your phone, set an alarm. Here's the link. I mean I even give them the link. The link takes them to the price list, the hidden price list. Because in local line I'm able to hide that price list from the public. So I give it a pretty link name and, or a redirect name so that it takes them to that site. It won't actually be active, but at least they know, okay, this is, I've got the link, I'm ready. So that when it turns on, when I turn the price list on at 7am it'll, it'll be live and they'll be able to find it. But that's the call to action in every single email. Sometimes it's also I want you to be thinking about what you want, start thinking about what you want to pre order so that you're not making that decision in the moment. Decide now, right? That is the, the coaching that I'm giving them. Okay, a few more to go. The last thing that I do, the second to last thing that I do is I create a checklist, A play by play master checklist. This is sort of like me being the stage manager of, I'm the project manager of this whole launch, right? I think in terms of theater because my brother works in the theater. It's kind of like being the stage manager. And the stage manager knows everything that's going on in the show. They know the cues, they cue the, the light people like hey, they cue the backstage. Like in 10 minutes you're gonna have to be ready to pull the curtain. Is so and so staged on stage, right? Because she's going to enter in like two pages in the script. She's coming. Is she ready? Does she have her wig on? Right? Like the stage manager knows everything and they're always thinking 10, 10, 5, 10 minutes ahead to make sure that stuff is, is prepped and in place. And so I create this master document for the entire pre launch period as well as the launch period. So that I know here's what's happening on day one, here's what's happening on day two, day three. And most of those things are things that I have automated that I have set in place. Because after I've written the drafts of these emails and I've created the graphics for the social media, I actually go and post them, right? I will Schedule the posts in advance so that, that's all ready to go. But I want to have a master checklist or a master, a master list or crib sheet that basically says, here are the messaging points, here's what's, here's what's dropping today in the Facebook group, here's what's going on in an email. And sometimes there are things on this list that I have to do live. Like Kurt and I always do a Facebook live toast on the last day of the launch where we celebrate with our, with our community online and say thank you. Here's our final numbers. And we do a big rah rah and we invite people to come with their wine cooler or beer or whatever, their waters, their kombuchas and toast. And toast the community and how we pulled this off together. And so I have to actually show up live for that. So I have to make sure that's on my list so I don't forget to do that because that'd be super awkward because I've told people we're going to be there at 7pm and if I don't show up, that's weird, right? So that, that list gives me a sense of confidence too. It helps me see. Oh, I better make sure that I, I got to print those flyers that we're passing out to people on the last day or the week before the final week to remind them that, you know, the store opens at 7am make sure you print those flyers. So these are, this is sort of like my to do list. So that's definitely a part of my process. I schedule everything. I didn't actually say that, but I do have to go in and schedule the emails, schedule the social posts, and then I test it. I find a customer or two and I, I let them in early. I say, hey, you can sign up early before everyone else. You're not going to go through all the stress of wondering if you get what you want in return. You have to test my funnel. And they're always feel super honored and geeked to be able to do that. And I ask them to look for specific things like, hey, were you confused by anything in the store? I want you to try to buy everything in the store at first and see if it works, then remove the stuff. Right. Is it clear where the pickup sites are? Do the emails that drop afterwards make sense? Do they drop at a certain time? Are there typos? Right. They're. They're just testing it for me. And every year they find something wrong. Gosh darn it this is going to be the year they don't though. And that really gives me peace of mind that, that it works because I have had this happen before where I got everything ready. I turned, thought I turned it on and then I got flooded with emails. I didn't check my email until like 20 minutes later and I had hundreds of emails. People are like, I can't get in. Is something wrong? Did you already sell out? Right? And I'm like, oh my God, what's happening? What's happening? And like the, the store had crashed and this was before I, before I got into Local Line. But so many people tried to go to the server and buy that my website went down. And this is one of the reasons that I ended up going to Local Line and finding another store platform because I'm like, wow, this cannot happen again. And so I learned my lesson that I have to make sure I test the actual process of buying. So I encourage you to do that. And then it's go time. And what's really cool is if you follow this, this roadmap, you'll the launch will actually not feel super stressed out because everything is pretty much on autopilot and running and there's just a few things that you have to push into position. I also find that I show up with energy because I'm excited to see what's happening and I'm able to be present with my members in the Facebook group and like talk about results or like thank them as they're signing up and be a part of the energy and momentum. And I'm not like writing emails in the moment trying to catch up. Right. I can just really be present with the energy and it feels like an event. It feels fun. What you will find and my students inside of my online course where I teach this step by step is they find this too. Most of your people will sign up who are going to sign up, will sign up on the first day. The majority of your sales will come in on day one. You'll get the, probably the largest, the second largest spike on day two and then your third largest spike on the last day. If you want to learn how to do this all very step by step. Where I hold your hand. I have a course called CSA Early Bird Campaigns that Convert. That's a mouthful. I would rename it something else if I could go back in time, but it basically teaches you my CSA early bird promotion planning process. And what's cool about it is it also gives you my email nurture, it gives you my email sequence. It gives you my social media posts so you can see exactly what I said and what I used. And it gives you that cheat sheet as well. It gives you examples. So if you would like to have more of a hand holding, step by step process and you kind of need something to shortcut you to see how a really well done promotion has been put together, then I encourage you to go enroll in that. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com earlybird and it's a really good course. It was one of the first ones I ever made. I'm really proud of it and I stand behind it. So I just want to encourage you if you're a little nervous about it, about investing in it, it's actually I think a really reasonable price. If you're still nervous about investing in it, I have a seven day money back guarantee. So you can go inside and take a look inside. And if you don't think that it works for you, you don't like what's in it, then you have seven days to ask me to refund you. So I've only had one person ever do that. So I encourage you to check it out. MyDigitalFarmer.com Earlybird and that's only if you want kind of the shortcut version to get you there a little bit faster. Otherwise you can totally do this on your own just by listening to this podcast episode, going back and kind of thinking through it, figuring it out on your own. I also want to encourage you to go inside my Facebook group. I have a Facebook group for CSA farmers. It's called the CSA Marketing Discussion Group and I have been in there over the last two weeks, two, three weeks, dropping videos every couple days with the different steps, highlighting some of the different features that I do at each of these steps. And if you want to go find that group, just do a search for the CSA Marketing discussion group and we'll let you in. Those videos are only going to be live for 30 days. So by the time you hear this, they're only going to be in there for a few more days. But that's another place you can go to quickly like binge, watch a bunch of stuff to try and work this stuff out. Okay, I want you to start working on this now. If you are a farmer that is ending here in the fall, try to have your promotion running before Thanksgiving. For sure you'll get some good results as long as it's before Thanksgiving. And this is something that you can do especially if you have those templates and you have an example of my promotion to actually stare at and look at. It's going to give you a really good idea of like how you could build it. And you can. I don't want you to copy it word for word, but you can certainly like copy the pattern. And don't be afraid to use AI. You guys. ChatGPT has been so helpful for me on so many levels. In the last few months I've been using it to help tweak my blog posts. Like I will write the draft but then I put it in there and it just helps clarify it so much better. I usually put my emails through there too and it cleans them up and it adds emojis and I think it does a really bang out good job. So I love having ChatGPT as a tool. It's another tool in my toolkit and that might actually be something that can make this whole process a lot faster. Okay, awesome. Well, that's all I have today. If you want the show notes and you want to see this checklist in short form, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com 283 and if you like today's show, please go share it with a friend, go into a Facebook group, let them know it exists or share the link with them. I'd love to have more people find out about the show, leave me a rating and a review as well because that helps more people find out about the podcast because the different podcast players will will rate it higher for people, will showcase it to people and suggest it to people if there are more reviews. So I'm trying to get more people to review the show. If you want to get onto my email list, I have some more marketing resources that I will share with you to to turn you into a better marketer. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and don't forget I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. So it's middle of October. I will be opening the doors to Farm Marketing School this coming month. Well, it's currently open for registration@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS but we're going to be kickstarting our new community of farmers that are in there in November with some fun activities. So I hope you decide to join our community and build your marketing machine step by step with me over the off season. If you're interested in some of that coaching, Please head to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS to learn more about that program. I'm not doing accelerator this year. Instead, I'm going to be working with Farm Marketing School with those students a little bit more hands on than I typically do doing book studies. We're going to be doing a fun project all about the three key levers in your marketing metrics dashboard that you need to be following and tracking. Yeah. Doing all kinds of fun stuff in the next few months to try and build our marketing machine piece by piece in our 30 day project build. So think about joining us. I'd love to see you there. Hey, thanks for joining me today. Have a great week. I'll catch you next time. Remember, I believe in you. You can do this. Bye.