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My Digital Farmer Podcast
291 Debrief: My CSA Early Renewal Campaign Results!
00:59:30
What does it take to run a wildly successful CSA renewal promotion? In this episode, I’m breaking down the results of my recent early bird campaign and sharing my biggest takeaways. With 80% of my members renewing and nearly $300,000 in revenue...
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- [00:01]
Corinna Bench
Every year I run an early renewal campaign to my CSA members. This year was no different. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you the awesome results of that campaign. Our revenue, our retention rate, our average order value, all the things and some of my takeaways of how I ran that promotion. I'm hoping that you can take some of the ideas you hear in this episode and apply them to your own promotions this coming season. Let's get started.
- [00:31]
Co-host or Sponsor
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.
- [00:52]
Corinna Bench
Better and more confident at marketing.
- [00:55]
Co-host or Sponsor
We learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show.
- [01:10]
Corinna Bench
Well, welcome to episode 291 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am 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 online. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. A big shout out to all of my regular listeners and especially all of you who binge listen. I love that. Welcome back. If you're new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out some of my early episodes. I always tell people to check out the first 10 because I designed them to be an onboarding into the marketing space. But you can also learn a whole lot just by getting onto my email list, which is free. Subscribe@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and when you do, I'm going to send you an email about every five days for three months or so. And each one of those emails is either a important marketing tip or a fundamental or principle you need to know. It might be a free resource I share with you, a link to a class you can take that's free or an influencer you should be following. It's really good stuff. It gets high marks from people who subscribe, so you can find that@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. Imagine all of your farm sales under one roof Localline is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs, selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, running a CSA and more. Features include E commerce, automated inventory management, a box builder, subscriptions, point of sale, and more, helping you increase your sales, save time and streamline your processes. Are you looking to switch to sales software that does it all subscriptions start as low as $49 a month with.
- [03:23]
Co-host or Sponsor
No setup fees or sales percentages.
- [03:26]
Corinna Bench
Plus, if you join LocalLine today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost to you, so you'll be up and running in no time. You can even pause your subscription in the off season. And bonus, as a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and enter the coupon code MDF2024. Our farm uses localline as our E commerce platform. I can't see say enough good things about it. We love it. Make the switch today. And now back to the show. Here we are again. It's the end of November, early December, and I feel like this is becoming a tradition. Every year it seems I do a podcast episode where I share the results of my CSA early bird renewal campaign. And the reason I do this is because, number one, it's the biggest promotion that I run in the year for my business. I spend the most time out of all the promotions that I plan on this one. So if I'm going to teach you about how to run a great promotional campaign, like this is the one that I've been running for years and years, seven or eight years now, over and over and over again. And it feels really good to be able to tell the story every year that, hey, this simple process that I have been rinsing and repeating continues to work. And so today I'm going to be sharing with you how the statistics worked out, how many people actually renewed. I'm going to talk about how much I spent in my budget on this renewal campaign. I'm going to talk to you about the promotion after the renewal promotion, the one that I sent to my wait list, and how I modified it to get even more people to sign up. And I'm going to share with you the general learnings and observations that came out of this campaign. Because every time I do this, I have a debrief. I take the time to review the results, to evaluate the process, to ask myself what went really well, what felt Easy, what was light, what was fun, what was hard, what was a heavy lift. And I pay attention and I make notes so that next year when I do this again, when I sit down to map it all out, I have those notes ready to go. So I figured I would just share with you what I had written down in those notes and maybe give you some insights. My hope is that if you run a CSA and you are going to do a renewal process or promotion, that there will be a few gems hiding in this report. But I want to make sure that I direct you back to episode 283, because in that episode I actually map out the whole promotional process. I'm not going to be doing that today. If you want to learn what that looks like, that is a tremendously powerful episode. Go and listen to that. It's a whole training in and of itself and it will give you the step by step. It's really good. Okay, so let me start out by reviewing with you what the promotion looked like when it happened and what the offer was. I run my CSA renewal promotion campaign to my current CSA members, the ones that I'm trying to get to renew. Okay, this is not to people who I have been pulling onto a wait list or who have shown interest in my CSA because they've downloaded some kind of a lead magnet. I'm not talking to them yet. That will be its own promotion because they need to be talked to in a different way. This promotion is just the renewal campaign. I'm only building an offer for the current CCSA members of 2024. That particular promotion ran starting October 20th. That's when the cart opened, when they were able to start renewing their share. It began at 7am sharp and it ended on October 27th at 10pm you'll notice that's only seven days that I ran this offer and I did that on purpose. As I talk about in episode 283, it's important to have an offer that has urgency. You can't run this particular special forever or people don't feel compelled to take action now. And so I chose the last week of our CSA season to have the CSA offer open. Now here was the offer, the price. I raised the price by $20 from last year, but I didn't point any attention to that. I didn't bring that up. I didn't say this is $20 more. I just said here's the price. For us, it was $590 for an 18 week season and that's the standard size share, which is what 98% of the people get. I'm not even going to tell you what the large size box was. It's basically double that with a little bit of a discount. I mentioned this only the price only because I didn't actually tell people in the offer this year that they're saving money if they buy early. In the past I have, I've been like, this is an early bird price. The price is going to go up after this week. New people who come in are going to spend more. So you'll want to grab this price. I didn't talk about that at all this year in the promotion. But just so you know, it is actually a lower price than what people will pay after this promotion is over. Now I offered a bonus gift that I think was really compelling this year and the bonus if they signed up in the seven day period was a package of free chicken sausage from Anderson Farms. I want to say it's a ten dollar value in that price range. My cost for that was a whole lot less. But Anderson Farms is a collaborator farm with us. I'll be talking a little bit more about them later in the episode. And then there was another bonus where I gave a PDF of the top 40 recipes of our CSA of all time. So we've been in business now for 15 seasons and I wanted to put together a recipe list of the recipes that we keep bringing up year after year after year. Katie, my CSA coach who does the recipes every week, she actually has a Google Doc where she stores her recipes that she brings up every year. There are certain classics like the pesto and the beet bagels, the ones that cause a sensation in the group every year or where people are like, what is that recipe again? I can't find it. Like she keeps track of those ones in a special Google Doc. And then as the season progresses and I give her the list of vegetables every week, she always goes back and reviews that and looks through to see, oh, have I featured that recipe again? Because I want to make sure I bring up some of these classics and then she'll add on new ones that are new for the year. And so I thought it would be really fun for our people to get their hands on Katie's Google Doc, the one that she's pulling these best of recipes that are showing up year after year from. And so I asked her to actually pick out 40 from that Google Doc. She has more than 40 in there, but I said pull out your big ones and she gave those to me and I put them together into A canva document. So that was another bonus that we gave away. That was it. That was my offer. Now remember, it was also only available for seven days. So that's also technically part of the offer. I want to bring up that I sold add on shares during this promotion as well. And some of these add ons created some elements that I would consider part of the offer. So let me go through this. We had 120 eggshares available. And remember, our CSA is a 400 member CSA. For this particular promotion, I only made 350 spots available because we usually save about 30 of those 400 spots for sampler shares, our trial memberships. And so I didn't want to give all of them away. So I only made 350 available at this price. I also knew that I had a wait list and I wanted to make sure that I had a few that I could give to the wait list in case we did have a really high retention rate. Okay, so there's 400 potential people that are going to be getting a vegetable box. There are 120 eggs and many of the people in our CSA want to have these eggs more than 120. I purposely limit the number of eggshares every year, even though I could sell more because it helps me with my CSA renewal promotion. So many people want those eggs and they sell out. In some cases it's been in like 10 minutes. This year it took a little longer because I made 20 more available. But because the eggshare is so popular and so limited, people will line up at 7am to purchase and renew their share because they want to try and get those coveted eggs. Okay, so this is an element of the CSA offer that isn't actually spiraling around my vegetables. It's around a totally different product that's being sold at the same time and that can be used to help drive results. I also sold flower shares, our fruit share, which has our highest margin, a coffee bean share that contained a bonus as well. If you purchased a coffee bean share, you got a free coffee drink from Maddie and Bella's. And we have an artisan cheese share. This had a bonus gift as well because we were trying to get more people to purchase the cheese share since it has a high margin. And that bonus was a free block of smoked butter from Boss Mouse Cheese. Now the smoked butter was a huge hit this year. In our first week's share share, it came with the cheese share as like a little extra tag on. And so many people were freaking out about it. I actually considered making the smoked butter be the bonus for the vegetable share. But we ultimately decided to go with the chicken sausage instead. But then I thought, well, let me make the, the smoked butter be a free gift that they get with their first week of cheese. If they order a cheese share and, um, I'll show you later that you could tell that that worked. We sold a lot more cheese.
- [15:25]
Co-host or Sponsor
Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly membership program that helps farmers build their marketing systems for their business. If you are a farmer that doesn't really have a good machine in place that's helping you collect leads, attract your ideal customer, deliver your offer, nurture them into superfans, and learn how to continue to make revenue off of them, then this is a program that you might want to join. This is a monthly membership, which means you pay month to month. And inside I have over 10 to 12 different marketing projects that are 30 day project builds. And farmers can come in, they take an assessment to figure out where they are in their business, what elements they might be missing in their marketing system, and then you build the different pieces of the machine month by month. You get to decide what to work on first. I have projects about the website makeover. I have a project about building your email nurture sequence, writing a weekly email, building a promotion calendar. This coming month, the month of November, we're actually doing a live book study on building a story brand by Donald Miller. And you will be building a brand script for your farm, getting clear about what your marketing message is. So that's the live project going on right now. And in the month of January, I'm going to be releasing a new project all about marketing metrics and we're going to be doing a deep dive on the key.
- [17:00]
Corinna Bench
It's kind of a short list of.
- [17:01]
Co-host or Sponsor
The metrics that you need to be tracking and I'll teach you them one by one. And then your homework is going to be to go find that metric for that week and build it into your workbook so that you can be tracking it. It's going to be super good. So if you want to join this community, head to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS to learn all about it. It includes a host of project builds. Each project has a teaching workshop, it has a project planner, it has templates to help make the process of building your own version a lot faster. And we also have a monthly zoom meetup where we talk out our questions. So I hope you decide to join the community. I'm super geeked about it this winter to work with my members and work one on one with them and help them go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS to enroll now. And now back to the show.
- [17:59]
Corinna Bench
Now there was one other element that I think helped drive early sales on the first day and that was because I had a drawing for a free gift to somebody who purchased within the first hour. And this gift was a free month's worth of our chicken share, which we're launching next year for the first time. And that Bundle was worth $125. So the idea was I'm going to choose one person from all the people who renew their share in the first hour and they will win a free box of chicken. And then that was announced later that afternoon on the first day. So that could have also just inspired people who knew they wanted to do this anyway to just get off their butts and take care of it in the first hour of the first day. Those are all great examples of how you can sculpt an offer and create urgency around. Like why do they need to take action now? Right. We're coaching the conversion to happen when we want it to happen. Okay, so that was my offer. I sold this offer on localline, that's our platform on a hidden or a private price list. That unique price list has a unique URL address which I could direct people to. It wasn't our usual online store URL, it was a different one. So I turned on that price list at 6:59am and when people clicked on the link it was able to take them right to that store. And within that price list I could then change a whole bunch of parameters and customize it. For this unique promotion, I was able to move and shuffle the order of the products. So I positioned the most expensive one first as the to kind of anchor the price. And that was followed by the standard size vegetable share. Then I put the cheese next because that was actually the thing I wanted to sell most after the vegetables. And then I put my fruit shares after that and then followed it with the other shares. So I thought about what are the products that I am hoping will sell that I really want to push? And I positioned those kind of near the top. I also turned on my invoice only payment setting, which is one of the cool features about localline that I really love is that I can decide to not accept credit card payments if I want to. So I know this is old fashioned and I may change my mind in the future, but we decided to continue the practice of Making CSA payment via check or bank check only. It is totally a point of friction. I get that. But it's also something that we've been doing for 15 years. Our customers are used to it. So it's kind of part of the buying habit for this product. We explain it well in the marketing and it's only an issue for like five people every year. And I make exceptions for them and let them pay me with Venmo, but yeah, that's how that works. Okay, now let me share with you what the promotion results were because this is really awesome and I hope it will be a compelling message to you. I'm only going to focus on the vegetable shares and how those sales broke down in super specifics. But I will give you the total results of all the other add on shares in just a minute. I had 350 shares available. On day one I sold 286. The remaining seven days were a total of 22 extra shares. So the majority of the sales happened on day one. The way that broke down was day two, I sold eight. Day three, I sold two. Day four, I sold zero. Day five I sold three. Day six, I sold zero. Day seven I sold one. And on the final day I sold eight. Which is usually typical. You see the most on the first and the last day and then the second day. So how did I get so many people, the majority of people, to buy on the first day? Well, it's the process that I teach in episode 283. By the end of the whole campaign, the total numbers of things that I sold fell as follows. The vegetable share, 286I sold 100 cheese shares. 57 coffee shares, 157 people got an egg share. 58 people got a flour share and 151 people ordered a fruit share. So the revenue that we brought in, $286,493 in that seven day period. Now remember, that's not coming into my bank account right away. I'm going to be getting that via check by June 1st. Half of that will technically come in by January 1st for us to cash and have that available for cash flow, which is pretty awesome. And that is what our farm predominantly lives off of for the first six to seven months of the season. And after that we really dig into our wholesale account revenue. The average order value was $902.6 products per order. So most people are getting at least two items. And I pitched this to 388 names on my email list. Now you might Be confused because you're like, wait, I thought you said you sold 400 shares. Well, some of those shares are large shares, which count as double of the standard. So it's really 388 customers. And 318 of those people really renewed their share during this campaign. So that's an 81.9% retention. Okay, those are the stats. Now, budget, what did I spend on this promotion campaign? Well, I spent $3 for each chicken sausage, and so that was about $900 on the bonus gift. Then I had, as I will share in a minute, during my reflections with you, we had a bunch of giveaways and prizes because we were running contests throughout the campaign. I spent $370 on the different prizes and giveaways. So that was a total of $1,270 that was spent on this promotion so that I could earn $286,493. Not too shabby, right? I will do that every single day. That cost per lead comes to $3.27 for every customer. Actually, not for every customer, for every lead that I pitched it to. Okay, so my EPL, my earnings per lead comes to $738. Now, if you don't remember what earnings per lead is, I did an entire podcast episode on this episode, 286, and it's a really fun one. If you're not really familiar with some of the stats that you should be tracking or could be tracking in your business, earnings per lead is one of the big ones, and it basically represents how much every person on your email list is worth. And you can track your EPL generally, or you can track it specifically by campaign. So if I look at just the leads that were pitched this promotion campaign, these are hot leads, granted, because they've been customers for a long time, Right. But if I just look at the people who were pitched this renewal campaign, each of those people on that list are worth $738. Because I take the total amount that I earned in this campaign and I divide it by the number of people I pitched it to, and that's how I find out that number. So $738 per person on my CSA on this CSA list. That's pretty powerful. When you look at the average order value being around $900, that kind of makes sense. The EPL is lower than that because not everybody purchased or renewed a share. Right? If everybody. If I gotten 100% renewal, the earnings per lead would have been really close to the average order value. That was Spent. But in this case, because not everybody renews, it's a little bit lower. That's still a very, very strong number. The that tells me that this particular CSA customer list is incredibly profitable, incredibly valuable. Okay, let's talk about some of the reflections. So as I did my debrief, these were some of the things that I wrote down and wanted to highlight for you. Especially number one is I set some goals this year and I noticed that my strategy followed those goals. In years past, I haven't always been very strategic about the goals. I'll just be like, oh, I want to try and, you know, hit 80%. I want to try and sell this many shares. But this year I had some more specific things that I was trying to work on. And I noticed that because I had targeted those things in my mind, I then ended up planning things to make sure that they were more likely to happen. And then sure enough, they happened. One of those things I'll just pick on one of them was I wanted to sell more cheese shares this year because I felt like there was energy around that product line. This year we had changed up the varieties quite a bit. It wasn't always the same ones like there have been year after year. It wasn't a routine and people were commenting every week, oh, this was such a fun cheese. It's a new one. I love it. And so I wanted more people to buy the cheese share. It also has a really good profit margin for us from among the add on share products in our product suite. This is one of the higher ones. So I thought through, how can I get more people to buy the cheese? And I decided that I was going to actually change how it was even structured. So instead of getting three cheeses per week, there was always like two different hard cheeses and then a chevre, a goat cheese. I decided that I would get rid of the weekly chevre and it would just be cow's milk cheese. And maybe every now and then I'd throw in a chevre, but that's not like the formula anymore. So as a result, the price was able to be lowered to $200 for that artisan cheese share, which I think is a little bit more accessible for people. It's like more of that ideal price point. You can just add on another 200 bucks, right? And it doesn't feel as hefty as if it's, you know, 250 bucks or something. Plus I said, let me try to incentivize this purchase and I'll put the smoked butter as the bonus there instead of on the vegetable share. And so maybe that becomes another reason why someone suddenly decides, I really want that smoked butter. It's not going to be given any other time in the season, so I'm going to get the cheese share. Those were some of the decisions that I found myself making in order to try and make that happen. And the year before we had 60 cheese shares. This year we sold 100. Actually it's higher now, but in that promotion we sold 100. So that shows you that something, I did something right there to encourage that to almost double. One of my other goals was to hit 300. I wanted to get around 80% retention. And that's because in the past that's what I have sold. That's been the number that I've landed at. I think there was one year, the year of COVID where we actually sold out during early bird promotion. But that doesn't usually happen. I usually land around 80%, 81%. So I wanted to at least repeat what I had done in the past. And if I overshot that, great. But I felt pretty confident that I could rinse and repeat it once again. And then my third goal was that I wanted to have fun. And I wanted this launch to create energy in my community. That was really important to me because sometimes it's easy to fall into this fear of running a promo because you're worried about coming off as salesy. And I hate that. I have to pitch myself and I have to send an email every single day for like 10 days. And what are they going to think? Are they going to be annoyed? All of that stuff goes through my head too. And so I said, how can I try to design the launch so that it's fun for my community? So that as I pitch, as I write an email every single day, that's a little bit easier to do because I know that I'm doing things that are also fun in the process to counteract that. So this is where I wanted to bring up the power of the pre launch, which I go into quite a bit in the episode 283 where I talk through the the process. So I'm not gonna dive super deep in here, but the pre launch period is the seven to ten days before you open the cards, before you make the offer live, where you're trying to dial up the energy, you're trying to make people aware of what the offer is going to be. You're educating them about the offer, you're getting them excited, you're doing some Fun things to bring energy into the room so that when they go to the store at 7am on the 1st day that they can buy, they already know what they want to do. They have decided, they have converted before that moment. They're coming in with a plan. And with a plan B, you don't want somebody showing up in your online store to, to renew the share or purchase and be like, oh, I'm not really sure if I want to do this. Like they're, they're coming with intention. And that happens when you do the pre launch, that seven to day, seven to ten day period really well. So here's some of the stuff that we did in the days before I opened the cart that I think helped with this and I. This is where I hope you're gonna get some ideas for how you can jazz up your own promotional launch. First of all, we did a Freezer challenge from September 22nd to October 4th inside of my private CSA Facebook group. And this is a very popular challenge. I've run it in the past. I hadn't done it in this way for a couple of years. But the idea is for us to teach our community how to take our produce that's backing up in their fridge here towards the end of the season and start preparing it in such a way that they can freeze it. So freezer meals or just outright, like, can you pesto that? Can you make an actual freezer meal? Can you put that into a Ziploc bag? Can you blanch and freeze it? Right. Just challenging everyone to freeze as much stuff as they could. And they were taking photographs of how they were freezing things. They were sharing ideas and we had some good prizes for the winners. I chose three different people and I featured them. They had to post a certain number of times, but that was running for about two weeks before the pre launch began. It actually overlapped a little bit with the pre launch period. So people were coming off of a highly engaged contest. And this also helped the Facebook algorithm because when you have so many people posting in that group for something like that, it makes Facebook want to share that page organically in the feed of the followers more often. So I had that engine already kind of primed and pumped so that when it was time to start pitching the offer during the pre launch week, those posts were showing up as well because there was already so much engagement. Now we had a bunch of challenges and contests and giveaways that I know created this spirit of fun. So I've talked about this before, but we did our daily question challenge. In the seven days before the cart opened, I simply had a question post and they had to answer it. And I picked one person at random who had commented to win a prize. And every day the prize was a loaf of sourdough. It was like 15 bucks for a loaf. And this is really yummy stuff. I did offer an option for people who were gluten free, so I made sure I said that too. I know you're asking that. Those questions were designed to get people to share why they loved the CSA so much. I mean, the questions I was asking were well positioned questions, getting them to reflect on their year, getting them to point out the people in the group who have impacted them. So there was a lot of thanking and highlighting the strong members of the group. There was, how have you grown this year? How? What have you learned? That's new. Yeah, just different questions like that. What's your favorite part of the csa? What's a memory? You're always going to have those kinds of things. Okay, so that helped. We also did something called the Golden Egg Challenge. And if you're on my email list, you got an email about this. It was a spark of genius that I had a couple of days before I decided to do it. What I did was I hid a golden plastic egg in three of the eggshares. So I took out an egg from the dozen eggs and I replaced it with a plastic golden egg. And inside there was a little note that says, congratulations, you're the winner. And it told them what to do. And then I put three golden eggs scattered around the vegetable shares as well. So you didn't have to be an eggshare member in order to win this. But here's what happened. If you got a golden egg, you got to cut in line and pre order your CSA before the cart opened. Can you guys see how this would be a very exciting prize? And it didn't cost me anything. So many people want that eggshare. And in years past, the eggshare has sold out in five to 10 minutes. This year it's sold out. It took two hours to sell out. But because there is a reputation, a history of this particular share going so quickly, it has, it's almost like a legend in our community. Now. Everyone was so excited about trying to get this golden egg because it would mean that they, they would be assured of an eggshare and they wouldn't have to get up early at 6:45 and wait in line and hope that they got what they wanted. They could basically just email me and Say, this is what I would like to have. And I manually created that order for them in localdyne. It also stirred the pot and reminded people just how popular that eggshare was. So it kind of had two purposes. That was a stroke of brilliance, and it was cool because all six of them were found. Some of them weren't found until, like, three days later, but they were all found. And people took a picture of it and they posted it with pride. In the Facebook group, there was one of a. Of a little girl who was holding it. She was probably, like, I don't know, six or seven, wearing this cute little dress in her living room. And you could see she was dancing in the picture with excitement, like, as if she were twirling around the room, screaming with excitement. And her mom caught that on camera, and she shared it in the community, like, oh, my gosh. She was actually the last one who found the egg. So I just love that it created all kinds of energy and people were celebrating one another and saying, great job, you're so lucky, et cetera, et cetera. We did another contest where I had people guess the number of people that were on the CSA wait list that was inside of the Facebook group. Again, I do that post every year, but I turned it into a contest, and somebody, whoever got closest to the right answer was going to win some cookies. That didn't cost me very much either. And what it did was it showed people that there were 144 people on the wait list. That was the answer. And people didn't realize it was that high. It creates this sense of urgency and makes them think, oh, gosh, I need to take care of this, because there are a lot of people waiting to take my spot. We also did something called seven Days of Giveaways. So when the cart was open, starting from October 20th through the 27th, we gave away a prize. At the end of the day, around 6pm One person from the entire collection of people that had renewed their shares would get chosen. So I would lump everybody into the bucket from day one all the way through day seven, and I would pull out a name from the hat. So you have more chances to win one of those prizes the sooner that you purchase. But there was actually a day when the person who won the prize had purchased that day, as luck would have it. So sometimes it does. You still can get a prize, even if you. If you decide to renew pretty late in the game. A few more things to kind of stir the pot and create a spirit of fun. We announced a chicken Share partnership. So up until then, nobody knew about this. This is a new thing that we're adding. Next year we're going to partner with Anderson Farms in Bowling Green. They are chicken producers, poultry producers, and they're going to be doing a monthly meat box with us. We're trying it out for a season. They're selling it to us at a wholesale rate and then we can mark it up. So we'll be making some profit off of that and we're going to do it for five months. I decided I was going to give away a free month's box of this share to one lucky person at random who ordered their CSA in the first hour of the first day. So I was able to announce that as I announced the news that we were having a chicken share next year. Now, this was a little bit difficult for me because I didn't want to create confusion here. I didn't want people to think, wait a minute, is the chicken share available in the store starting October 20th? Is that something else I now have to think about buying now? And am I going to have to shuffle the deck because I can't afford that along with all the other things I wanted? Um, I didn't want people to be confused there. So I had to make sure that as I announced it that I said, we haven't put all the details together yet. It's probably going to be around this price point, but we won't be promoting it or you won't be able to buy it until January. And we purposely separated these launches from each other because of the fact that that's going to be a higher ticket priced item and I don't want that to be competing with some of my other shares so I can confidently sell that later on in the year. It's a totally different kind of product too. It's, it's meat. People have a different budget for vegetables than they do for meat, I think, so it'll be okay. But that was a little bit of wordsmithing that I had to do. But I was excited to kind of share it. So that was a big reveal. We were showing pictures of the Andersons. We were doing close ups of things. So that kind of like a mystery photo and they were trying to figure out what is the big reveal going to be. So we were teasing the reveal. Then when we revealed it, everyone's like, oh my God, gosh, I can't believe it. You're moving into meet and yeah, so it just created a bunch of buzz and excitement and energy and then just knowing that that was another prize that was being given away, I think helped us with our sales in that first hour. Most of the sales on day one did come in the first hour. I also had a prize for it was like beat the clock. So the first person who actually got in their CSA order won a prize. And so that was just kind of fun to try and get people to be the first person who would be that lucky person that would get first in line. So that was kind of fun. It wasn't an expensive prize, but it was just another way to create energy and encourage people to try and go in the first hour. Yeah, so those were some of the ways that we created energy in our community. We also had a feel to table dinner the weekend before the cart opened at our farm. So we always like to bring people out, have a nice fancy chef meal and remember the season and celebrate all the partners in our farm. So it's kind of a feel good moment and I think that helps create good mood and good vibe as well. Moral of the story there is it, it felt like an event. The launch felt like an event and the prizes made it feel exciting and fun. People were checking in with the group more frequently because they wanted to see who had won. So there was a lot more engagement happening. And I think more importantly, it changed the way that I felt about the promotion. I felt generous instead of salesy because I was giving away all these things. It made me feel more comfortable asking people to buy and I could tell people were having a good time because of all the engagement and all the excitement. And I think that was validating. So I just want to offer that to you if you're thinking about doing a really big promotion. Like, I don't pull out all the stops like this for all of my promotions, guys. Like, I only do this for the CSA renewal because this one matters. Like I. This is the bulk of my sales. A huge ton of my revenue comes through this way. And so I'm going to take the time to invest in it and really run it like gangbusters. Okay. One other thing that I wrote down as I was debriefing is that we fell short on our fruit share sales. And. And this is a little bit concerning because we have a high margin on that. We do kind of expect a certain amount of revenue to come in from the fruit share. So to see that significantly lower kind of made me wonder, why was that? Is the fruit share not seen as valuable? Are people not liking the varieties that we're putting in? Is there not enough Is there too much? So, so I need to figure out why and that's some information that I have to go and do some research on. I need to actually ask my customers and I will probably have to create another promotion campaign to try and push my add on shares again and I'll just do that later on in the season. That's just a reminder to you that whenever you run a promotion campaign sometimes you're not going to hit your goals. You'll miss the mark. That doesn't mean you can't try again and pitch them again with a different offer. Because I'm selling so many things at the same time, it's possible that my add on shares are competing with each other. And so there just may be an upper limit to what a person can spend in one purchase at, you know, at the computer, what they're comfortable spending. Maybe it's like I don't want to go over a thousand dollars and so they're only going to put two items in their cart. That doesn't mean that they won't have disposable income in a few months where they're willing to now spend 200, 300 bucks on one of these items again when that money is sort of replenished. So I just might have to find another time later on in the year to pitch those products again and they'll be, they'll say yes. So just keep that in mind that we can always pitch offers at different times. And that actually kind of makes sense if people have an upper limit of what they're willing to spend in one. In one sitting. Okay, let's talk about the wait list. I did have a CSA wait list and I talked about it during the pre launch. I did that on purpose and I think it worked. Um, there were 138 people after originally 144. But then I cleaned up that list a little bit. I actually saw I gave people the option to get off of that list. So I did email people on the wait list and say, are you sure you still want to be on here? I'm about to sell my product to my current members after I'm done with them. You're going to be next. So this is your chance to get off if you don't want to know about CSA anymore. I sent that a couple times and my list held strong at 138 people. People saw me collecting a wait list and I know that that was helping create a sense of urgency. So I like how I was grooming the wait list during this promo period and that contest that I talked about where I said, hey, guess the number of people. That was an easy way to make people aware of just how many people were on that wait list so that I could get them to take action. Now let's talk about what happened after the CSA early bird renewal launch. I turned my eyes to my CSA wait list and I ran another promotional launch for the CSA to them. That's right. I have two promotions that sit back to back. I give myself about three days to debrief, reset the store and update some of the emails and assets that I need to run the next launch. But I like to run them back to back. I do this because when I'm pitching the CSA early bird renewal, I talk about how I'm going to give these leftover spots to the wait list like a few days after this is over. And so I, I do that to create urgency. And so I need to be a person of integrity and actually try to do that. So I have everything waiting in the wings. This is a launch that I have pre written before it starts. So I have all the emails lined up, but I don't have a Facebook group where I can be posting stuff to this audience. Right. It's really just a launch that's done through email. This particular Launch ran from November 1st through 7th, so seven days. And I sent that to 145 people. Roughly. This was 10 emails. The pre launch started October 27th. The cart opened on November 1st, ran for seven days. It had its own separate offer. It was a higher price. It also had a bonus and out of 145 people, 14 people decided to purchase. So that's only a 10% conversion compared to my conversion rate for my CSA members on the renewals. That's quite a difference. Right now I want to tell you that I've only been tracking this consistently for the last three years. That 10% conversion is about average for me. I remember the first year it happened and I thought, oh man, this is really bad. Like that's a really poor conversion rate. And then when it happened again the next year and then again this year, I think I'm kind of in a space where I'm like, well, maybe this is just what the conversion rate is and that this particular wait list is not as prepared or ready to say yes for whatever reason. So I either have the wrong people on the list, even though I ask them repeatedly, do you want to be on this list? Do you want to get off? I look at the open rates for this list and they're like 60%. So it's not like people are, you know, not opening the emails. They're opening all 10 of those promo emails, but for whatever reason, they're just not taking action. Now I have a suspicion that some of them want those sampler orders, the four week trial memberships. So we'll kind of watch to see if that's the case. But I wanted to bring up that conversion rate because I think some of you are like maybe wondering, well, how come it's not as high? And I want to just point out that sometimes the, the list, the different types of lists will give you different conversion rates. So the revenue I made for that launch was $11,095 and my average order value was $792.50. That's a little bit lower than what the first promotion was. The average person purchased 1.6 products per order and my earnings per lead was $80. That's significantly lower, if you recall, than my hot CSA customer list. And that makes sense to me. I mean, they haven't purchased anything from me yet. This is their first time. They're rookies, they're not going to be quite as profitable yet. That number is a really helpful number though because it, first of all, it allows me to see how much money I can spend on a Facebook ad, for instance, to acquire a lead onto that list. So I could spend up to 60, $70, I think comfortably, actually technically $80 if I want to break even. But I might be willing to spend up to $70 per lead to get someone onto my CSA wait list. Knowing that the current EPL is 80 bucks. And using that number, I can also then extrapolate and I can say, well, if I need to sell 30 more shares to get to my goal and I, you know, I get down to the wire and I am 30, not there yet. I would need to have about 300 people on my CSA wait list since that's the conversion rate. If it's a 10% conversion rate, if I had 300 people on my wait list instead of 145, then I would get 30 people to buy. So moral of the story is when you're doing promotions, make sure that you actually track the numbers afterwards. This is going to give you a lot of empowerment. I can look at these numbers now and feel, well, really good about the strength of them. Number one, it affirms that I know what I'm doing and that my marketing principles are sound and I just really need to continue to rinse and Repeat this to get similar results, but it also can kind of show me what I need to do to hit those numbers using the current system I have. I wanted to just wrap up by sharing at the end of the day what the total results were for both of these campaigns. So come November 7th, my total revenue for the CSA promotion was $299,978. That was made up of 335 orders, average 2.5 products, and the average AOV between both lists, the hot list, and then the CSA wait list was 2.5 products. Not too shabby. I would say that for me, these results are fairly typical. This is what I've been averaging for the last few years. The only slight blip this year was, like I said earlier, the fruit share numbers were down. And one of the things you want to be looking at when you're staring at your numbers is are there huge aberrations in these numbers from year to year? And if there are, then that can be a signal that you need to look at that particular product. Or maybe your promotion wasn't messaging well on a particular angle. And that may be why, as I reflect about the fruit share, I didn't really promote the fruit share very much at all during the promotion. I was really pushing the cheese and the vegetables, and so that may be partly to blame. So that's something I just pay attention to. I'll try a little bit of a different approach next year. I may have to run a separate promotion later on in the spring to try and bring those numbers up. But let your data tell the story. One of the great things about running an early renewal campaign at the end of October is that you know where you stand by the time you get to the end of the fiscal year. And I can make some decisions now about whether I need to build a big promo for anything in the CSA product suite come springtime or if I can just sort of let those sales dribble in. If I didn't have great results, then I would have time to kind of make up the difference and build promotions. As it is now, I feel like I'm in a really strong spot and I can really just turn my eyes towards the chicken share and pitch that well and look at the. Look forward to the extra revenue we're going to bring in from that. Now, I wrote all of this stuff down in a checklist. I have a Google Doc that functions as my promotion planner and it's broken down by day. So, you know, here are the things you have to work on on this day. On this day you're posting these items and you're sending out this email. And make sure you don't forget to pick up the sourdough bread gift for the giveaway. Right. Like, I have all the different things mapped out. I have never had such a detailed list before and that was really helpful. It kept me organized and it really allowed me to not think about it all the time because I wasn't worrying if I was going to forget something. I could just look at that every morning and say, what do I have to do today? Is there anything that hasn't been automated that I have to take care of? It's also great because next year I can go back, pull that out and follow it step by step, make a few tweaks. Going to make the whole process so much faster. All of my emails and all of the social posts were put onto a Google Doc as well so that I can see those, copy and paste them and make that a whole lot faster. Incidentally, all of this information can be found inside of my course, which is called Early Bird Campaigns that Convert. If you want to learn the process, if you want the emails, if you want the social, if you want that checklist cheat sheet planner thing I just talked about to see the whole thing broken down. It's all in there and makes it a whole lot faster for you. And you can grab that@mydigitalfarmer.com Earlybird if you want to wait just a few more weeks. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be putting that course inside of Farm Marketing School, which you'll be able to access@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS so if you want to subscribe, subscribe to my monthly membership starting let's say January 5th. For sure I should have it inside of there. Okay, that's all I got. Today's show notes can be found at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/291 if you liked this episode, please share it with a farmer friend and go leave me a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help more people find out about the show and I just get into more people's earbuds. Don't forget, if you want to get onto my email list and learn more about farm marketing, I have some free stuff to send your way. You can get that@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and I'm also now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I love to show up in stories so go check me out there and connect with me. Thanks for joining me today. Have an awesome week. Remember, I believe in you. I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.