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My Digital Farmer Podcast
306 5 Ways to Get Your First-Time Farm Customers to Buy Again (And Spend More!)
00:55:40
Is your farm’s sales funnel doing a great job of bringing in first-time customers—but then dropping the ball when it comes to getting them to buy again? I recently coached a farmer who sells grass-fed chicken, pork, and beef by the cut, along with...
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Corinna Bench
Is your farm sales funnel doing a great job of bringing in first time customers, but then maybe it's dropping the ball when it comes to getting them to buy again? This is a common problem and I recently coached a farmer in farm marketing school on how to overcome it and I want to share with you what I told him in today's episode. I'm sharing a checklist of ideas that you can implement to build out your own post purchase system. Let's dive in. 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. Let's 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 306 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 strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. Welcome back to the show. How's everyone doing today? Big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners and if you're new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show and go check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo way back when I first designed them. They're still still as good as ever. Or you can just kind of look through the archives and see what jumps out at you. There's a lot of good stuff here. Another great place to go if you're new to the marketing lingo is to get onto my email list because when you subscribe, I'm going to send you a bunch of free stuff for about three months. Every week you'll get an email from me that has a marketing principle, some teaching tips. I'm going to send you off to really key podcasts that you need to listen to to learn stuff. I'm going to give you some free gifts. I'm going to tell you which influencers you should be following. It's really good. So you can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. If you're like me, winter is your downtime to plan and prep for the upcoming growing season. Set yourself up for success with localline, the best sales platform built for farms. Local Line is the most comprehensive software for farmers and food hubs that's out there selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers running a CSA and more. With features like e commerce, automated inventory management, they have subscriptions, a box builder, point of sale, and more. Localline helps you grow sales. It saves saves you time and streamlines your operations. In fact, on average, this is cool. Farms that use Local Line grow sales by 23% and they increase their average order size by 9.5% annually. So, ready to switch to sales software that does it all? Logoline has no setup fees, no sales percentages, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free so you'll be up and running in no time. As a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code MDF2025. So to claim it, go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter that coupon code MDF2025. Don't wait. Start your season strong with Localline today. And now back to the show. I'm sitting here with my cup of peppermint tea looking forward to teaching you on today's topic. It's a Saturday that I'm recording this and we just finished our spring break week for one of our kids. Our other kid goes to a different school district, so he'll have his spring break in a few weeks. But we're going to do something today. We're heading out to Cleveland to a piston show. This is the kind of stuff that my family geeks out about and I just go along for the ride. But apparently it's a show that specializes in machines that use all kinds of pistons, so there will be planes there and cars and all manner of machinery. So my boys are really geeked out about it. So I'm gonna go along and take a lot of photos and just marvel at their brilliance. And honestly, I'm gonna feel like I am left out of the conversation. So it'll be fine. It's really cool growing two beautiful boys that are talented in engineering and mechanical stuff. I feel like my primary work as a mother was done in the first eight years of their life. And now Kurt is really pulling the heavy load here at the end and just I love I love watching him parent. It's awesome. So that's what we're doing today. I hope you're having a wonderful day and that you're finding time to be with your family and loved ones. Even though I know it's April and it's probably picking up for you if you live in North America. I know our season is starting to get much more busy in terms of production. Today I wanted to bring to you a case study of one of the farmers from Farm Marketing School. So if you join Farm Marketing School, which is my monthly membership program, we do have a monthly Zoom call for the whole group where people can come together and share their wins or their struggles or troubleshoot together. But after you've been in Farm Marketing School for a certain number of months, I give you a chance to have a one on one call with me. And so this is kind of coming out of one of those calls I was recently coaching Ted, so shout out to you, Ted. I did not record our call. We had some technical issues with Zoom and it was a little bit spotty there, but it was such a good conversation. I love doing these calls because it shows me what issues farmers are actually having. And I start to see patterns after a while, like, oh, this was coming up for Ted too, you know, and it, it gave me the idea, like I should do a podcast episode that talks about the issue he was coming up against in his business as he's building out his sales funnel. So Ted is a farmer who sells grass fed chicken, pork and beef by the cut. He also has farm bundles and he sells shares. I know he sold beef shares at least. I can't quite remember all the details, but he is a meat producer and he had a local line store that he had been working with I think for like two months. He really liked it. And he was in the stages of kind of setting up this automated funnel like I teach in Farm Marketing school. And he was trying to put all the different pieces in place. So there was still a lot of work for him to do here in the future to look at the data and the metrics and kind of learn from the patterns, learn from the sales. But so far he was having a really good run. He was telling me that he'd made more money with local line with this new E commerce platform set up in the last few weeks than ever before. And he's like, wow, if it keeps going like this, we're going to be great. So he was having a lot of hope and positive energy towards, you know, setting up this Automation system. So in our call, he wanted to kind of review what he had done so far and just show me his website, talk me through what was, what he was doing. And then he honestly just wanted to know, like, what should I work on next? Like, what's, what should I be looking at building? Where do you see a hole in the funnel? Or what's something that's maybe not working? And so I was really impressed, Ted. I, I told you this on our call, if you're listening, he had a really good, solid sales funnel in place. And you know, when you're building the sales funnel, I teach this in the, the first intro class of farm marketing school. I teach you what the different pieces of the sales funnel even are, what the framework is, and if you're kind of new to this space. Let me just review with you when, when a, a person decides to become a customer and buy from you the first time. Like, it's usually not a super quick transaction. Like there's several things that actually happen before they decide to buy and that you may not have really ever thought about. But first they have to have a problem or a need that causes them to even want to go looking for a solution. Then they become aware that you exist, maybe because they start researching the topic, or someone brings you up as they're discussing the problem with a friend. Then they go and actually engage with some of the different solutions. Or they might go read some blogs and try to learn more about it, or they might go check out some different websites or different ways you could solve the problem. And they start to center on one track or one solution style that they like. Then they might get onto your email list, or they might watch your content for a little bit before they decide if they trust you and like you. And then they're like, okay, I want to get on their email list. And then they might decide to buy once they figure out, oh, well, what is it exactly that you even offer, right? So there's, there's this kind of what we call top of the funnel, top of funnel strategy whose whole goal is to just acquire new leads and customers. But then once a person buys, it's not over. Like there's ongoing steps after they buy for the first time, right? Hopefully we want that customer to become a lifetime customer, to come back and buy again more often, maybe every week or twice a month or every month, depending on what you sell. And we want them to tell their friends about us. We want them to become a part of our marketing engine. And so there are things that we do deeper in the sales funnel that encourage that to happen so that we have a lot of lifetime customer value superfans in our sales funnel. Okay. So I would say as Ted's walking me through his story, he had a really solid top of sales funnel in place. He'd worked hard to get those pieces lined up using the stuff in for our marketing school. So let me just briefly, like, give you some context here. I'm going to keep it a little bit general, but he was using social media to showcase his farm story and tease his products. So people that would go there and find out about him kind of began to get a sense of what it is that he even did and what he sold. He had developed a lead magnet. It was casserole recipes that used his meat. And he had actually experimented the positioning of that in a couple of different ways. So he had promoted it on social media. He'd even run ads to that lead magnet. But he'd also run Facebook ads right to his website, the products. And he actually found that his lead magnet performed better sitting on his website. When people went to his website through the ad and then discovered his casserole recipes, they would download them more that way than just seeing the ad. That was kind of an interesting little aside. So he had Facebook ads that he was investing in to get more eyeballs on his website. And then people would be subscribing and getting onto his email list. Okay. Once they opted in, he. I think he even told me that he had a short nurture email sequence, a series of emails or welcome emails that dripped out that pitched his first offer to his store. And in that email, there was a coupon code. Local line has the ability, as part of their standard package, I think, to use coupon codes. And so he could actually issue that coupon code in that email that encouraged them to go and take his first offer and then go to the store. And that was working really well, like he was getting sales from that. So he's really excited about that, and that's kind of where he was at. And he said, okay, now what, Corinna? Help me figure out my next step. And as we parsed things out, I began to sense that what he was really hoping would happen next is, well, how can I get these people to come again? How can I have them want to buy from me a second time and build that habit? So we had a really good conversation about some of the things that he needed to be thinking about at this point. I applauded him and said, great, you've got this awesome top of funnel thing. You have no problem. You have a system, let me put it that way. You have a system in place to be able to dial up the number of new customers that come into your funnel. But here's where the opportunity was and here's kind of what I counseled him. And this is what I want to talk about with all of you today. How do we get people to buy again and spend more? And that is a whole nother type of system that you can create within your sales funnel. The problem here is that Ted had, first of all, his average order value. I think it was around 35 to $40. And with a meat product, I personally feel like that isn't the highest it could be. That would be a pretty good aov. If you were just selling vegetables, maybe it could go a little bit higher. But for a meat producer, I think you could definitely get the AO the average order value per order to be higher, to coach it, coax it a little bit higher. And there's lots of different ways that you can do that, which we'll hopefully cover in today's episode. So that was kind of one of the issues I brought up. I'm like, hey, there's an opportunity here for you to try and get your customers to spend more on their transaction, on their first transaction, but also on their second. But also, he wasn't tracking yet how frequently customers were purchasing. He didn't have kind of that system in place. And there was definitely no system in place to encourage the next purchase. It was kind of up to him to decide. Okay, well, am I just going to send a weekly email out every week to whoever's on my list and just hope that they buy? Or will I try to create a intentional onboarding process in the first four weeks after someone buys to move them into certain directions based on their initial buying choices and what interest they have shown in my products based on where they've kind of entered the funnel, the door they came through, the product they came through. Right. So we spend the majority of our coaching call talking through the concept of how to build out an ascension ladder. And that's what I want to talk about with you guys today. The ascension ladder is part of the sales funnel framework. It is one of the steps, one of the eight steps in the funnel. And it is actually known as the profit maximizer stage. In your sales funnel. It's the place where you make your profits. The initial purchase. Oftentimes you're operating at like a break even point or maybe you Make a little bit of profit, but you're willing to do that. Sometimes you even take a loss, but you're willing to do that on the first purchase. If you know you have a strong post purchase ascension ladder, you have a strong system for getting people to come back and keep buying. You're willing to take a little bit of a loss or break even because you know you're going to make so much money on the back end that it's okay. And your data shows it right. You look can actually look at the data of how often a customer buys in a typical year, how much they spend, and you see this huge number and you're like, well yeah, I can totally spend $40 in discounts on the front end or I can spend this much on a Facebook ad to acquire this customer into my leads list because I see how much I actually make on the other side. So the ascension ladder concept is building out that you're guiding customers up a ladder of products towards bigger purchases, higher priced products, more frequent purchases. It's how do I get my customer to increase their average order value and how do I get them to buy more frequently so that their lifetime customer value or their customer value in one year increases? Okay, that's where you're making your money on the repeat purchases or the new purchases where they test out other products and they start wanting those as well and they just turn into a super buyer. Okay, There needs to be a system in your business for how to coach people into your ascension ladder so that you can recommend, here's what you should buy next. So for me, when I was listening to Ted, this was kind of the opportunity that I saw for him, that he had plenty of products. He had meat bundles, he had all kinds of meat products by the cut. He had even beef shares for people who are willing to take that leap and graduate to the next level. But he had no automation to move buyers along the path. He didn't have a recommended buy this next or a success path, right to say, here's where I think you should go based on where they had started. So that was kind of the goal that I gave him. Like, let's create a process that gets first time buyers to purchase again, to purchase more frequently, to kind of graduate to that next level of client and create a buying habit so that they'll just want you to be their primary meat producer. And so I gave him a couple of different action steps to try and move this along. Just real briefly, I'll tell you what they are, but we're Going to go into more detail in a second about those, but I told him, hey, I think you, the opportunity here is for you to tag your buyers by product purchase. So as they purchase in local line, let's, you know, set up some automations so that they get tagged as somebody who purchased a pork bundle or someone who purchased some, some beef broth or whatever. And then the other opportunity was to create an automation of emails or it could be SMS text, I guess too, to target future offers to them based on what they had already purchased and, you know, on your best guess and on your knowledge, what you think would be the next best recommendation for them. Okay, so that's kind of what I said. Here's your opportunity and if you can get this right, you're going to make buttloads of money. So for the rest of the podcast, I want to talk through, you know, what are some ways that we build this system for repeat buying and AOV growth. And I have kind of five different ways that I mapped out here. This was all sort of after the fact, after I got off that call, I'm like, oh, if I could go back and go through this again with Ted, what would I say? So, Ted, this is kind of out, you know, a podcast for you. You're going to hear a lot of the same stuff, but there might be some new stuff. So if I could go back again and redo this coaching call, here's some more things I would say. But let's start out with like number one, the number first way to build a system for repeat buying and AOV growth is to send an immediate second offer post purchase. So you've got someone on your list, you issued them an offer, they bought, they got a confirmation email, and immediately you need to send them a second offer after that purchase. This could be issued via email. That's kind of my first thought because in most cases people had to enter an email address to place an order in your online store. Or if they're buying with a credit card on Square at your farmer's market, a lot of times they have to enter their email address to get that receipt sent to them. So you can set up an automation so that an email goes out after that confirmation email and it happens immediately after purchase or maybe within a couple hours, and it says thank you for your purchase and it issues a special offer to buy again the next week. This is a lot like when I go to Kohl's, which is a department store here in Ohio, and I buy sweatpants for my boys. Feel like I'm always buying them sweatpants. They're growing so fast. And I get to the check out to the cashier, and they run it through. I pay, and then they hand me this Kohl's Cash, right? And it's this physical piece of paper, a little coupon. And it says, you know, you can spend up to $10 or get. Get up to $10 or $20 in free Kohl's Cash, but it never is accessible that day. Like, I have to. There's a delay. There's a few days before I can actually come back and redeem it, or they'll issue me another coupon. But that coupon isn't good until next week's promotion. And so it kind of makes me think, oh, well, I have to. In order to get this money off, I'd have to come back again. It's a little bit like that, but you need to give them another offer, another compelling offer to come back the next time and purchase again. Now, why does this work? New customers are still really excited about your product, especially in the case of, like, farm businesses like this. I think in meat producers, when they find you and they try out, they take home that bacon they bought, and they're like, oh, this was so good. And they're really excited about it. And you want to strike while the iron is hot. You want to make sure they know you've got a lot of other really cool stuff in your store. Like, they may think about that in the moment while they're eating the bacon, but they're not gonna actually go and, like, shop for additional products while they're having their breakfast. You need to remind them that you're still there. You need to, like, tease them and poke them a few times after that purchase and be like, hey, remember, didn't you love that bacon with your eggs? Like, I got more stuff. And I've got this special offer to thank you for your purchase. I made this special offer just for you. It's like, you can't turn this down, because I only offer this one time, and here it is. And a person, when they see that a couple times, they're gonna be like, yeah, I want it. I want to take that. That's a really good deal. I'm gonna go for it. I want to try that new cut of meat or whatever. Okay? So it can be as simple as, like, hey, thanks for your order. Here's a special 20% off your next order if you purchase within the next seven days. Use coupon code 20XYZ. And then give them the link to the store. Right? So that's kind of tip number one. Send a second offer to someone who just purchased. Send it immediately within. It could be tucked into the confirmation email even. Although I think that tends to get lost. I think it should be its own special email that drops within an hour or two after that first purchase that says, here's your chance to order again. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. All right, farmer, let me ask you something. Is marketing your farm something you actually enjoy or does it feel like a constant struggle? If you are like most farmers that I talk to, you are wearing all the hats and marketing always seems to slip through the cracks. Can I get an amen? That's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School. It's an online membership designed to help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually works. Inside, you'll get bite sized, step by step projects that make marketing easier. Each month you pick what to work on, like writing better sales emails or improving your website copy, or setting up your online store. And I walk you through exactly how you should be doing it. And you're not doing this alone. Every month we have a live Zoom meetup where you can ask me questions, meet other members of Farm Marketing School, get coaching and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor in your back pocket. This isn't some long, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days. So you're making steady progress without it taking over your life. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings in steady sales, come join Farm Marketing School today. Sign up for your first month and see what a difference it makes. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms to get started. And now back to the show. Now, the second tip that I would offer here for how to build a system for repeat buying is to create a product recommendation sequence. I was trying to think of how to word that this is where, based on what people have already purchased, you can take them down a custom buying path. A recommended next purchase path. Now, you won't be able to truly make this custom right unless you have some really fancy software. But you can look at your patterns in your customers and you can say, well, people who typically start with the bacon, or most of my customers typically start with bacon, or most of my customers start with ground beef, or most of my customers start with just the basic chicken breasts. And then you can look at well, how do most of those customers who start there then progress? What do they buy next? You can look at the patterns and from there build out a recommended product ladder for each of those gateways and channel people through them based on what they first purchased. This is a little bit ninja like this requires setting up some email sequences inside of your email provider and then creating some automations so that they fire when a particular product is purchased. But it is definitely possible. So how does this work? First of all, you have to tag purchases. You have to track which products someone buys. And I know with local line this can be done using a tool called Zapier. If you don't know what Zapier is, you need to know about this tool. It's a platform that connects your favorite apps and software and it allows them to talk to each other and automate repetitive tasks. So like for example, Ted could set up a zap that automatically adds a new customer purchasing his chicken breast from Localline. He could tag create a zap with his email provider, for example Mailchimp, or in my case it would be Kit.com and he could say when somebody buys the chicken share or chicken breast, tag them with a tag that says purchased chicken share or purchased chicken breast. And that makes it easy to trigger a targeted follow up email or offer that's going to match their purchase history. So instead of manually tracking orders and sending emails, Zapier does the work behind the scenes so that you can focus on, you know, running your farm. So it's kind of like having an extra farm hand. It's dedicated to just managing your customer relationships. I really love using that tool. So you could create a zap that's like new purchase in local line purchase chicken bundle add tag in email service provider of purchase chicken bundle. Okay, that would be the zap that you would set up. So this tip that I'm sharing requires that number one, you have to set up these automations to tag people. But then you can build an automation that recommends a complimentary or higher value product. And this is actually pretty simple to do. You have to go in and pre write the emails, call them automations and then just set the rule in your email service provider that says when this tag purchase chicken bundle is added, send this email after two hours and it will automatically send it to everyone whoever purchases. Right. If you've got that zap setup. So for example, if they buy a meat bundle, you could send an email that issues a second offer with a coupon code that encourages them to buy a beef share within the next 30 days at such and such price. Here's the coupon code. Are you tracking? Okay, so that's kind of the second option for you. The second tip, the third one is to offer exclusive VIP or loyalty incentives. This is another great way to get people to want to come back or increase their average order value. Reward your repeat buyers. Create a culture of rewarding your repeat buyers. So this is where your your offer would include special perks to customers who buy three or more times. And you could make people aware early on in this process as you're sending out these automated emails or if you set it up through SMS texting, make them aware that there is a VIP class and that once you do xyz you are able to unlock VIP status. Maybe you even have a VIP class that costs money to get into. I know that I have, I'm a part of a pickleball membership and they're within the membership. I pay a monthly fee to access the membership trainings. But then within that there's a VIP level. If I wanted to pay even more per month, I would be able to access the pattern recognition library and a series of drills and webinars. And I haven't done that yet. But just knowing that there's a VIP level makes me want to try to get there. Right. And you could do that with your farm business too, where you can let them know if you want to be in the VIP club, which gets you a 5% discount on anything you purchase and access to special offers throughout the year that I only give to VIP people. You have to pay this amount per month or per year to be in that club. Like that could be an offer that you give to people. Right? So just making people aware that there is a VIP level or creating some kind of an incentive, like when you buy five times, you're going to get a free cup of coffee. Like how many of us have done that at our coffee shops, although usually it's 10 cups of coffee and then you get your free coffee. Right? The punch card system. So you could give a free product, you could invite people to a VIP customer group for a price, or you could offer exclusive early bird access to maybe a special high quality, limited product line. Those are all examples of things that you could issue in some of these early first steps. Once a person becomes a first time buyer to encourage them to want to keep buying. People want to take the next step if you show them the path of how to graduate through your products. And it's an enticing one. Your ideal Customer is going to want to graduate through them, I promise you. Like, I can't tell you how badly I want to be a 4.0 pickleball player right now. And I am like, I'm trying to do everything I can to prove that I belong in this group and that I'm going to get better and better and I want to do all the things. I'm like that type a girl that wants to graduate. Wait, I'll take that class and I'm going to do that and I'm going to do this. Just show me the path, show me the stones in the creek. And that's kind of what this step is getting at. Okay, number four, tip bundle and upsell higher value packages or create subscriptions. We want to increase the average order value, right? And one of the ways we can do this is to bundle products or actually take higher priced options and put them in front of our customers. So for example, you might say, if you loved our bacon, like if that's your gateway product and that's the first thing they purchased, you might have a follow up email that says, if you loved our bacon, now try our smoked brats. They're perfect for grilling. Grab a pack today. Taste the smoky goodness. Right? Bacon lovers are drawn to savory smoky flavor. So there's alignment there between sausages and brats. Or you could say, if you loved our bacon, try our smoked ham steaks for a quick, easy weeknight dinner. Again, I'm just thinking smoky, salty, well cured ham kind of appeals to the same taste buds that people who love bacon have. So we're, so we're looking for what, what are the products in our product ladder that have alignment with that first purchase? That would make sense. Like this is the obvious next step for you. If you liked my bacon, then you're gonna love my dry aged pork chops. Or you're going to love my pork belly, you're going to love my charcuterie sampler, right? So think through that lens. You could even offer like a bacon lovers bundle, which includes two to three of those options I just mentioned. Maybe that's the upsell offer and you could even give a discount for buying the full package, right? Just think through this lens like they just bought the bacon. So knowing what I know about people who like bacon and buy my bacon, what do they usually buy next? And you engineer that journey. You make the recommendations through this email sequence that drops over the course of several weeks and you just see what happens. Issue an offer seven days after the second offer you issue another offer for that has a different coupon code for a different type of product. And then the next week you try another one and you just see if you can get them to graduate through the products in that ascension ladder, or frankly jump over to another product ladder, maybe your chicken, or then over to your beef and get them to move into that too. Okay, number five, here's another tip for how to increase your average order value and just getting people to come back more frequently to buy. Test different offers to see what converts. This sounds kind of generic, but you have an offer library at your disposal, right? You need to experiment. You need to get in the sandbox and play with all the different permutations and variations of offers that are out there in the big wide world. Apply them to your product line and see what works. Try discounts, try using bonuses, try using free gifts, try using limited time promos. Just see what stimulates the next purchase. And yes, this is, this is a little tedious. This is going to take time. You're going to have some things that don't work as well. That's all part of the process. I can't tell you which ones are going to work for you. It's going to be different for every farm. So maybe you try the free gift with a purchase offer. Okay, Everyone loves a bonus. You could just add a free product if they hit the minimum order amount and that could nudge the customer to spend more to qualify for that reward. So like, hey, spend $50 and get a free package of our signature smoked brats with that order. So looking for a small, high value item you could offer as a bonus and then figure out what is that, that threshold that I want them to hit before I'm ready to release this bonus to them. That's where you can get that AOV to go higher. So you know, Ted's average order value I think was around 40 bucks. And I'm like, man, I know that is not the Goldilocks zone. Like, I know you can get that to go higher. I don't know what it is for meat, but I know it can go higher than 40, so don't feel limited there. I'm like, why don't you try to, you know, make it 50? Maybe it could be 60. Like, what could you do to get people to try to spend 50? So if you had an offer that said spend $50 to get this free smoked brats, I guarantee you more people are going to spend $50. And now you've just increased your AOV and you're turning this pattern, you're creating this habit. Now I spend $50. It feels more comfortable to a customer to spend $50 with you. They do it a few times in a row and the world doesn't blow up, right? And they're like, oh, I still had enough money to do this again the next week. And it turns into a pattern. Okay, so that could be one offer you might try. You might also try like a flash sale, which is typically a promotion that has a lot of urgency, right? These last chance kind of offers, anytime you create a sense of urgency that will encourage immediate action. So for example, like we're having a flash sale, get 15% off all beef bundles, but only if you buy in the next 48 hours. Don't miss out. Right? So Ted could run a 48 flash, 48 hour flash sale on a popular product or on a product he's trying to move and just see how many of his buyers re engage. Let it be an experiment. Make sure you test it, pay attention to the data, make note of it, and learn from it and then move on. You might decide didn't go so well. So then maybe try it one more time, see if it doesn't go so well again. And if it doesn't, then don't do it again and try a different offer. Okay. One other offer I want to suggest here is the buy more, save more, the tiered discount strategy. This one works really well. This is where you offer tiered pricing incentives that encourage customers to increase their order size if they want to unlock higher savings. So I know you've seen this, like, buy one bundle and save 5%, buy two and get 10% off, buy three, get 15% off. Or sometimes you want to do like a dollar amount. In that case, you'd probably say, buy one bundle and save, save $5. Let's buy two bundles and save $15. Whatever, right? Like, you have to figure out what those numbers are, but that's an example of what that looks like. And just, you know, try a tiered offer like that. See if it makes customers increase their order size. See if more people end up buying three and that increases the the AOV for you. Okay, so that's just a few examples. You know, bottom line is you have to find what is that perfect next sale offer, next promotion offer, and just see what gets most people to buy for the second time. You're going to have a few different ones that work really well for some of your various products. Now, there are lots of offers to choose from as you play around in the offer sandbox. In fact, I have an entire project inside of our marketing school that is called the Build a better offer challenge. And it encourages you to spend a whole month, four different weeks playing around actually testing out some of the offers with live customers to see how some of these work in your business and to just pay attention to the data and make notes. But I also have a guide that I want to share with you because some of you might be sitting there thinking, corinna, this is great, but what kinds of offers are there? You just gave me three, but I don't know what they are. I have no idea. I don't have any background in marketing and so I've got you covered. I actually put together a resource that I offer inside of our marketing school as part of that project. It's called 35 Ways to Build an Offer. And this is like a list I've compiled of tried and true offer formulas that are used by all kinds of industries, not just farming. Right? They, they work in farming too. They boost your sales, they'll increase your retention, they'll increase your aov. You're going to get all kinds of ideas in there, like the free bonus gift, the tier discount, the VIP early access offer. There's 35 of them. So if you're sitting here thinking, I don't know what they are, there's no excuse. Get this free guide and you'll have them all. And then you can stare at it from week to week and say, I'm going to try this formula to try and get more people to come back for the second purchase. Okay, you can totally adapt this to your farm business. It's a great way to brainstorm new ideas so you can grab that free copy@mydigitalfarmer.com offer. Super easy to remember. Okay, just go subscribe to my email list. It'll come to you as a PDF guide. Download it and you're welcome. It's really, really good. Okay, so let me just wrap up by reviewing this list of 5 ways that you can build a system for encouraging repeat buying. Number one, we talked about sending an immediate second offer post purchase through email or sms, whatever you want, but it should come within the first two hours. Number two, create a product review recommendation email sequence. Or it could be done over sms, but based on how they came into your sales funnel, what product or product line or category of product they started with, what would be your next recommended project. And that may involve having to set up a automation with Zapier where you can tag People automatically based on what they purchase in your store, pre writing some of these emails in advance and then setting up rules or automations in your email service provider so that those emails drip out or trigger when those tags get added automatically. Okay, Number three, to offer exclusive VIP or loyalty incentives. We talked about that at length. Lots of different ideas. Number four, to bundle and upsell higher value packages or to create subscriptions. If they're ordering a package of bone broth, you could send them a suggestion like, hey, did you like the bone broth? And you probably use this a lot on a weekly basis. Why don't you get a subscription and you can never run out of it again. Right. So that's essentially functioning as an upsell based on their initial behavior of that first purchase. And then number five, test different offers, learn what the different offer formulas are. Become aware of them. I have that free guide, mydigitalfarmer.com offer that you can get to see them all and then just test them and see which one actually converts. Okay, now before I let you go, I want to bring up one more topic that came up when I was talking with Ted on our coaching call. And I have a feeling that this is coming up for some of you who are listening. It's an objection that goes something like this. Well, I don't want to offer discounts all the time or I'll train my customer never to buy at full price. Are any of you raising your hand right now? I've heard that too. There is some truth to that. So let's just have that opinion in the room. Let's walk around it. But I want us to also consider another perspective. And you're going to need to weigh the pros and cons. But I think both of these mindsets have some truth to them. First of all, we're talking about the initial stages of getting a brand new customer into our sales funnel and turning them into a lifetime buyer. And this is a really unique situation because we want to build buying habits. This should be a focus of ours with our new brand new clients, new buyers, they're not just, you know, buying something. We're not just making a sale. We are training them to come back and we need to train them. It doesn't just happen because you have amazing stuff. There does need to be a little bit of training. Just like I have to train my dog to have good dog behavior. Right? And so offering a small incentive on the next few, few transactions will create that momentum. Does that mean that we offer these incentives and discounts Every single offer in the future? No, but in the first few transactions, when we're coaxing them, coaching them, loving on them, building trust, there is some value to doing this kind of thing. Okay. The second element I want you to think about here is lifetime customer value matters more than just one sale. If you can look at your data, go into your online platform and just run a report and find out how much does a typical customer spend with you in one year? Do you know that number? Because you should. And once you see that number, you can kind of guesstimate that most people who come into your sales funnel as brand new folks will probably, in time, eventually become that kind of customer who spends that amount of money with you every year. Of course, we're always trying to get that to go up, but the number is what it is. So based on what that number is, and let's just assume that customer is going to be with you for five, 10 years. So multiply that number by five to 10. That's a lot of money potentially on the table. Now, given that number, I want you to look at that objection that you're having of, well, I was told not to offer discounts or I'll train my customer never to buy a full price. Do you see how it just looks a little different, doesn't it? Like, I'm willing to offer discounts and incentives that cost me something for the first three to four times to train the behavior. Especially if my data is showing me that I make so much more money on the back end, I'm willing to take this loss. This is what's called the cost to acquire a customer. Customer acquisition cost is a very real thing, and that's why you need to know the metrics. You'll feel much more comfortable spending money on a Facebook ad like Ted was doing, and spending money on these initial offers to get people locked in. If you know that at the end of the day, your average customer is with you for seven to eight years spending, I don't know, depending on what kind of business you are, like $1,500, two grand a year with you, $1,000 even a year. If you know the numbers, then you're like, heck, yeah, I'm willing to spend $40 on the front end in incentives to get them to come in. I'd say yes to that every day. Do you just see how that puts a different twist on it? Now? If you don't know your numbers, then I would be a little nervous about, well, how often do I do this? Right? And you'll be able to see just how far you can push that before you no longer feel good about your profit. Okay. And then just I want to remind you too that discounting is not your only tool. There are all kinds of other ways you can build incentives. You could have a bonus of some sort. It could be exclusive access to an event or loyalty rewards. These are all things that still create urgency, that don't devalue your product. So I wanted to just bring that up because I, I know this is a thing. It comes up for me too sometimes. Okay. But I want to just reframe it for you that it's about lifetime customer value, not about the moment that you're making in that sale. Now if you are a business that lives in a tourism zone and your customers really only shop with you like once or twice and then you never see them again, then yeah, that's a different story. Then you're, you're like, I don't know if I want to have discounts because there is no, you know, money on the back end. There is no opportunity to ascend my people through a ladder of products. They don't come back again. And that is a pickle, my friends. Then you are constantly churning through new customers and the only lever you have to pull to increase your revenue is to increase your price or increase your customer numbers. Right? You don't have, well, maybe the aov. You could maybe pull the AOV lever and try to create incentives to get people to buy more in that moment that one time they buy. But you don't have the frequency lever to pull. Okay, so big takeaway from today's episode is do you have a post purchase sales system in place? It's important to have all the other pieces in the sales funnel. That's what farm marketing school is for, to show you what those are. But one of those steps in the funnel is also the ascension ladder. And we need to have a system, an automated system ideally that tracks people and moves people through purchase channels and recommendations. This is where you make your money. They don't call it the profit maximizer phase for no reason. Okay? A funnel that only gets first time buyers isn't going to be enough for you. You need a follow up strategy that's going to build buying habits. It's going to increase your AOV and grow your customer loyalty. Pull that frequency lever as hard as you can. Okay, so your homework from today's lesson is to look at your sales process right now. And I want you to start with one new automation. Just pick One, do something simple, something that you feel really confident about, and test a second sale pitch or offer this week using that product, on that product. Maybe it's just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this thing out that Corinne is talking about, set up one email. ChatGPT is gonna help me write it and I'm gonna have it in my email service provider. I'm gonna set up the tag and just see how it goes. So if somebody buys this one product, that's gonna trigger, it's gonna have a coupon code in it. We're gonna see if anybody uses that coupon code. I'll be able to track it. We'll see how it works. How many people actually take that coupon code and go buy again? Okay, that's your homework now. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 306. If you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review. And another option is you could just share this actual link of the podcast episode with a farmer friend. It really does help with getting my message out to more people and helping other farmers become more profitable, more confident, frankly, just confident in how to sell. That's my huge mission. I just want to inspire people. So please leave me a rating review. If you want to get on my email list, remember, you can do so@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. I also have that offer freebie with a 35 ways to build an offer. You can get that@mydigitalfarmer.com offer and yeah, I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. You can go check me out there. I'd love to connect with you. Thank you so much for joining me today. Have a great week and remember, I believe in.