A (0:00)

Our CSA renewal week just ended and wow, do I have some numbers and lessons to share. In this annual episode, I'll unpack what worked, what didn't, and the key strategies that helped hundreds of my CSA members recommit for next year. Early Ready to learn the secret sauce behind a successful promotional launch? 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, 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 339 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable farm business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back. If you are new to the show, I'm really glad you're here. Thanks for checking it out and I hope you get a lot out of this episode. If you're one of my regular listeners, thank you for being so faithful and sharing these episodes with your farmer friends so that more and more people find out about it. I really appreciate that. If you are new to the show and you want to learn more about Marketing Lingo Marketing 101, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and to get onto my email list because when you do, I'm going to send you a really good email every four days for about three months. You can file them away and kind of move through them slowly, but they are going to be a roadmap through the marketing jungle. I'm going to show you the key principles you need to know, the most important lessons to learn, the most important marketing assets to build first, people you should be following. I'm going to give you freebies, resources, step by steps, video tutorials. It's going to be really good. So you can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. It's free. Take care of that today. Today's episode is sponsored by my favorite e commerce platform for farms, Localline. As the season winds down for you, it's the perfect time to get ready for a smoother year ahead. And if you've been thinking about switching sales platforms, localline makes it easy. Their team handles the heavy lifting so you can start next season more organized and efficient. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs with tools for e commerce, inventory automation, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder and positive farms using localline grow their annual sales by 23% and increase their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is simple. It's stress free. No setup fees, no sales commissions. And their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free so that you can focus on what really matters. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature free. Free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/localline. That's all one word. To sign up, use the code MDF2025 to get that free premium feature and start the new year strong and sell smarter with Local line. And now back to the show. Well, it is November. I am recording this actually on October 28th, a few weeks ahead of the release date. We just finished our CSA last week, our final distribution. Everyone cheer. You know what a big deal that is. And Kurt has a little bit more production stuff that he's going through this week. Bed's putting up and garlic being planted, but our crew is leaving this weekend, heading back to Mexico. And then we enter a season that begins to be a little bit more relaxed. I like to call it my deceleration phase. And I don't know about you, but in the past we kind of struggle with the transition because we go from breakneck speed to hardly anything at all almost overnight. And it can be really jarring when you're used to doing stuff all the time and getting your sense of purpose and validation from being busy and doing hard work and then to suddenly have nothing to do. You're almost like, wait, is everything okay? Like, is, is the ship gonna go down if I actually take a break here for a few weeks and do nothing? And one of the suggestions that I made to Kurt this year is that we're actually gonna go away to a lodge or maybe an Airbnb somewhere. Somewhere in a forest, somewhere where we can go hiking and intentionally take some time off at the very beginning to mark this new season to kind of say, okay, we're, we're creating a trailhead here so that we intentionally wind down and we have some quiet time and some space to let our brains just slow down and to pray and be together and journal and read before we come back into our, you know, our home life and our new personal kind of our personal life, our world. That's. That is the, the months of November, December, January. So I'm kind of excited to see how setting an intentional moment like that, how that changes the way we experience this shift into a different space. I encourage you to maybe be inspired by that, maybe try that yourself too. So when I kind of pivot and move my eyes from the csa, I kind of tend to take my off season and have a little bit more time available for digital farmer, especially with Farm Marketing School. And this is when activity inside of Farm Marketing School dials up a little bit and we do some extra activities. We'll have a book study, we'll do some live classes and live one on ones and coaching calls. So I'm excited about trying to figure out what that will be. And that's one of the things that I think might come out of my time of reflection as I get quiet and sort of try to figure out where's my energy going there. I wanted to do something special for all of you, my farmer community, especially those of you who are kind of new to the podcast and you're trying to learn the ropes of marketing really fast. I feel like it's important to teach you kind of the overview, the framework of marketing, the thing on which all of our marketing assets stand. And I think many farmers never learned this. I know I'm raising my hand here. For my first 12, 13 years, I didn't know that there was a marketing framework. I knew there were things I should be doing in marketing, but I didn't know how they all hung together and why. And when I learned this system and I saw how all the dots connected, I was like, oh, now I see why I have to have an email list. And now I see why I need to have a core gateway offer. And you just see how everything stitches together. So I wanted to have an educational webinar that teaches this concept. And basically I'm going to teach you the sales funnel framework. I'm going to teach you the customer value journey. I'm calling it the Farm Sales framework. And you're going to learn how to build a steady stream of customers all year long. And I'm going to do this by like teaching you these eight steps that your customers need to go through in order to turn from like completely unaware you exist to superfan and along the way, I'm going to not only show you what the steps are, but I'm going to kind of point to, hey, here's the marketing asset that is typically used to get at this stage in the customer journey. And so once you know what the stages are and you start to see, oh, that's why I need a website, because it's doing that part of the funnel, it just makes everything more clear to you. And you can then look at your own current sales funnel and assess it and be like, okay, I've got those pieces, but I don't have these three. And maybe that's why my sales aren't churning the way I think they should be. You know why I don't have new customers coming in? Because I'm missing this one piece that's supposed to connect to the next stage. It's really enlightening when, when my farmers first learn this, it kind of opens their eyes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach this content every single week in the month of December. On Tuesdays at 10:00am Eastern Standard Time, it's going to be about an hour, maybe an hour and 15 minutes. And all you have to do to sign up, it's free, is to go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/webinar. And when you get on my email list, the confirmation page is going to have the zoom link on it. Okay. I'm also going to send you because I'll have your email and I'll tag you as someone interested in this webinar. I'll make sure that you get an email from me that invites you to come and watch that webinar so that you have the link. All right? And like I said, I'm going to do it every week for the month of December, with the exception of the week of Christmas. I'm going to skip that one, if that's okay. And if it goes well, I might continue to do it into January. We'll see. But I just want to offer that to my community. I think for some of you, it's going to be groundbreaking. It's going to be like the marketing 101 you've been waiting for. And you will begin to see how your business fits into that framework. You'll see what you're doing well, and you're also going to see the things that are obviously missing. And you will then be like, aha, that's what I need to work on. And then I'll invite you to come inside. Farm Marketing school and I have probably a project for, I have a project, I think, for every single one of the phases. But you would then have some very specific guidance on how to build that element if you wanted it. If you want special help, you can come into Farm Marketing school and then work that for 30 days, get it done, then get out. So hope you decide to come again to sign up. It's mydigitalfarmer.com forward/webinar. This was an idea I had a few days ago and so I have to build the slide deck for that. But I'm excited. Like, I, I love this content, this content and I, I know how vital it is. I think once you get this, you're going to be able to kind of see what you need to focus on. And plus, it's just fun to hang out with me live for an hour, right? So I'll be doing that live every single week. Like I said, the first, I think it's the first three weeks of December. I'm going to take off the week of Christmas and then if it goes well, I'll probably just keep doing it in January. We'll see. Just stay tuned to the podcast and you will know. All right, well, let's move on to today's top podcast topic. I am going to share the Results of my 2025 CSA Early Renewal Promotion campaign. This is the week when I ask my current CSA members to sign up again for next year and they're not going to fulfill. I'm not going to fulfill on this order for seven or eight months. Okay, so they're pre buying something that they're not going to get for eight months. And I have been doing this system for seven or eight years now and it has worked like gangbusters. I always do a podcast episode where I go through the results. So if you have been listening to me for a long time, you may have heard this content before, but there are a few changed this year and there are some new observations and aha moments for me and I'm going to share all of that with you. So don't just decide to turn this off because you're like, oh, I know how this works. I've already tried this. I've learned about this. I think there's going to be something in here that's going to be new for you. And so stick around and find that diamond in the rough. Okay, so let's start out with the launch results. At the end of my launch when I close the doors to the offer. What did I actually sell. So my total number of vegetable shares was 261 sales and that was out of 350 that I put into the store. The other kind of big wow was that our egg share sold out in 10 minutes, which is the fastest that it's ever gone. I warned people that it would sell out quickly, but usually It's a good 20, 30 minutes before that happens. This time, whatever I did to create a frenzy, there were more people coming in the first ten minutes than ever. And we have a local line online platform and in the past it has been strong and steady and it's never crashed. It, it didn't crash this time. But I did get a lot of reports from people that they saw a lot of spinning right as they were trying to place their order. It was working really hard and they were waiting for several minutes before the order came through. So I know that we were taxing the server big time. We also sold 88 Cheese shares, which is a really awesome number. We have a good profit margin on that and I was trying to sell more of those. So I'm really pleased that that happened. Okay, so just keep in mind if, if the goal was to sell 350 shares in this pre sale and we sold 261, that's pretty darn good. That is a 74% full after seven days of sales. Now here's the other kind of interesting fact. 234 of those shares sold in the first day and the remaining ones trickled in over the next six days. So this system that I'm teaching you today really does cause the customer to buy immediately. It creates urgency so that they want to take care of it in the first day and in many cases in the first hour. Most of my sales happened in the first hour and that's because I had some things in place that encouraged that to happen. I also wanted to mention where we market our renewal campaign. We have kind of two locations. Remember, this is a very targeted audience. This is our current CSA members. This is not people out in the big wide world who don't really know about us a lot. It's not my public facing Facebook page. I'm doing a lot of this marketing and messaging in my private Facebook group. They already know what a CSA is and how it works. I'm just trying to get them to renew it and do it again and to decide how they might want to change up their share mix for next year. I also use email marketing extensively. I did not use text sms, I just used email and the Private Facebook Facebook group. All right, so we opened the cart on October 18th at 8am and we closed it on Friday, October 24th. It was a seven day launch. I chose the, we the last week of our CSA on purpose because I wanted to kind of ride the, the wave of good feeling. People like to say thank you and goodbye and when we give them their bonus on the last week, kind of adds in a little bit of extra energy. So that was kind of like the, the very first thing that I did was decide when do I want to have this launch? And I always tell people that I think you should place it at the end of your CSA season when people are more likely to be thinking about it. If you try to do this in the middle of December, you're not going to have as good of a result, in my opinion, because people are thinking about Christmas, they're not ready to put down a bunch of money for next year because they're, they're spending that money elsewhere. So you have kind of this ideal window at the end of your season for those people, especially if it falls where it does for me at the end of October where people are ready to spend that amount of money right now and designate it for that purpose. Okay, the, the second thing I wanted to talk about was the pre launch. There is something called the pre launch period which we have really maximized in our promotion. And pre launch refers for me to the two weeks before the card actually opens. I call it my pre launch Runway. And this is the reason why people line up on, on the cart open day to buy because I have used this pre launch Runway so, so well I've leveraged it. The goal of the pre launch period is to communicate the offer to make sure that everyone knows exactly how next year will work and what the options are. And so they have time to intentionally decide what they want. There should be zero confusion. When they show up at the cart on, you know, the, the 18th of October at 8:00am they should know exactly what they want because you have done such a good job of communicating in advance. So the pre launch is where I'm communicating the new offer. Any changes? But I'm also creating buzz and excitement. I'm doing lots of activities and calling their attention to, hey, here's something that's coming up. Let's get excited. Creating a little bit of surprise and delight. And this activates the algorithm causes Facebook to show more of my posts in their feed because we have a lot more engagement in these two weeks before I actually sell. And then that actually Causes those promotional posts to do better and to be shown more often because I've done a good job of priming the pump before we get to that part. Launch. Renewal Launch week is, is an event now in our farm. Like people expect it. When I tell people, oh, it's renewals week, everyone's like, excited. No one is like, oh, great, I gotta deal with promos. Like, no, they're looking forward to it because I have made it really fun. So here are some of the things that we did this year during the pre launch period, about two and a half, three weeks before I do a challenge. Normally it's been the, the freezer challenge. But this year I did the chili challenge, a chili cook off. And people were encouraged to submit their favorite chili recipes. And I had some pretty big prizes. There were three winners. I had some honorable mentions and we had a lot of people participate in this. So I chose wisely. I was nervous about not doing the freezer challenge because that always does so well for me. But I wanted, I was getting bored with that and I wanted to do something different. And I wasn't sure if chili would captiv people, but it did. And I got a lot of really good recipes out of it. People like to show off the stuff they're making, right? And so you just saw picture after picture after picture, all kinds of people submitting their entries. And what this does is it's making the Facebook group more active. People are coming in to see that stuff, they're commenting. And then Facebook's algorithm sees that as a sign that people are really liking this group. I'm going to show posts from this group more often. So all of a sudden, future content is almost guaranteed to be shown to my, to my audience in the, or, you know, organically in their feed. Because I've done this work of priming the pump. We also did something called the golden egg game. This was two weeks before we opened the doors. And this is where I hid a plastic golden egg in three of our eggshares. And I also hid it in three of our vegetable boxes. And there was a laminated card that kind of went along with it so that they could read what, you know, what this golden egg was all about. And it basically was like a spoof of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book by Willy Wonka. Not by Willy Wonka by Roald Dahl, one of my favorite books. And if they find the golden egg, the prize is that they get to pre order their CSA share before I open the cart so they don't have to wait in line. They don't have to stress about whether they're going to get an egg share. They can get it taken care of beforehand. So this costs me nothing. But it creates a whole lot of excitement for the six people who find the egg. I also give them an extra dozen eggs the following week. So we had a lot of people showing their picture of them holding the egg and smiling really big and feeling like I won something, right? Anytime you can win something, you feel like a million bucks. We did a daily question challenge for five days. This was also about two weeks before the card opened. And this got a ton of engagement. Every day I asked a different question of the group and I gave them until 6pm to comment their response. The answers were not meant to be hard. They were either one word answers or they were, you know, a phrase or a sentence. But they were well positioned questions because I wanted, I wanted each question to accomplish a specific purpose. So for instance, one example of a question might be tell me why you decide to renew, why you decide to buy from, from our CSA and renew your CSA every year. And this is almost like suggestive, like you're going to tell me now that you're renewing next year and you're going to tell me why. And so you just, you see all the values, language come out from your customers in and you can pretty much guarantee that if they're commenting, they're already making a micro commitment in that moment that they plan to renew. Plus all the people that are reading that, they're reading everyone's comments before they write their own and they're nodding their head and they're saying yes, I feel the same way. There's a sense of I belong here and this is my group and I want to stay here and I value these people. So I want that feeling to happen, right? And so that's why I chose that question. Now I was averaging about 50 to 60 comments for each of these daily questions. So not only were they having a desired effect of creating social proof and helping a person mentally basically make this commitment to me before they officially did it the next Saturday, but it was also again, coaching the algorithm. The algorithm sees all this activity, people commenting like crazy every single day. It's gonna, it's gonna be like, wow, something cool must be happening in here. And I'm gonna keep showing these posts. Now that's great because in a week I'm gonna start showing a lot of promotional posts. And so Facebook will know, won't necessarily know the difference and it will show those promotional posts for me because I've done the work of creating all this non promotional activity here on the front end. Now. We also had a well timed event occur the weekend before we opened the cart. We did a tomato u pick and a pepper gleaning event. We had so many peppers and tomatoes still left over after we did bulk canners that we just decided before we took the stakes down that we were going to let our community come out and pick whatever they wanted. We had a very, very low per pound rate and then we told people the first 30 pounds are on us if they're going to give it away to someone in need. So I think that doing an event like that is sort of a feel good event, right? It makes the brand look generous. It's not why we were doing it, but I know that it had the effect on people of being proud of being a part of this community that cares about other people and is trying to do justice in the world. There were lots of question posts in the Facebook group too. I would randomly decide I'm going to just throw out a prize today. So guess the number of fruit shares that we had last year and if somebody answered correctly or got really close, they would get a prize. We did a lot of stuff like that. So all of these activities and surprise and delight moments and events and contests were creating buzz and energy in the group. 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, one of the other things that was important in the pre launch period was to identify my key talking points, my messaging points of the promotion. And these are mapped out intentionally before I get to work on writing the content. So we're thinking about things like what changed from last year that I need to make sure my customers know about before they reorder. What do they need to know? Is there some information that they have to know? What are their frequently asked questions that are a little confusing? Because we, we have a lot of people who've been doing this for 10, 15 years, but we have a fair number of people that have only been with us for one or two years. And so they've never been through a launch like this. They might not quite remember how it works. And so we need to make sure that we explain some of those important logistics to them and then what am I trying to sell more of or achieve more of? So I'm thinking through the lens of like, man, I really wanted to try and sell more fruit shares this year. I feel like in the past I had notes actually in my, in my debrief last year that I didn't really talk about the fruit share much and that the sales showed it. And so that was a challenge that I set for myself this year is to make more of a big deal about how awesome the fruit is to see if we can increase the sales on that particular product. Right. So I'm looking at those questions and out of that I kind of identified for me what were the things that I most wanted to communicate that I wanted to beat the drum around. And then these became the topics of my social media posts in the private Facebook group, as well as the emails that started to drip out in the week before I started to pitch the offer. So for me, one of my key talking points is the bonus. I choose a bonus as part of my offer and I needed to make sure they knew what the bonus was. This year it was a bag of biscuit mix or pancake mix from Elderberry Farms. Shout out to you, Andy. She was in my accelerator program and she rocked it. She came through for me with 285 bags. But we also had bonuses. If you decided to buy the cheese share, you got A free smoked butter in your first week's disbursement. There was a bonus if you bought a fruit share. I gave three people who bought a fruit share a flat of strawberries. Next May that will be on us. And then people who got a coffee share, they were going to get a bonus bag of holiday beans that were going to be able to be picked up around Black Friday. So I needed to make sure they knew about all of the incentives for ordering early in this period. The other key talking points included, when does the store open? When can they actually start buying? That was so, so important that I beat that into their head. Saturday, October 18th at 8am in fact, it used to be 7am but I changed it to 8am because the number October 18th, it just seemed like it would be easier to remember 18 and 8. So I switched that time and I was a little bit thoughtful about that. I also wanted them to know the link that they had to go to to sign up. Because in local line, I turn off that price list until 8am and I go in and just toggle a switch over. So in, in a second it's, you know, it's off and then the next second it's on. So I had to be able to tell them, here's the URL you're going to go to. It's a different price list than the store one that you usually use. That was really important. I didn't want people trying to go to our online store where we typically sell stuff every week, and they're like, I don't see it in here. Right. So I had to communicate that the other big talking point was the eggshare and how popular I knew that it was. In years past, the eggshare has sold out in 20 to 30 minutes and a lot of people really want it. So I, I wanted to reassure people, like, hey, if you want the eggshare, you have to get online and buy in the first 15 minutes and you'll probably get it. This year the eggshare sold out in 10 minutes. So it's just going to make it even more frantic next year. I know, but I wanted people to know about that scarcity element because I didn't want someone to be disappointed and miss out because they just didn't know. One of the FAQs that I was getting early on was, are you going to do the chicken share again? We, we debuted last year with a monthly chicken bag, a collaboration with Anderson Farms and Bowling Green. People have loved it and I needed to make sure I told people yes, we're going to do that, but we're not selling that with this launch. So I want to just point that out to you that you don't have to sell all the things that are in your CSA product ladder inventory at the same time. You can choose to pull things out and do a special promotion around that because the chicken share is, is more expensive. It's a $600 product. I didn't want it competing with all the other items in my CSA product suite with my add on shares. And so I just didn't offer it. But I wanted to make sure they knew that it was going to be offered eventually, but it wouldn't come until February. So that was an FAQ that I needed to address. I also needed to talk to people about how does payment work because we're still that CSA that does invoice only. We don't do credit card payments for these high ticket purchases. And so I just needed to communicate to them that fact and how do they go about making sure we get our deposits in on time. Some of the other kind of key talking points I was trying to communicate during this particular launch was I wanted to trigger social proof. So I was looking for ways to get people to comment, to get people to publicly state how much they loved our CSA so that other people could read it and so that the person themselves could experience like that loyalty building moment of saying out loud that I like you guys, I will never leave you, I am loyal to you. And so you'll see that in some of my content, how I was trying to provoke that response and then just trying to show them and remind them of the value of the CSA membership and that it's not just about the vegetables, but it's about the life change and the transformation that happens when you become a CSA member and you end when you have this community. Because it's the community that was really unlocking them and giving them ideas for how to cook differently and make things with the food and become a stronger chef in their kitchen and learn all these exit strategies and find new recipes they like and see their kids start to eat differently and experienced some health changes. Right? That all happened because of the community element, not just because they were getting a box of vegetables each week. So it is the csa, it is the community supported element that is creating that life change. So I was really trying to highlight that and show them, hey, this is worth doing again. So these talking points were brainstormed, honestly this year they were just reviewed because I have done this system now for so many years that it's the same thing every year. I just reread the emails, I reread these social media posts and I decide, do I want to change some things? Do I? You know, I have a different bonus. So I got to change the picture out and change the content there in the copy. But I'm just reviewing it through that lens and then I'm using those talking points to form the basis of my communication in my emails and in the Facebook posts. And part of the process of building out the promotion is going into Canva, making the pictures, writing out the social media copy, then going into Facebook, scheduling it, right? Making sure that I know what's getting posted on Tuesday and that it matches what's getting sent as an email that Tuesday to my audience as well. Because I want to have the same message be spoken twice on the same day. All right, so there's just the whole pre launch process, thinking that through, making sure that I've created a lot of buzz. I've pushed the flywheel so that by the time the cart opens on October 18th at 8am, people are waiting in line. They are getting in line at 7:55. They are freaking out, they are nervous, they're having an adrenaline rush. They're watching, you know, their order spin and spin and spin and they're wondering if they're going to get their egg, like, and then when it happens, they have this like, you know, endorphin high and they come into the Facebook group and they're doing high fives and they're saying, I got it, I got in. And there's just this celebratory feeling, right? And all of that happens because I have hyped them up in the two weeks before. I have prepare them. They know exactly what they want and they've had a blast, you know, celebrating the year with us, reviewing the year with us, celebrating each other. And they want to do this again, right? They want to do this again. So that's all, that's all intentional. Like I have pumped that engine. That doesn't just naturally happen. That happens because I spend a lot of time on the pre launch. So be thinking about that for yourself the next time you have a big promotion that you need to make a big revenue goal. Think about what can you do in the two weeks before you actually open the offer to get the pump primed. There's some stuff you can do and you've just heard some examples of mine to help you get people excited and curious and ready to try and jump on board. Okay. The next thing I wanted to focus on was building a good offer. This is a key part of my course, early bird campaigns that convert. If you come inside farm marketing school, that is, that course is now inside of there. It used to be a standalone course, but now I've put it inside of our marketing school. And it basically walks you through how to do a promotion like this step by step. And one of the steps is to build an irresistible offer. You've got to come up with a package deal that gives them a reason to decide to renew. Now, many of your people will probably want to buy your product again, but if you need them to tell you now, then you've got to come up with a reason to, to make it worth their while to decide. Now, instead of April or May, which is typically when my people used to always renew, I needed them to renew in November because I needed that cash flow to help us make it through the first six months of our season. And so I have to craft the best offer of the year for this promotion. Now, I want to make sure that I reiterate that this offer, like, let's just say that you, you wanted to sell something and your goal was to sell a hundred of them. And at the end of the promotion, you had sold 50, 59. Okay. And you didn't sell out. You had an amazing offer. This doesn't mean that you can't continue to offer that same product after the promotion is over. You just have to make the offer a little bit less desirable than when you sold it in the, in the early pre launch. Right? So I'm not saying, oh, if you don't sell it, well, you're out of luck. No, you can keep pitching it. You just have to change the offer. And this offer in the early bird should be the absolute best one that you ever, that you ever offer anywhere. So for me, here were some of the things that are a part of my offer. First of all, it's only around for seven days. So I have built in scarcity and urgency into that offer. Right from the get go. I offer a bonus gift. It's cost me $5, so my cogs were $5. It was the bag of biscuit mix and pancake mix from Elderberry Farm. I have been thinking about that bonus for several years now, and I finally pulled the trigger on it. And I was really excited about it. My community has loved it. And in the back of my mind I was thinking, you know what, if this goes really well and people love it, I can continue to sell this in my online store in future seasons. So this is almost a way of introducing a new product to all of my people and it can end up turning into a longtime moneymaker for me. So I always encourage you to think through is there something that I can give away? And you just build the cost of that into the price of your promotion or into the price of your product. It cost us about $1,500 to have that bonus to purchase that bonus. But I have a budget for my promotion and that's primarily what it is, is the cost of the bonus. I just make sure that the price of the vegetable share will compensate for that. Now people don't necessarily know that, but I know that. And that's just, it just means I make the price higher. I also think about this question, like what am I trying to highlight? And one of the things that I was trying to do this year is sell more fruit shares because we have a really high profit margin on that and it's just really good. And so I wanted to test an idea this year to offer a special bonus of 3. People would get a flat of berries next May and I would choose those names out of a hat. After the first day you had to have purchased a fruit share, but. And you had to have purchased on the first day. So I was trying to drive more people to, to say yes in the first day because then I would know how many bonuses I had to get in and get those ordered and get them here to the farm in time. But I also just wanted to try and get more people to buy fruit. So I. That was a test idea, that was a beta test and I didn't end up selling more fruit shares. It didn't work. But yeah, you know, you try different things out and it may just be that the percentage of people that want the fruit share is what it is and I'm not going to get it to go higher. Or maybe I need to change how the fruit share quantity and volume is packaged. Maybe I have to change the price point, I don't know. But I just wanted to kind of mention that I was trying to create even a bonus within a specific add on share type to encourage a certain behavior. I'm also asking myself the question of what could I limit. Anytime you limit something, you make it more desirable. So in this case, my eggs were a big driver of my offer. I know that probably 40 to 50% of my customers want to have some kind of an eggshare whether it's weekly or bi weekly. And we just can't Provide that many. Our source doesn't. Can't do it. So I just randomly kind of have come up with this number of 120. This is the number that I offer in the pre sale. My source could probably go up to 140, but I don't. I don't sell pre sell 140. I've always just kept it at 120. Sometimes I'll end up adding a few more on at the end of the season in, in May, right before we start, I might add on 10 more. But I want the eggshare to be limited because I know this is what makes people get in line and sit on their mouse, you know, in front of their laptops or their phones, right at 8am to try and get in. This is what makes everyone want to buy on the first day. So look for something like that in your product suite that you can purposely limit. In fact, that brings up a kind of a side note. Going into the promotion, you don't have to pre sell all of the inventory items that you have available. I mean, technically, I, in air quotes, need to sell 385 vegetable shares before June 1 next year. But I could decide for this promotion that I'm only going to offer 300 of them at this price. And with this special offer and the other 85, I'm going to reserve because I want to be able to sell things to the public over the next seven months, right? So I can decide to pull stuff out and create a smaller container. And now the audience hears that and they kind of do the math and they're like, well, you had 385 last year, and we're all trying to Compete now for 300 spots at this price level. Like, you've just created additional scarcity. Do you see how that works? So just know if that's an offer, an option for you. We also did a fast action bonus this year. I experimented with that. This is where you offer a special prize that's only good for the first hour of the promotion or the first 24 hours. The first day, you can do whatever you want. I chose to limit it to the first hour. So anybody who ordered eggs in the first hour, they were entered into a drawing. And I picked out one person who got a free eggshare. What this did was it drove a lot of people to buy in the first hour. And as you heard my results at the beginning, it was ridiculous, I think. I mean, it was like 98% of my sales or something came in on the first day. And many of those happened in that first hour because so many of them were trying to to get that prize. So that was all, you know, engineered by me because of the marketing angle that I took. So just know you have a lot of influence. So what incentive can you give to your customer or prospect to make them want to sign up now? Maybe it is a free product. You can call it a bonus. Maybe it is exclusive access to an offer in the future where they will get first dibs or they get to cut in line. Maybe it is a raffle or a drawing for a prize. Maybe it's time with you, a dinner with you. It could be an event that they are given free tickets to. It could be a coupon code for a set number of months or maybe an entire year. Or maybe they get VIP status that will end up leading to more sales and revenue for you because they'll come in and use that coupon code and buy more things. It could be free swag to identify them as some kind of VIP level. So just know that there are lots of different ways that you can build a bonus. I've even done digital bonuses where I've given like a compilation recipe book of all the recipes that were shared in the Facebook group one year. Yeah, that was a very popular one. We did a another one where we shared all the the drinks that were shared. We had a lot of alcoholic drink ideas in our Facebook group one year and so we just compiled them all together and shared that as a bonus. So just get creative. Sometimes content bonuses can be really popular. Now we did set a goal for our promotion. I always encourage my farmers to do that before they put together any of their marketing assets. And so our goal was to sell 350 shares. That was the number I was aiming for. I actually don't want to sell out all of them because I want some of those spots to function as a sampler membership. I turn some of them into four week trial memberships because that's one of the ways we get new people in. I like to be able to have something to sell somebody who is interested in the CSA in the main season. I don't want to have to say I'm sorry, there's nothing here for you. So I actually didn't want to sell 385. So for this promotion I said we're going to have 350. And my goal was to sell 70% of those 350 shares. My actual number was 74% and so that felt like a really strong return for me. I also wanted to increase the average order value. In other words, I wanted to try and get more people to add one more add on share into their cart. So I was measuring that as well. Last year's AOV was $904, so they were putting in an average of 2.6 items into this into their carts. This year, it did go up. It went to $951. So not too bad. That averaged 2.7 items. We did increase the price of some of the shares, and so that may account for one of the reasons why the AOV went up a little bit. But this was just insightful because it showed me that this just might be the AOV for this launch. Somebody is. Is coming to the cart, and they're just prepared to spend around $1,000, and that's probably the upper limit for most people at this point in their journey. And that just might be what it is. And I'm not sure I'll be able to make that go any higher. And the secret to earning more revenue from this customer base then might not be to try and pile more items into this launch, but instead to try and stagger some new products, new product lines at different points of the year so that they have cash flow replenished, and then they can come back. And when I pitch them that chicken share, for example, in February, they have a new cash injection, and they're ready to spend $600 again. Right. Okay. So we did set a goal for the promo, but I also want to just bring this up. I really practiced it this year to hold the goal very loosely. It's really tempting to get fixated on the number. And, you know, when you don't hit the number. Exactly. Then you tell yourself it was a failure. My launch was a failure. I only hit 40% or 50%. I didn't get 70% like Corinna does. That's ridiculous. So. So I always try to look at what was last year's benchmark. How did I do stacked up against last year's benchmark, and how do I feel about how I promoted this? That's really important to me. So Kurt would just sit down with me sometimes and say, corinna, don't worry about what happens from here on out. Don't worry about how the numbers stack out. Don't worry if a whole bunch of people don't renew this year. Like, you are running an amazing campaign. Right. And I was like, yeah, man, this is one of the strongest campaigns I've ever done. Like, I have stacked the deck. There are so many Cool things going on. There's so much energy firing in our group. I, I knew I had prepped as well as I could. I had done my due diligence and so that allowed me to really release my grip, release the results and just let things unfold and trust, you know, whatever. This is supposed to be this new season in our life for where we are at the 18 year mark of a CSA and with this customer base, I have done everything I can to, to get a really good result. And whatever the result is, is, is what it's supposed to be. And I'm going to be able to make up the difference. If it's not, you know, hitting our goal like that will indicate what we need to do to shift. Maybe it's, it's a kind of a marker to say you need to pivot something or you need to change something. So I really tried to practice not judging myself if I didn't hit my targets. Now I did hit my targets, but it's really tempting when you're pushing the go button, like, oh no, what if, what if people don't sign up? And so I, I go through that every year and I just wanted to bring that up and normalize it. If you feel that when you're doing a promotion, if you're worried about, oh well, people not buy and does that mean I'm not good anymore and my product's not good and there's something wrong with me, like we really have to actively fight against that thought because we won't show up and promote with confidence if we feel, if we feel that thought. This is one of the other reasons why I pre launch or I pre schedule everything so that I don't let that negative energy or that negative talk that hits me affect how I sell in the moment. So I write all those emails, I schedule them, I schedule all the posts so that I'm just living the launch live with everyone else watching those posts pop up. I don't have to sit there and be like, oh, I need to go create copy for a post for tomorrow. And I'm not feeling very confident because the sales didn't come in quite the way I thought. And then I won't, you know, write the post in the same way. Or maybe I won't even do it at all because now I'm feeling unconfident. Like I don't even let that happen because I, I pre schedule everything so that I'm coming from a place of this is good and I'm going to put it out there. And I'm just going to launch it and trust it. It's going to do its thing. So I feel like I'm on a little soapbox right there. But just know that it is normal in any kind of sales situation for you to doubt yourself or worry that you're coming off salesy or worry that you won't hit your targets. And we have to actively fight that. I followed a system and I wanted to bring that up here too. It was a really easy lift this year, more so than in years past. And I want to explain why I have a, a plug and play process now because I've been doing this for so long. I rinse and repeat this sales message every single year that the emails are 95% the same from year to year. The social media posts are also about 90% the same. I switch out pictures but the what and the, you know, the, the types of challenges, the daily question posts like I'm doing them every year and people are still eating it up. So here's kind of a brief overview of how I've created this system. First of all, I have a master sheet on a Google Doc and it links off to last year's promotion emails. So I can just click on it and it takes me literally to a copy of the email that I used last year and I sent everyone. And so I can just duplicate it and edit it right there. Makes it a whole lot faster. I have a link to the canva folder where all of the graphics live, the ones that go into my emails, the ones that go into social media posts. So again, it's easy to click on that, find that folder and then just make new images for the next year. In many cases, I keep the same captions, I keep the same labels or any, any kind of words that are on the picture themselves. Those mostly stay. I'm just switching out the actual images. I have a Google Doc that has literally a copy of all the social media post copy, a copy of all the email copy the, the different contest posts. Like anything that has words like it's in there so that I just have to go in and quickly scan it and remind myself, oh yeah, this is how I ran it last year. This was the order in which we did it. Here's the literal words, here was the picture that went with those words and I can just copy and paste things. So even though it took me probably a total of eight hours to schedule, rewrite and schedule all the emails and schedule, schedule all the posts and make them, most of it was very just Like I didn't have to use a lot of brain energy. I was just, you know, clicking things, changing words, putting them in there. It was just, I could have given it to a virtual assistant to do it. It was that simple. I also have a day by day schedule of content. It's almost like my. If I were a stage manager for a drama or theater program, the stage manager knows exactly what is supposed to happen when that actor speaks that line on stage and they're thinking about two pages ahead and they're getting the prop ready and they're making sure that the costume change is happening and that the sets, you know, ready to switch. Like he's like two steps ahead and I have a sheet like that that's telling me here's what email is going out today. Here are the social media posts going out today and what time. Here's what you have to do today. That's live. Like you need to go photocopy the flyers that you're going to pass out to your customers and pass them out. Right. I can't automate that. So it just helps guide me and shows me what historically I've done. So we're just going to repeat it. Here's what you need to do on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and so forth. And then I use that as my roadmap through the launch. And as much of it as can be automated and done in advance was. And so that really took a lot of the pressure off. When we were running through launch period, I was just basically living it. I was handing out prizes, announcing winners. I didn't have a whole lot of extra work to do on the actual week of selling. I also want to mention that I used chat GPT this year, much more so than last year, to jazz up my social media posts. Didn't really do a lot of adjusting with email because my emails are just good that I just reuse the ones from the past. But I was able to add more emojis to my posts. I would kind of show chatgpt. Here's what I want to want to want to post. Here's what I did in the past and it would rewrite it in a little bit more visually appealing way. So use AI to help you do this kind of stuff. And my budget, I did have a budget for the launch and every year when we set our budget, our promotion budget, a big chunk of my promotion budget is for, for this launch. I just wanted to, you know, spend a little time talking about that because how many of you actually have a marketing budget and do you know how much it should be? So my marketing budget is primarily paying for Facebook ads to do lead generation. That's probably about three. I want to say it's $300 a month for lead gen, and I spent a total of eighteen hundred dollars in bonuses and prizes for this promotion. Now, that might seem like a lot to you, but when you consider that, you know, I, this particular share or this particular promotion brought in $252,000, like that's a drop in the bucket. And so I'm going to spend that all day long in order to get this many people to say yes to me and to get that cash injection on the front end. So just have a budget. Don't be afraid to spend some money, but be thoughtful about how is that money being used. This is the biggest promotion I do of the year. It has to do really well. And so I feel like it's appropriate to invest some money to make sure that it does. All right. I wanted to wrap up just by pointing out a few observations in case you haven't picked them up yet. As I've been going through my story, there is a best time to launch any promotion, and that goes for a CSA renewal. For me, I think the. The best time is, is to do it at the end of your season, if you can, when people are getting ready to say goodbye. It depends, though, on when your season ends. So if your season is ending in the month of December, then that might not be a good idea. I feel like you should avoid December. I could be wrong about that, though. So test it. But I've had other CSA farmers tell me the same thing. That late November and then into December is just really tough. I think another good time to try and test it if you wanted to do it early would be after the new year or to do it when it starts to feel like spring, when the weather is changing and now people are thinking about getting out into their gardens and having fresh produce again. But unfortunately, that puts you in a position where you have to wait until April to get those sales. And to me, that's. That's too late. So that's why I always like to try and do it right at the end of our season. But in all promotions, there is an ideal best time where you're going to get most of your people to say yes. And you find that out simply by testing it. And there's going to be a few times where you don't do it right and you learn, and then the next time you do it differently until you Find that perfect sweet spot. There is an average order value for every promotion. And this was an insight that was new to me this year because I've always tried to say, oh, we need to get more people to buy more add on shares. And I've just been tracking it and tracking it and it just isn't going up. It's like it's sticking around this $950 zone. And I just sort of had this insight this, this year of like, you know, maybe, maybe that's just the aov, the ideal AOV for this kind of product launch. With this amount of add on shares priced at this level, people just aren't willing to spend more than a thousand bucks in one stop. And so instead of trying to hack it and figure out how to make them go higher, maybe I need to think about positioning some of these other products at different times of the year, offering them again, or pulling them out from this particular launch and giving them their own stage and own time. So I want to just have you think about that. I think every launch has an average order value, the amount, the maximum amount that the average person is willing to spend in that moment. So if you have too many things in your product suite, you know, that just might really. And they're not moving, that might be the reason. They're just, they're just never going to go over $1,000 or whatever the number is for you. Okay. I also noticed that my sampler system is not doing its intended job. And this is sort of a, I don't even want to call it a failure, but for the last few years I have had this four week trial membership called the Sampler. I had 60 of them this year and the whole reason I have them is because I want to give people a chance to try out the CSA in a smaller dose to see if they're a good fit and hoping that it would help me find people who really, really love it. So I guess it is doing that, but it's not converting at a super high rate. So when I look at how many of my samplers came back as full season members who upgraded to the full season, it was 18% and that's really not great. What I'm hearing from a lot of people is, oh, I would love to just get the sampler again next year. It was perfect. I want to be able to have a four week box experience because I travel a lot or I just, you know, don't like the stuff at the front end of the season. I want to be able to just have the stuff in the fall. And so I'm just noticing that it's not functioning in the way that I want it to. And I find that very interesting. So what I have noticed is that it may be pointing me to what the customer actually wants. I'm a little reluctant to see that and look at that. But I have heard them say things like, we'd love to have a bi weekly vegetable share. It's just too much for us to do this every week. And that's partly why they're. They're attracted to the four week sampler share. Because it's a smaller amount of time that they get that maybe they would. I would have more people buy if I moved to an. Had an option for an every other week vegetable share. I've had some people say, well, we just really want to be able to get what we want. The whole customizable thing, right? And the other insight I had as I'm considering that is I get to decide if I want to let the market take us there or not. You know, the market might be pointing me in a new direction, saying, this is actually where your customer wants you to go. And I could choose to follow that energy, but I could also choose not to. Right? This is business by my design. And so Kurt and I have just sort of put the line in the sand and said, we do not want to do a bi weekly vegetable share. We just don't. Because we know a lot of people would hop out of their current situation into that. It would be more of an administrative, like, I don't wanna say nightmare, but a lot of extra work over here on the other end. And I just don't wanna do it. And so if I don't wanna do it, we're not gonna do it. Right? So just know you can decide. You get to decide how you want your business to be run. And sometimes if the. If your customer demands that you change your system to accommodate them to be more convenient or to have this product a certain way, you could do that, but you don't have to because it might be important for you for other reasons to keep it the way it is or shift in a different direction. And I just want to remind you that you are the owner of the business. And although we need to listen to the market and pay attention to the clues and the cues that the customer is giving us, ultimately you can still stand your ground and say, but I want to do it this way. The launch has become a buying ritual that was very obvious this year. In my early years when I would do this, I would always feel like, bad that I was asking people to buy again and almost like I was contriving this whole energy build up system to get them to want to buy. And now I've come to realize that I don't need to worry about that. Like, my customers love Renewals Week. They think it's so fun, it's an event for them and they expect it. That's the thing, I think that's blowing me away. They expect it, they can't wait for it, and they look forward to it. So just know that when you do this well and you keep doing it year after year, your customers like it. When you do it, they're waiting for it. And so you don't need to be ashamed or worried about being spammy or promotional. Just lean into it and trust that your people really want this. Learn how to use the bonus wisely. So one of the things that I realized this year was that I can use the bonus as a way to spotlight a potential new product that we might sell in our online store next year. So I'm basically giving everyone a chance to try this biscuit mix because I know it's amazing and I know they're going to fall in love with it because I've gifted it to them. So they're all going to have to try it. And then I'm going to try to sell it in my store next year. And I know it's going to become a bestseller there. More people are going to buy it because they've had a chance to try it. So think about your bonus gift that way. Like, is there something that, that you foresee potentially being becoming a part of your product ladder? Will it be able to help you make more money in the future or become a lure to get people to buy things from your store? Choose that so that you can introduce it to your entire audience. Okay. And then my final comment is that once the CSA promotion was over and I closed the doors on Friday, my energy level was spent. And it is tempting to want to keep your doors open for something like this for two or three weeks or maybe an entire month. I've heard of some CSA farmers who have an early bird price all winter long. And I really want to discourage you from doing that because that doesn't give a person any sense of urgency. Instead of, we want to try and keep the, the launch period as short as possible. Seven days to me feels like a really good number. It feels scarce and it'll make a person make the decision. Plus, there is energy that you have to continue to channel if you keep it open longer. There was one year where I did it for two whole weeks, and most of the people signed up on the first two days. And then, man, I had to keep all this momentum and energy turning for 12 more days, and there just wasn't as much engagement because most people had already renewed. And I'm like, ugh, this is so tiring. So at the end of those seven days, when it was over, I was excited to turn it off. I felt really good about the results. And I'm like, man, I'm so glad that I only had to do this for seven days. You can do anything intense like that for seven days, especially when you know you're doing it well and you get good results. So keep that in mind. I literally am repeating this same messaging and process now to my CSA wait list. I had about 155 people on that, and so I took a lot of those emails and rewrote them. They don't have a private Facebook group, so I can't talk to them through Facebook, but I am doing a lot of this messaging now currently through an email automation. And I'm opening the doors for that offer on November 1st, and that will run for seven days as well. And I'll try to get as many people on my wait list to sign up. That particular offer is a little bit higher price tag than the early renewal offer, but it has the same bonus, but it doesn't have all the other special bonuses that went with the first offer. So even though it's a good offer, it's not the best offer of the year. And then when that wait list offers turns off on November 7, I anticipate I will still have sales or shares open, but it'll just then turn on and it'd be open at a higher price. No bonus. It'll just sit there through the winter as people discover it and, you know, hear about it. I may run another special promotion in the spring if I have to, but people will just kind of dribble in. And it's still available to buy, but the whole, like, special offer bonus, all that stuff, is only for these special promotion periods that I create. Okay. So I just want to make you aware you can keep doing promotions as you need to for, you know, future months, switching out offers, playing around with different ways to bundle things. All right, well, I hope that was helpful for you. I had an amazing, amazing ride and I'm so glad. Grateful for the results. I'm grateful for this system that works. If you want to learn this system and you just really want someone to give you the formula and help you walk through it step by step. If you have a CSA and you're like, man, I want to build that, I want to build that for myself this year. Come inside Farm Marketing School, my friends. This course used to be offered on its own. I think it used to be like 150 bucks for the course and now it's inside of Farm Marketing School. Like it's one of the projects in there. So if you are a CSA farmer and you want to build an early renewal campaign, you can come in there and take that project, have that be your first project, watch the teaching video, do each of the steps in the step by step planner. One by one. I tell you what to do first, then second, then third, and get your template built so that you can just rinse and repeat it from your on out. And I have my exact social media posts that you can copy, you can look at. I'll have my email copy in there. I have that master checklist example that you can use. It's all. So you have just templates, right? To show you how this could work. I've had so many CSA farmers go in and take that class and they write me emails. I should read some of them to you. They write me emails of like, oh my gosh, this has changed my life. And if you're one of those farmers right now who's written that email to me, you know what I'm talking about. So this is a really awesome sales system. And the thing is that you can use that system to sell just about anything. It doesn't have to be a CSA renewal. So it's a really great. It's basically a project that teaches you how to run an amazing promotion. So if you want to learn the launch system, that class is the one you need to take. And come on inside Farm Marketing School this winter, join my entourage of farmers. We're going to be doing some really fun stuff. I've already picked out the book study that I want to do. We're going to be reading a book in December and then doing the discussion in January. And I've got some other fun things lined up. So if you want to be a part of my community and really dive into marketing this year, get some projects built in your off season and come to our monthly zoom calls, troubleshoot some of your issues there. Please come and join us. It is so fun. So mydigitalfarmer.com FMS it's a monthly fee, you come in for the first month. There's even a kind of an introduction class that I encourage you to take when you get in there so that you learn the key lingo and then you're off to the races. After you audit your sales funnel, you're off to the races and you start building your assets for your marketing sales funnel. So I'd love to help coach you and be a part of your finally getting control of your marketing system and getting confident that you know what you're doing. So mydigitalfarmer.com FMS I hope to see you inside. All right, quick announcement. If you actually made it all the way to the end of this episode, next week is Thanksgiving week here in the United States and so I will not be releasing a podcast next week. It's one of the two days in the year when I take a break so you won't have a new episode loading into your podcast player. Please don't send me emails. It's part of the plan. Okay, so we're taking a break. I hope you enjoy some time with your family and just know that I'm grateful for you. If you liked today's episode, please go share it with a friend. I want as many farmers as possible to get value from all the good stuff that's in the archives here. Go leave me a rating or a review. It does really help more people discover what's going on here on the podcast. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 339 and if you want to get onto my email list and get some of that free stuff, that free marketing training and get into my community, go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. You will be really glad that you did. Thank you so much for joining me today, everyone, and I hope you have an amazing week, an amazing Thanksgiving, and I'll catch you in two weeks. Remember, I believe in you. Bye Bye. Sam.