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What if I told you that your best marketing channel is the customers you already have? And if you can activate them and get them to start talking about you, you'll attract more people who are just like them. In today's episode, we're going to walk through what referral marketing is and how to actually set up a simple system that runs quietly in the background of your business. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Foreign welcome to episode 337 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 farm business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my binge listeners, super fans, glad you're here and if you're new to the show, thank you for trying it out. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and if you're new to the marketing space, I encourage you to go check out some of my earlier episodes. The very first 10 I designed to be a marketing on ramp into this space so you could kind of learn the lingo. Another place to go is to get onto my email list because when you do, I'm going to give you something free. It's basically a free training in all the stuff you need to know to be a good marketer that drips out to you over email. Maybe every four days you'll get a new tip or a new principle. It's really good. That goes on for like three months. It's totally free. You can learn it at your own pace. So you can get that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. If managing orders, customers and inventory feels chaotic this season, it might be time for a better system. Local Line 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. All right, welcome back, Digital Farmer Nation. Hope your fall is turning into a profitable one, that you're having some time to rest, that you're looking forward to the finish line, if you have a finish line. We have a finish line coming up at the end of October and things really calm down for us. So by the time you get this podcast, we will be very close to finishing our csa. And I'm excited. We're going to plan a trip, Kurt and I, to get away for a weekend, probably fly somewhere warm and just celebrate today. This is going to be a good episode. I haven't actually talked about this topic at all in the 336 episodes prior to this one. We're going to talk about how to build a simple referral engine for your farm. This is a system that turns your current happy customers into your very best marketing team. I've been noticing something lately in farm marketing school, when I get on my one to one calls with farmers or when we have our monthly Zoom meetup, a lot of beginning farmers especially are asking the same question. How do I find my first customers? How do I find more of them? So they're showing up at the farmer's market, they're posting on social media, they're not getting a ton of traction yet, which is kind of normal at the beginning of your career. But what I keep reminding them is that the best marketing channel you have, especially in the early stages, is the customers that you already have. And so if you can activate them and get them to start talking about you, you will attract more people who are just like them. And these are the customers that end up staying loyal. They stick with you, they become brand promoters in fact, one of the stages of the customer value journey, this is the list of steps that we coach our prospects through to turn into superfans. One of those steps is to become a brand promoter. It's the very last step in the journey. This is the goal to get our customers to become the brand promoter. And how do you do that? Well, I mean, like every other stage in the customer value journey, we build a system in order to encourage people to become promoter. So today I want to walk you through what referral marketing is and why it works, why it's so powerful. And I actually want to help you set up a simple system that's going to be able to run in the background of your business on autopilot. It doesn't have to be complicated. There's just a few steps you have to set in place. And this is one of the things you can do early on and play around with and test. This is going to bring you new, high quality customers every single season. And it's going to happen on autopilot. So if you're interested in this concept, please stay tuned. Make it all the way to the end. The show notes for today's episode can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 337. So any kind of freebies that I give away, you can go there and find the links for them. Okay, so let's start out with just a basic definition of what referral marketing is. This is a little bit different than affiliate marketing. They're kind of related. But referral marketing is simply the process of turning a happy customer into a brand ambassador. Okay. When somebody loves your farm and your products so much that they can't help talking about it with someone else. And it works because it's built on trust. So when a friend recommends something to you, you listen, right? It's social proof. It's someone you believe and trust, you give it more credence. In fact, studies show that word of mouth recommendations are the single most powerful marketing driver of all time. Period. That's. That's a big deal. So let's take a quick look at how this idea shows up in other industries. Because I think when I point them out, you'll be like, oh, yeah, that's right. It works in other places. So it'll work for your business too. The tech world is especially well known for this. They figured this out a long time ago. And you will start to see this now that I've pointed it out, especially in the tech space. Dropbox, do you remember them? They when they got started, they kind of exploded by giving users free extra storage for every friend they referred to their business. So that was their offer, and it caused the person to want to talk about it with someone. Uber. How many of you have used Uber? Raising my hand here. Uber gave Uber gave both riders a free ride. When you got someone new to sign up, how's about that? That's a pretty great offer to help get the word out. And I remember the first time that I tried Uber, I was, like, nervous. I'm getting into some random person's car from that I haven't vetted at all. And I'm going to trust that they're going to take me to my destination, you know, as a single woman. Well, I wasn't single, but I was by myself as a woman. Right. Is that safe? And I remember it was a little scary the first time I did it. And then I'm like, wow, this is so easy. So I can see how having a friend who's tried Uber talk about it and say, no, this is really. It's really fine. It works. How that would maybe be the thing that it would. I would require in order to move forward and try for the first time. And then more recently, I think I shared this. I know I shared this. In a past episode, I got an email from functionhealth.com which is a membership I joined this year, and they offered me a 300 gift credit to share with someone that I cared about. But it expired in 100 hours. And if you haven't listened to that episode, go back. I'll put the link in the show notes. Um, but it was a. One of the best email offers I've ever run across. And it was so compelling. I was like, it stopped me in my tracks, and I was trying to think of people that I could share it with. Um, but it was a very urgent, a very generous, a very emotional email. And it made me stop and think, who do I want to share this with? This is so good. And. And that's what good referral marketing does. It creates a little bit of a pause for the customer, that moment where they think of someone specific that might love your product, and it gives them this impulse to want to try and get that person to try it too. And so this whole concept doesn't just work in the tech space. It works for businesses like ours in the farm space. In the early years of our csa, I remember we would ask our members to bring just one friend into the folder who might want to try the csa. Our goal was to double in size every year. And so in my head I thought, well, I could try to do this by schlepping myself around to every community event I can think of and having coffee talk, coffee chats at coffee houses and talking with the Lions Club and all of that. Right. Which I did. I definitely worked that angle. But I got most of my members through my current customer base because I would ask them to host little open houses or tasting parties at their house. And I would say, hey, could you invite three people that you think would love this? And not everybody did that, but I had enough people do it and I. My conversion and my close rate was pretty good because they would vet the clients kind of for me. And even early on in my business, I would, I would kind of challenge, I would challenge our customers like, hey, we're trying to grow our business. Be a part of this. If every single one of you brings us just one client, we will hit our goal. And so it was sort of this challenge like, can everybody successfully refer us to one person? And that was a very compelling pitch early on in our business when our customers really wanted us to succeed. And so it didn't feel like marketing when we were doing these open houses at people's homes. And it really felt like we were sharing something good because the customer was hosting. It was genuinely excited. So now let's talk about why referrals are such a big deal for farmers specifically. Referrals are powerful because customers trust word of mouth way more than any ad or any Facebook post. And you already have a loyal base that loves you. They just need permission and a reason to talk about you. Many of them are eager to do so. They just maybe don't have a hook around which they can rally or you haven't given them like a compelling offer to talk up, or they're just so caught up in the week to week ritual of getting your stuff that's, you know, they. That initial like wow factor that they have when they first discover you is past and it doesn't occur to them to kind of share. There is this initial excitement when a customer first joins your brand that you want to capitalize on. And once you've kind of passed that window, you can still get it, you can still lasso energy around it, but you have to remind that loyal base why they love you so much and coach them to leave that testimonial and to talk you up. It's also really cost effective because you don't have any ad spend. When you use referral marketing, you're just using the forces of timing and making sure you have a really great offer and having some intentionality behind it. And if you're using email, it's basically free. And that's what I'm going to coach you through today. So let me give you an example. Imagine a CSA member telling her friend, you have got to try this box. We had the most amazing cauliflower this week. And broccoli. I didn't know I liked broccoli. I didn't know broccoli could taste this way. And it has totally changed how we cook dinner now. And my kids know where their food's coming from. Okay, just imagine someone says that after they've tried out the box for the first few times and they just had a really good experience and they're like, wow, this was a good decision and they want to share it with someone. Okay? So that friend that they spoke to is 80% sold before you as the farmer ever even open your mouth or show them something on your website because she trusts her friend more than she trusts your landing page or sales page on your website. So referral marketing doesn't just bring in new customers. It brings in the right ones. Your customer vets them for you. And this is what I love. The kind who already believe in you because someone they trust vouched for you. So they're coming in with an expectation that they're going to like it. They're coming in with the quote, unquote right set of values, the kind of values that, you know, customers who like your product usually have. Because our customers hang out with other people like themselves in most cases, and so they know the people who are going to to like your product. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the psychology behind a strong referral offer. Because this is really important if you're going to ask customers to refer you. The offer itself needs to have some power behind it. And this is where I think businesses make a critical mistake when they're trying to get into referral marketing. They don't realize how important it is to actually build a good offer for the referral offer. And there are five ingredients, I think, that make a referral offer specifically irresistible. We've talked about irresistible offers in other episodes. You're going to see some of the same things talked about here. But let's just review it because it's important, okay? As you're trying to think about what is my, my first time offer for, you know, this person, you want to make it generous. So we don't just ask people to share our product. Hey, talk about my product with people. We want to reward them. We want to give them something that feels valuable to them. So, you know, a classic example is like, hey, refer a friend to our CSA and you'll get $25 off your next vegetable box. Or you'll get $25 in store credit and so will your friend. Right. That would be an example of a generous offer, perhaps. Or share this link. Your friend gets free delivery on their first order, and you'll get a surprise gift from the farm. That's another example of an offer. Okay, so, yes, it's going to cost you something on the front end. That free delivery has a cost, and so does that surprise gift. Add that up, there's a dollar figure there. But I want you to remember that if you are tracking your numbers and you can see the results of this referral campaign, like, you'll be able to tell after you've tested it for a while how many of these people end up sticking with you and how much they end up spending in a typical year. And you'll be able to kind of look at that cost, or, excuse me, the. The revenue per customer in one year, the lifetime customer value or the average customer value, and compare it against the cost of the bait to get them in, and you will see that it's totally worth doing. And if it isn't, if the numbers are not lining up, well, then you just have to change your offer. This is how you're going to get over that initial fear of, like, giving away free product. You do have to look at your numbers. But making that initial offer generous, it has to be irresistible. It has to be something like when I read that email from Function Health and they were like 300 off a 500 membership, I was like, wow, I wish someone had told me about this before I joined. I would have totally taken it. Right. That's over 50 off. And I wanted to share it with my. With my friends that I knew were in a similar situation. Okay. The second element of a great irresistible offer is that it adds urgency. So people need a reason to act now. Without a deadline, they're just going to procrastinate. So your offer could say something like, this weekend, only refer a friend before Sunday night and get a free xyz, a free bacon, a free dozen eggs, whatever. Or, hey, for the next 100 hours, like, you can put a timer on it. And now the stopwatch starts clicking, ticking, and it causes the person to say, oh, I need to forward this email. Now and they start making a decision about who would be a good person to reach out to with it. Number three, great offers have emotion triggers, emotions. So this isn't just about giving away discounts. You want to pay attention to the words that you're using. You want to use words that connect to generosity, to caring, to community. So I was thinking about a recent offer that we put together. We wanted to offer a tomato gleaning. Yeah, you pick tomato to our current CSA members. And then Kurt had this idea. He's like, babe, we have so much out there. What if we ask them to come and glean some of the tomatoes for like a local food bank or someone they know who's in need, who would that they can can a batch of tomatoes for and give it to them as a way of spreading good cheer and love. You know, how can we encourage that kind of behavior in our customers? And he's like, how about we. And he had this idea, what if we tell them that the first 30 pounds of your picking is, is on us, it's free if you're going to give it to someone in need. Right. And that it's just going to be honor system. We trust you. Realizing that some people might fleece us and say that they're going to give away the, that first 30 pounds of tomatoes to someone and then they don't. That's possible if that, you know, if they really need the tomatoes, great, let them have it. But that would be kind of tapping into the emotions. So we could say, hey, share the gift of farm fresh food with someone you love or hey, help us feed more families together and share the love with people who are feeling a little down and out. Let's be a community together. Forward this offer to a friend who would love good food. Right. So, and then talking about how you get your first 30, your first 30 pounds for free if you share it with someone. So yeah, make it emotional. Number four is to capitalize on the timing. And this is so important. Timing is everything. You want to ask for the referral right after a high value moment, like when a customer in your CSA picks up their first sampler box or they just posted about your vegetables on Instagram and tagged you and you can tell they're super excited. Or they reply to your email with oh my gosh, we love our box. And they give give you some kind of a cue that they are a satisfied customer. Okay. Their dopamine is high and that's your referral window and it does not last forever. I want you to Think about this. Do a quick analysis of your own business. Have you noticed that when you have new people come that are really excited about it and they're on fire for you, that can, that can last for a few weeks and then it starts to temper down and they sort of get used to it, right? So. So that's your window. When they're excited about it, when it feels easy for them, they're lit up. There's energy in the room. There's like a little dust devil whirlwind. Wherever they go around your brand, you want to capitalize on that. So the timing matters. And we'll talk about that in a minute. You want to release that offer to them when they're in that dopamine high, when they're in that window of energy. And then finally, an offer, an irresistible offer. When it comes to referral offers, you have to make it easy. Just make it ridiculously simple. Give them an email they can forward, a special referral link, or even a physical card that has a QR code on it so they can just pass it to a friend. The less friction there is, the higher your conversion. So if it's complicated for the new person to go and actually sign up for a product, right? Like, let's just say that you give them a referral card, it has a QR code, and that person gives it to a friend. Yay. They actually succeeded in doing that. Now the friend takes that QR code, goes to the website, and then when they go there to that landing page, it's really complicated. And it's not easy and simple just to buy the first product you recommend. Like, you don't even necessarily tell them on that page what's the first thing they should buy. And it's confusing at that point. Then they're going to abandon ship, right? So you need to think about all stages. Where is the friction showing up? Make it easy to buy that first time. 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. All right, how do referrals strengthen loyalty? I almost didn't include this, but I feel like it's important to mention again, here's a little mindset shift that you need to keep on your radar. When customers refer you, they're not just helping your business because they're helping you grow your customer base. That is definitely like, the thing we think of when we're like, oh, I should create a, a referral marketing engine in my business so that I can grow my customer base. Yes. But the other thing that's happening when you build a marketing referral system is that you are strengthening their own loyalty to your farm. You are strengthening the loyalty of the customer who is referring. So think about it. When you tell your friends about your favorite restaurant, you have just declared to the world, this is what I do. This is part of my identity. I eat here. This is something I love. And now that you've publicly committed and put that out there, it is much more difficult for you to backpedal and suddenly change your mind and be like, no, I don't like this brand anymore. This is actually a thing that has been studied. We want to remain consistent with our public commitments. Our brain is looking for ways to do that. And so this is why we want to encourage our customers to make a public commitment at some point in their journey with us, because that will lock them in to lifetime loyalty with you. And it's very, very rare then that a person will abandon you or stop buying from you once they've become a brand promoter and talked you up about something every now and then, it'll happen. Like, you'd have to really disappoint them and upset them for them to. To break ties. So we want to have them make a referral. We want to coach this moment for the sake of the initial referrer. Okay. And this is why referral is actually a formal stage in the customer value journey. This is the. The framework that I teach inside of farm marketing school. There are eight different stages in this journey. Each one is important as it comes coaches a person along through your brand as it turns them from someone who doesn't know anything about you into a brand promoter. And they have to go through each stage and you build a system. Guess what? There is literally a system you build in marketing for each one of the stages. And if you have a system for each one of the stages, people will move seamlessly through it on autopilot. It's pretty cool. And so that's why we build a referral marketing system at the very top. It's the last thing they go through to turn into this kind of brand promoter. Because we want them to say the words, I love my farm. You should try it here. Here's a card. You should go check them out. They're doing this special offer right now, right? When someone publicly endorses your brand, they have crossed into a whole new level of commitment. And so we want to make something in our brand that makes this happen, that triggers that moment for their sake. Okay, so how do you build a simple referral system step by step? That's what we're going to talk about next. I know this is the part you're excited about because we want to build this out. And so I call this the three step farm referral engine. It's not super complicated. We're going to try and keep it as simple as possible. But here's how it breaks down. Okay? Step number one is we want to identify the right moment. So ask yourself. As new people come into my business and they progress down the path that I coach them down, like, oh, they buy this gateway product and then they usually buy this, and then maybe this happens to them or they feel this or they think this, or they have this experience with my. With my product. Like all these different things that happen to them in the journey. Okay? Ask yourself, when are my customers the happiest? I want you to think about that right now. What have you noticed? When are they the happiest? Right after the first pickup of your product? Or is it right after they buy a specific product? Or is it when they post a photo in your private Facebook group and people support them and encourage them? Or when they email you and Say, oh my gosh, we loved your bacon. Okay, these are the potential referral moments, the moment, the trigger moment, and that is when you make your ask. So that's kind of step one is to brainstorm and try to identify, hey, when is the right moment? When am I going to at least test, beta test. As I build this, this is going to be my first go at it. And I'm going to say that this is the moment when I release the offer, when this feeling happens or this situation happens, or they buy this product or I get this cue. Okay, step two is to craft the offer and you can keep it really simple. It can be give $10, get $10, or refer a friend and you'll both get a farm Fresh treatment XYZ or share this email and your friend will get a free pint of ice cream with their first order and so will you. Okay, what? Like just come up with an offer and I know you're like, well, Corinne, what, what's a good offer? Well, there are so many offer formulas. If you go into. Inside of our marketing school, there's a class called Build a better Offer. And for me, the main value of that class is just to get exposure to the 25, 30 + offer formulas that I share with you in there that are out there in the big wide world industry. Okay. You can even just go to ChatGPT or Google and ask it what are examples of offers? And you'll see some of them come up, learning what those are. It can. You're just going to have to play around and see what jumps out at you, what works for your business, and you're going to try some that don't really take off and then you just adjust the offer. This is part of the process of figuring this out and optimizing it. Okay, so if you sell CSA shares, maybe your offer is bring a friend who signs up for our 2026 season and you're going to get $25 in farmstore credit for every person you bring me. And if you bring me more than five people, you will get a free dinner ticket to our field to table dinner. Right. You could even set a. A goal that encourages them to do it multiple times. So you want to make it clear, you want to make it generous, and you want to make it easy to say yes. So crafting the offer is step two number. Step three is to deliver the offer. So somehow you have to get the word out to the people when they have had the trigger fire, when the queue, when the time is right, when their Emotions are hot, right? And this is where you can get creative. So I would say start with email. Just send a message that says subject line, a farm fresh gift for a friend you care about. And then something like, we're giving you $10 to share with someone who would love farm food. They'll save on their first order. And you'll get a free bouquet next week as our thank you. Okay, that was something I just typed up here. It can be anything you want, but I'm just giving you an example and see how. That was a short email. You want to add a little bit more around it, that's fine. You want to put a picture in there, great. But it doesn't have to be complicated. Let's just keep it really simple. And then you deliver that offer to the people when you sense that the queue has happened. And this could be done initially, I think it could just be done manually as you're watching people pass through different milestones. But eventually you want to create an automation around it. But at first just do it manually and test it and see if it works. But email isn't your only option. You could also use. I've seen people use QR codes or like a bring a friend moment. So for instance, print a QR code on your CSA insert or on a thank you note and say, it says, like, scan this to gift a friend $10 off their first order. Okay. And then that QR code takes them to a special landing page or sales page. That assumes the person has read that email and talked to a friend about the product. I want to make sure that's a clear. Okay. You don't necessarily send them to your basic sales page. I mean, I guess you could if you want to keep it simple. But if you know that the only way a person is being taken to this unique sales page, the one that the QR code points to, is because a friend handed them the card, then you can kind of assume that the friend has talked to them about the product a little bit and they are somewhat familiar with the concept. And so you can change what you put on that page a little bit based on that assumption. Right. You don't have to tell them everything under the sun. You can probably make it a little bit of a shorter sales pitch as you present that unique offer. You could put a QR code on your farmer's Market sign. I've seen that done. Or like a packaging sleeve or on. On the label of your product. Especially if you're asking your customers to shoot share the product itself with Someone and maybe they're sharing a, a case of mic or a packet of microgreens. And on that packet then is the offer or the QR code. You could add it to a flyer at your booth that says, you know, share the farm, love, bring a friend. Next week you both get a free add on. So QR codes I think are something you could play around with. And I also want to just bring up the bring a friend effect because I've seen this work well too. This is where you would invite a customer to physically bring someone new to meet you in person. And when someone introduces this friend in person, there's kind of this beautiful social glue that forms that that new person feels safer to meet you. And the referring customer feels proud. And I think the new person may feel feel a little more pressure in a good way to try out the product because their friend took all this effort and time to introduce them to the farmer. And it would be weird not to buy something from you, right? So you, you kind of can almost count on the fact that that new person is going to get at least something because they're going to want to please their friend and they really want their friend to, to appreciate their friend and they want their friend to think that, hey, I like this too. So there's a little bit of social proof going on there. You could even make it fun. You could take a photo of the referral duo. You could give them like, I don't know, a shout out in your stories or I don't know, farm friend sticker. Don't do the sticker, but you can come up with something fun. Okay. It's simple, but it works. I think that that's kind of neat. So I, I have a few examples here by type. If you're a, a vegetable farm, here's an example of a referral offer. Refer a friend who joins our CSA and you'll get $25 in farm store credit. You could also include referral cards in each box with a QR code and a short message. This is something that I do once a year on a special weekend. If you're a meat producer, you could have something like, hey, refer a friend who buys a grill bundle and, and they'll get 10% off and you'll get a free pack of sausage. And then you can ask, you have a process in that buying form where they have to let you know who referred you so that they can reward you. Okay. Notice how in that offer it says refer a friend who buys a grill bundle. It's very Specific about the thing you want them to be referring. So you can decide what is the thing you want to refer flower farmers. You could say, like, hey, share this QR code. Your friend's gonna get $5 off their first bouquet and you'll get a free mini arrangement next time as our thank you. If you're a cheese producer, bring a friend to our farmer's market booth next week and they'll get a free sample flight and you'll get $5 off your next wedge. Or you'll get $5 off a cheese variety that's like really. That sells out, that's really popular. And you basically lock them in that they're going to get it because you are a top referrer. Okay, all right, let's now talk about super referrers. You want to. You want to identify and celebrate your super referrers. This often gets overlooked. Once you start running a referral program, you will quickly realize that some customers go above and beyond. They bring like five friends and they talk about you constantly. They're really well connected. Not a lot of these people, this is not a high percentage, but there will be a few. And they will bring a larger percentage of new people to you. They post pictures of your veggies every week on Instagram. They're. They know a lot of people. They help you create collaborations. It's just like they want you to succeed. And these people are gold to me. I love these kind of customers. I also love customers who spend a lot with me, but I also love customers who are super referrers. It's a different gift. And so you want to celebrate them because what gets rewarded gets repeated. I learned that long time ago when I was a youth pastor and I went to a leadership conference and I wrote that down and I love that phrase, what gets rewarded gets repeated. And I learned real quick to take care of my volunteers, to train them, to equip them, to reward them and celebrate them. And when I did, and I took care of my team, they built community and they wanted to come back and I had a huge retention rate. And the same thing goes for your customers. Celebrate the behaviors that you want to encourage and you will discover that they will continue to do those behaviors and it will become a value in your brand. More and more customers will aspire to that behavior. So here's some of the ways you can show appreciation to these super refers. You can give them early access to products or pre sales or frankly, just give them offers that no one else gets. You can invite them to your field to table dinner or a special event. We recently did this for our field, to table dinner. And I placed my referrers next to us. They sat next to the farmer. Those are the positions of great value at the long table. Who gets to sit next to the farmer? It's my people who are the hardcore refers. Send them a handwritten note or a surprise gift and tell them why you appreciate them so much. You could feature them in your stories, Instagram stories, or even in your newsletter. You could create a VIP tier. We've done an entire podcast episode about VIP tiers. I'll link that up in the show notes. There's two episodes. Really good. Maybe even you, you, you can create an affiliate code for your super refers that you give to them a very unique code, a referral code that when they pass that code out to their people that they refer it to, it gets them a discount. So I know I could go inside of local line and I can create all kinds of coupon codes so I can make a coupon code for Jeff Wisniewski and tell him, hey, you bring us so many clients, I'd like you to be an affiliate so that you get a little bit of a kickback every time you bring me a customer. So here's your own unique code. If you know someone who wants to join our csa, give them this code. They'll use that code at checkout. And then that way I know that was a referral that came from Jeff Wisniewski because he's the only one who has that code. And every time it kicks in, then I can go and reward him. Right? I can see at the end of every quarter Jeff's brought me two new people or by the end of the year, Jeff brought me five people because the code triggered five times, you track. And so this is kind of where affiliate marketing can overlap and you can create some kind of a kickback. Like, hey, for every person you get, you're gonna, at the end of the year, I'm gonna give you this amount of money or this amount of store credit or something. And you've been documenting it. So we want to make them feel like they are part of the inner circle because they are, they are a special kind of unique brand of person within our business. We want to take really good care of them. Okay, let's land this plane. Referrals don't happen by accident. Okay? They happen because you design for them and a well timed ask, a simple offer, giving a simple reward can start a snowball effect that's going to fuel your business growth for years. So I want to give you a simple checklist to get started. You don't need to overcomplicate this. But here's how we, how we do this. This is my referral engine checklist. Step one is you create a simple share page on your website that explains this referral offer. This is a different offer than you might have on your main page that describes the product. This is the offer that's for the referral offer. Okay. Then you need to make a coupon code for new customers. If you have local line. This is easy to do because that's part of the, part of the package. It could be something easy to remember. Don't make it x 92478. Like don't do that to your referrer. That's mean it should be something like new 10. Okay. Or new 25 if you want it to be the year, whatever. Decide when you will then send your referral. Ask. So ideally it's 24 to 72 hours after their first order or pickup or after they're having that like dopamine hit and the positive vibe thing is happening for them. So figure out when you're going to send it. And then step four is to write a short email template that you can send either manually or that you ultimately can automate. Step five is to print a QR code version for a booth sign or maybe your box insert. Or if it's going to go on your product page, maybe you stuff it inside everyone's store order bag as you're packing and doing fulfillment that week. Step six is to track your referrals. So create some kind of a tracking system. Even, even a simple spreadsheet will work and you can track it weekly or monthly. And then step seven, celebrate your top referrers every season. So create some sort of a moment in time when you pause and you look back and you look at the data and say, who were the people that referred? And now I'm going to celebrate them. Okay, so just start small. Pick a moment this month to test it. Maybe it's after your CSA fall season starts, or maybe it's at your Thanksgiving bird pickup. I don't know. And remember that your best marketing engine isn't Facebook or ads or even SEO. It's the people who already love you. So empower them. Empower them to tell your story for you. Give them a path to walk. And keep it simple. Keep it simple and they're more likely to do that thing. You just coach this, coach them along and they'll do what you say if they're super fans, and then just watch what happens next. All right, today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 337. If you like today's episode, please go leave me a rating or a review on your podcast player or just copy the link of this episode and share it with someone who has never heard of me before. Hey, I'm trying to get you to refer me. Are you catching that? Yeah. I would love it if you would help me grow my reach and my audience. So if you're getting a lot of value from this podcast, man, it would be so awesome if you would just share the love by telling as many people as you know about me. I just want. I just want to help farmers. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be doing the podcast. I sometimes think about that. I'm like, on episode 337 and I always said I would keep doing it until it wasn't fun anymore. So it's still fun. But there probably will come a day when the podcast will stop. Um, but I, in the meantime, just. I just want to reach people. I want to help farmers get better at selling. Like, this is the thing that you have to master if you want to become profitable, and it's not something that most people have been trained in. So I. I'm really passionate about helping farmers learn this skill. Um, it can be done just by binging my podcast. There's all the stuff I know is basically hiding within there if you want to listen to all 300 episodes. But you can also come inside farm marketing school and kind of get more of a fast track and really work on it and get that project built. But this is what I do and this is what I love to do. So the more people that I can help, the better. So thank you for sharing the love and telling other people about my digital farmer. If you want to get onto my email list, remember I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing easier to shortcut that process of learning farm marketing. You can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'd love to connect with you there. Otherwise, thanks for joining me today. You guys have an amazing rest of your October and fall, and I will catch you next week. Remember, I believe in you. Bye. Bye. Sat.