Corinna Bench (0:00)

Do you know who your VIP customers are? You know, the ones who come back again and again, tell their friends about you, and never question your price. What if you had a system in place to reward and grow that group of super fans on purpose? In today's episode, we're kicking off a two part series on how to create a VIP strategy for your farm business. Let's get started. Hey there, this is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product, you've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing. 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 319 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 get more confident in their marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. If you're new to the show, a big shout out to you. I'm so glad you're here checking it out and I hope you get a lot of value from this episode. This is going to be a good one because it's a two part series. We're talking about VIP customers and how to build a strategy for them. Now if you're pretty new to the marketing space, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to the first 10 episodes of this podcast because I designed them as an onboarding into the space. You can also get onto my email list that's going to help you a ton. That's free. Just go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and I'm going to send you an email like every four or five days for three months. I'm going to walk you through the jungle of farm marketing. I'm going to show you the key principles you need to know. I'm going to point you to the podcast that you need to listen to first. I'm going to give you some free resources and canva templates just to get you started. It's going to help you a lot so you can subscribe to that again@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. If managing orders, customers and inventory feels chaotic this season, it might be time for a better system. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs. Whether you're selling direct to consumer or managing wholesale buyers or running a csa. With tools like E commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder and pos, localline helps you simplify operations and grow your sales. In fact, farmers using localline increase their annual sales by 23% and boost their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is easy. No setup fees, no sales commissions, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free. No joke, so that you can get started without missing a beat. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline use that coupon code and you'll be on your way. Start selling smarter this season with localline. And now back to the show. Well, happy fourth of July weekend to all of my friends in the usa. I hope you're making lots of money this weekend selling watermelons or steaks or burgers and maybe you're going to have a chance to take a little bit of time off and enjoy the weekend. We just wrapped up a really fun month inside of forum marketing school where we did the social media challenge and this was a brand new project that that I put together live over the course of the first couple of weeks in July and I was basically teaching people what should you be posting on social media for your farm business. But not only that, I actually help you build a 30 day social media template that you can rinse and repeat from month to month. So you learn how to create the system so that social media doesn't take over your life all the time anymore. And you're strategic and intentional about what you should be posting and why and what kinds of repeat content you should be putting in there. What's your pillar content, your anchor content, how to set up the graphics and the the photo banks so that this is easier to do every week or every month however often you decide you want to schedule things. And I'm really proud of it. It's such a strong project now in the school. If you don't know what farm marketing school is, this is kind of my signature program and I have about 40 farmers in there right now and you can basically Go in, subscribe from month to month, you pay monthly, and then you get access to all of the workshops and classes that are in there. There's over 15 of them now. You just decide which marketing asset you need to focus on and learn about or build. And so there is obviously the. The social media one, but we have things about building your website's homepage. We have one about the email nurture sequence. We have one about just writing a better weekly email. We want to have one about how to create a better offer or learning the offer formulas that you can use to sell your abandoned cart. Email sequence, There are so many great things in there. So if you ever want help just building one thing and getting it done, the idea is that you go in and you work on it for 30 days and you're kind of in and then you're out. And if you decide you want to stay and do another project, you can. I mean, you can binge them all if you want, but it's just a really awesome program. And every few months I add another idea in there, another project, as I get energy for it. I think I'm going to drop the Instagram Stories challenge in there sometime this summer. So that's kind of my next idea that I'm percolating on to teach you how to do Instagram Stories really well. But anyway, I love my community there, so if you want to work more intentionally with me, that's the place to go. And that's@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS well, today we're going to hop into our topic of the day, which is VIPs, VIP customers. So have you ever walked into a Starbucks and noticed that some people don't even have to say their name? Maybe you're one of those people. They just walk up to the counter and the barista already knows their drink order. And they might even say something like, hey, James, your usual today? And the customer will smile or nod, and maybe they even talk about a little quick life update. And then within seconds, the customer gets their drink and they skip the awkward waiting and they just walk out the door feeling like a somebody. That right there, that's a VIP experience. And it wasn't because James had a platinum card or spent hundreds of dollars every week. It was because he was known and he was a regular, and Starbucks treated him like one. So VIPs aren't always flashy. I want to start out by saying that today, in fact, most of them are quietly loyal and they show up every week. They buy consistently they refer their friends and they trust your farm business without any fuss. But here's the thing that I think most business owners miss. You have VIPs right now, too, and you just might not be treating them that way yet. And so that's what today's episode is all about. We are going to be looking at why VIP customers are so valuable and how to start tracking them and what kind of simple system you can build to start rewarding them and retaining them on purpose. So this is just meant to be a brainstorm conversation. This is a space that I am beginning to dabble in more diligently. And that's why I wanted to bring it up, so that as we head into our busy season, you can start thinking about this and you can maybe start beta testing some different ways that you can identify VIP customers and take good care of them. Okay, so let's get started. First of all, let's talk about why VIPs matter. Why VIPs matter. So, first of all, I want to make sure you know that not all customers are created equal. Hopefully you have realized that your VIPs drive a larger percentage of your revenue. It's probably actually the whole 80, 20 Pareto principle, where 20, 20% of your customers are bringing you 80% of your revenue. It's these VIPs who are. Who are really pushing the engine, and they buy often. They refer other people to you. They are emotionally invested in your farm business. And most farmers don't have a plan to recognize or nurture them. We just maybe kind of sort of occasionally give them a free gift or, you know, we're nice to them, we have longer conversations with them, but it's kind of hit or miss. We don't really have a true system. And what if we had a system so that more of these people were all getting that same star treatment? Right. What could that possibly do to our business? So your goal is to identify who these people are, first of all, so that we're getting all of them and what behavior we want more of from them so that we can reward it. Because. Because, like I always say, what gets rewarded gets repeated. Let's all write that down. What gets rewarded gets repeated. I learned that a long time ago when I was a leader in the church. I heard that at a workshop. And I remember being, like, blown away by that. And I started enacting that principle as I recruited volunteers into my church program. And I would just train up my volunteers. I would treat them like a star. I would build them into a community. I would Take care of them. I would thank them. I would give them gifts. I. I made them feel like VIPs. You know what? I never had trouble recruiting people, and my retention rate was crazy. And everyone in the church was like, what are you doing? How are you finding all these people? And I was like, what gets rewarded gets repeated. And so this principle has followed me now into my business. So I just am really passionate about this. So we want to figure out how can we take care of these people who are VIPs. And I wanted to spend. Actually, we're going to spend two episodes talking about this because there's so much I could say that it would end up being a very long episode. And I need to go away to Chicago this weekend, so I cannot do a super long episode today. So we're going to knock this out, this first part out here in a smaller amount of time. Okay, so let's talk about what qualifies someone as a vip. And so I want us to reflect on this. Right now. You're probably wondering that, like, how do I even make that distinction? How do I decide that this customer is going to be a VIP and this one isn't? And so there's lots of ways you could do this. You get to decide this is business by your design. So there's no hard and fast rule here, but I'm going to give you some suggestions, and then I want you to do the work of brainstorming. Maybe you think of some other bullet points, other qualifications. You get to decide what's going to make your VIP be a vip. So, first of all, one thing you could could consider are who are your repeat loyal buyers? Who are the ones that are coming every single week? Or maybe you're the kind of product that if they buy from you twice a month, that's like signs that they're a loyal, repeat buyer, whatever that is for you. It may not be that they spend a ton of money every time, but maybe they're just coming every time, so their order frequency is high. Maybe it's who spends the most amount of money with you. If you're tracking that, who are the people in the top? I don't know, 5%? Or if you have 100 customers, maybe it's the top 10. Or anybody who's over a certain amount of money per month or per year. Maybe that's how you're deciding who buys across multiple product lines. Is that how you want to define vip? They're not just buying your pork, but they're buying your chicken and your Beef as well? I don't know. That's up to you. It could be who renews every year the same thing over and over again without your prompting. They're just like, all in. Who sends you new customers? I know that that's sometimes a huge thing that I value that they are just a referral engine for me. Maybe they don't buy a ton, but they're just bringing in new customers like crazy. So these are some of the things to think about is who qualifies. But maybe it's also who's engaging on social media, who's really strong in your private Facebook group for your csa, who's showing up as an influencer and giving ideas to your community, or being a cheerleader. That might be a behavior that's really valuable to you. I have a customer named Tanya who is a loyal volunteer. She, every summer, she's like, however you need help, let me know. And she'll. She just does it for free. Like, I take care of her, but she'll. She'll be like, I can come help hex dorters. I don't have anything I'm doing. And she'll come and spend like two or three hours doing that with me. And then she's like, oh, and I can show up the next day and actually pass them out at your site. She's not doing it to be compensated. Like, every time she does this, I just feel more and more indebted to her and I'm like, who is this woman? Who are people like this that just love on us and love our mission so much? Like, I take care of Tanya because she's amazing, right? So you might want to reward that kind of behavior. You get to decide how to define VIP. Is it, oh, they spend over $2,000 a year with me or oh, they buy X number of times per year or oh, they refer over 5 people 10 people per year with me or they have been a customer of mine for 10 plus years. However you want to define VIP, that is up to you. So that's kind of part one today is I want you to. As your homework, I want you to define what is a vip. And I'm actually going to give you a worksheet to help you do some of this work. So if you want to download that, that's kind of the freebie from today's episode, you'll be able to go to mydigitalfarmer.com VIPworksheet and you can fill this out. Use this to help you think through some of the Questions that I'm going to give you over the next two episodes. And this is going to help you flesh out what your VIP strategy might look like. Okay? So if you want that, just go to my Digital Farmer.com VIP worksheet and I'll put that link in the show notes as well. 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 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. Okay, now that we've talked about how to define a VIP customer, the next natural question is, well, what are you actually going to do for your VIPs? Because let's be real, if you're going to give someone special treatment, it helps to have a plan, right? What perks or privileges are you going to offer them that actually make them feel special and incentivize others to try and reach VIP status too? That's the thing. You're going to want to communicate either subtly or overtly that you have a VIP tier because that's going to cause people to want to aspire to it. But we'll talk more about that in the next step. Okay, so this is where the fun begins. I want you to think of this like A rewards tier or a loyalty club. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It really doesn't. You just need to ask yourself, what would feel like a real treat to someone who shops for me all the time? What kinds of early access bonuses or thank yous could I layer in? And most importantly, what kind of VIP treatment would delight your best customers and keep them coming back for more? So they're pulling that order frequency piece. Right? So in a minute, I'm going to give you a giant list of ideas broken down by farm type. I'm going to do like meat, veggies, flowers. But before we do that, here is the rule of thumb. This is the general rule of thumb. Your VIP perks should feel generous, exclusive and valuable, but they cannot feel burdensome for you to fulfill. That's really important. Okay. They have to fit the rhythm of your business too. So if you don't want to be offering a new bonus every week as part of the VIP level because it's going to stress you out, don't set up a VIP program that promises that. So this can first start out as something as simple as or as fancy as you want. Right? Just make it feel intentional. I just did a whole episode about starting things as a beta test. So you can decide to do this. Just dabble in it. Play in the sandbox with the VIP tier and start out really small. And then if you want to make it more complicated, you can begin to add layers onto it as you get excited about it. But I think this is something fun to explore. Okay, so let's walk through some ideas. Here are just some sample perks, a real quick list of categories you could think through. And then I'm going to go into like, specifics of what this could look like for a farm business. So early access to product launches. I just did a CSA chef's club and this was a four week beta test where we're trialing this frozen foods line. And I didn't offer that to the whole world. I only offered it to my kind of private group. Right. People that I knew would be more favorable to trying something out and having it flop. Right? So early access to product launches, especially beta tests. So surprise. Thank you. Gifts is a whole other category here. VIP only flash sales where you only give this coupon code or this offer to your VIPs free delivery. I know some of you are doing free delivery to everyone, but you could portion that out and only give it to people who are in the VIP status. It could be exclusive content or exclusive recipes that are only given to VIPs. It could be event invites, private events, private tours. Okay, that's just kind of off the top of my head as I was preparing for this episode. Let's just imagine you're a meat producer. I'll get a little more specific here. For those of you who are doing meat, this could look like first dibs. Access to limited edition cuts. I don't know what that means. I wrote down, like, marrow bones. I don't know. Steaks. What are things that people are just clamoring for? Things that you sell out for and you give access to VIPs first for those limited edition things? Maybe it's an invite to a butchering demo or a tasting event. Maybe it's a free pack of bacon or sausage after they spend X amount of money and you get to decide what that is. Maybe it's a VIP only text alert when your inventory gets restocked. Mm, I like that one. Or an annual steak sampler gift box as a thank you for being a vip. And let me tell you, once they get that for the first time and you label it as, hey, because you're a vip, I wanted to give you this steak sampler gift box. You know what? They are never going to leave VIP status because they're going to be like, oh, my God, that means I lose the VIP steak sample or gift box if I stop being vip. So they're going to keep going. Okay, I love that idea. So you would build the cost of that, by the way, into this whole VIP status thing so that you're not losing money here. I just want to put that out there. If you know your numbers, this is something you can easily do. Okay, what about if you're a flower farmer? What about, like, VIP bouquet subscriptions with extra stems? Or maybe you have some rare varieties of flowers that only they get. This could be a variety that you don't have a lot of and you just take care of your VIP people and that's the stuff they give or get. Or you give them the option to have that be in their bouquet if they get to decide what the bouhes look like. Custom arrangements that are available only to VIPs with. I don't know, I'm thinking like, heirloom dahlias, for instance. I'm not a flower farmer, so I don't know what these ideal flower parks could be, but I'm thinking a custom arrangement option would be super cool. A private flower you pick night with wine tasting. I don't know. Or maybe it's an exclusive flower workshop invite that only your VIPs get access to. Or a complimentary bouquet wrap upgrade like premium paper or a special ribbon. Or free delivery to a local event or office that you offer occasionally. Or a special event. Again, just brainstorming here, but trying to get you to think outside the box. You don't have to offer these things to all your clients. You could only offer them to your VIPs. And that tier now becomes more valuable and more people want to enter into that tier. And maybe it costs more to enter into that tier. That depends on how you decide to set up your VIP level. Right? Okay, what about if you're a vegetable grower or a CSA farmer? Here's a few ideas. What if you had an exclusive bonus item in your box like microgreens or a garlic braid or some kind of really cool fruit? I'm thinking of my pawpaw trees, for instance. And you only give that to people who are in the VIP class. It could be a private tour. It could be a private dinner with you on the farm or a tasting on the farm. You only offer that once or two times a year if your VIP group is small enough. You know, having a group of 14 to 15 people for one tasting, that's. That's really not a ton of money out of your pocket. Or maybe they even still have to pay, but it's at a much reduced rate. And now you're spending one on one time with your best clients and you're building that connection even more. And they're going to be even more loyal to you because they feel like you're making them feel special. Oh, yeah, that's a win. All over the, all over the place. You could do a farmstand Fast Pass I was thinking about. This was one of my favorites as I was brainstorming, because whenever I go, we have this Cedar Point, which is this huge roller coaster park out here in Ohio. And you, you buy almost. You just have to buy the Fast Pass or you're going to stand in line forever trying to wait to go on these rides. And I've always wondered, how can we use the Fast pass concept in a farm stand? So if you're one of those places where there's a huge line for your agritourism or even just a stand in line to get stuff like what would that look like to flash your fast. Your fast pass, or to have a place where the Fast Pass line is here and they don't have to stand in the line to get your. I don't Know your donuts that everyone loves, they get to jump ahead or their stuff is pre bagged and they can just skip the line. Okay. And then just in general, like VIP perks just for general farm business stuff. Like a VIP email segment with extra deals and I don't know, first looks at things or access to limited runs of value added products. Maybe you've got dried herbs or bone broth or pickles and your VIP folks get first dibs on it. Or maybe it's a free birthday gift or a free birthday coupon perk and you only do that for your VIPs. You know what their birthdays are and you take good care of them on their birthday. Or you have a bring a friend bogo deal. Buy one, get one deal that's only limited to your VIPs. So in farm marketing school, there's an entire class, an entire project all about build a better offer where you just learn the offer formulas and you could take one of those offers and instead of, you know, learning the offer formula for all your customers, you could just say, I'm going to use that offer formula only for my VIPs. Right. You could splinter it off. Do you see how this works? So this is just like a beginner's like list. Beginners starting point of, of what could a VIP program even look like? What are the perks? What are the benefits? Again, you get to decide and I want to encourage you to take some time to brainstorm what one or two or three of your perks could be and just beta test it for this season. Okay, so you've heard all these ideas. Just think about what could 3 to 5 perks look like and how could it feel like a no brainer for you? Things that your customers would love but that you could deliver easily and just start somewhere. You can always change it, right? Beta tests, that's what they're like. You just put something out there and you go with it and you decide, I'm only going to do this kind of a VIP tier for three months, see if I like it and then next year you could try something different. Now if you want help thinking through this, remember I have this worksheet that I've created for you. So to help you brainstorm and map out your strategy and you can grab that@mydigitalfarmer.com VIPworksheet I'll put the link in the show notes too and download that, print it out, work through these first two sections and then next week we're going to finish off this VIP strategy series with part two and I'm going to dig into how to structure the VIP system, how to track the VIP behavior, and then what? What do you do if someone falls out of VIP status? How do you communicate with your VIPs? How do you even just make it all public facing so people know that there is a VIP structure and to do it in a way so that people don't feel like you're being snooty about it. Right. You want people to aspire and want to be in vip, but you don't want it to feel like it's the popular club. And that's kind of a fun dance and a line you have to walk. So we'll talk through all of those questions that come up. You don't want to miss it. So make sure you come back to next week's episode. But for now I'm going to pause and just put a pin in this now. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 319 if you like today's episode, send it to a farmer so they can discover the My Digital Farmer podcast. Or please leave me a rating or a review because that also helps more people find out about the show. You can do so by going to Apple Podcasts and then just scroll down to the different episodes. At the bottom you'll see a place where you can leave me the stars or leave me a little comment. I would love to see that. Now don't forget, if you want to get onto my email list to get some more farm marketing tips and strategies, I've got some free stuff to send your way. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe check me out on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I love to show up in stories with a daily tip. Usually do that three to four times a week and I'd love to connect with you there. All right, that's all I have today. Thank you so much for joining me. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Have a good one. Bye Bye. Sa.