← My Digital Farmer Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript13 lines
- [00:00]
A
What if I walked you through step by step? Exactly how I'm selling out monthly chicken and pork shares on my own farm right now. In today's episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on the entire promotion so you can copy the framework for your own meat sales. Let's get started.
- [00:22]
B
Hey there.
- [00:22]
A
This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to
- [00:25]
B
the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product.
- [00:33]
A
You've got to know how to sell it, too.
- [00:36]
B
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
- [00:47]
A
how to find more customers, increase your
- [00:49]
B
sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show.
- [00:59]
A
Well, welcome to episode 347 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast cast. 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 business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. I'm really excited to have you here. This is going to be a great episode. Big shout out to my regular listeners and thank you for tuning in week after week. You guys, you don't know how much that means to me. Your loyalty, the fact that you're telling other farmers that I exist and sharing the love and the value of this podcast. We are making farmers more profitable and more confident and it's such a powerful mission. So thank you for being a part of that. If you're new to the show, I'm really glad you're here that you discovered the podcast. Make sure that you subscribe to my show and go check out my first 10 episodes, especially if you're new to the marketing lingo, because I'm going to walk you through the key principles and foundations there that build on each other to help you learn the ropes. Another great place to go if you want to get an on ramp into the marketing space as a farmer is to get onto my email list. You can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and when you do, I'm going to send you an email every five days for several months and I'm going to basically map out the most important things that you need to know. I'm going to point you to podcast episodes that are really good. Everything's going to build on each other. I'm going to give you free trainings, free templates, people you should be following, just nuggets of wisdom. And I encourage you to subscribe to that. Save those emails in a folder and just go through them slowly over time. It's such a wealth of information. So again, that's free and it's@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. A new year is the perfect time to streamline your sales and grow more profitably. So if you run a CSA or you sell wholesale or manage both, localline helps you streamline your sales and scale with confidence. In 2025, farms and food hubs that used Localline grew their sales by 33%, building on the 23% growth they saw the year before. Average order values increased by 31%. I know mine did. And total order count grew by 9%. Look, real results across operations of all sizes. Localline brings everything together in one platform. They have CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, barcode scanning, a box builder and POS so that you spend less time managing admin and more time growing your business. And switching couldn't be easier. There are no setup fees, my friends, no sales commissions, and their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free, taking the workload off your plate. And that usually only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use the code MDF2026 at checkout. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter that code MDF2026 start 2026. Organized, efficient and ready to grow with localline. And now back to the show. Oh my gosh everyone, you know what just happened? I just finished recording the podcast for like the first 10 minutes and I was looking at my scream at my waveform audio and I'm thinking why is it so like small? And then I realized I didn't have my microphone plugged in. Ah, rookie mistake. So I had to start over. It was so good too. So hopefully I can repeat what I just did. Welcome back to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. And today I want to pull back the curtain on a special promotion that we are running right now at Shared Legacy Farms that is new for us and I'm having a lot of fun with it. It was a pretty easy lift. We are selling monthly chicken shares and we're adding this year a brand new monthly pork Share. And we did this for the first time last year in 2025 in the month of January. That's when we first did our chicken shares. It was wildly successful. I had no trouble selling them out. It was a five month commitment. Five monthly chicken bags. It's priced at $750. I'm going to go through the whole thing later on in this episode, but this year we decided that we would try beta testing a pork share and so we're adding that to the promotion. It's creating a lot of buzz inside our community. And as I was building out the emails and the social media and just the whole promotion plan, a few days ago I had this moment where I thought, oh wow, this is actually a really clean, repeatable framework. This is another example of a great promotion launch that I'm building and I could share this with my farmers. So today I'm going to walk you step by step through exactly how I am designing this promotion so that all of you meet producers. And I know I have a lot of you who listen to this show can listen in and replicate something similar. Maybe you want to try selling a CSA or a monthly meet share, whatever you want to call it and you're just intimidated by it. You're not sure how to go about it or the idea of putting all the stuff together feels overwhelming. Or maybe you've tried it before and the results were kind of ho hum and you're not exactly sure why so you don't have a lot of confidence for it again. Or maybe you've never even sold a monthly meat share. Okay, this episode is going to be very tactical. I'm going to walk you through what I did. Okay? No promises that it's going to work for you, but I have a feeling that there's going to be a few nuggets hiding in here. A few aha moments where you're like, ah, I never tried that. That sounds like that might be a deal breaker and it may be the difference maker for turning your monthly meat share promotion into a success. So hopefully it'll be very practical at the end. I'm going to tell you where I'm going to drop my entire promo plan. Yes, I put it all into a Google Doc. Emails, the social posts, the images that I used, and even the timeline. I'm going to be putting it inside farm marketing school. So for all of you who are members of fms, you'll be able to go into that platform and I'll have a spot on the kind of the homepage where you can just click on it and open it up. Eventually I'm going to turn this into a project, but for now I can at least put the Google Doc in there. And that's going to make it really easy for those of you who just want to go and copy the emails and just put, make your own versions of it. It'll just be super fast so you can see how I did it. Okay, so let's, let's get into it. We're going to get kind of detailed here. Before we talk marketing though, I just want to make sure we talk product, because we want to start with a product that we're excited about, that we believe in, that we think is going to be a winner. Right. We're always think through what's the product, what's the offer. And I want to give a little context because not everybody knows what exactly I'm promoting here. So we have created a monthly chicken share now this year, a monthly pork share. And we have partnered with another farm to do this with Anderson Farms in Bowling Green. Brian and Stacy Anderson. They are really great meat producers. We trust them. They've been doing our eggs for years in our csa. We knew that they sold chicken retail to their own customers at the Farmer's Market, mbg. We had this idea after we'd worked working with them for a few years and we were really impressed with their professionalism that what if we, what if we could sell meat? Like, I didn't even know if we could. I didn't know what the regulations were. And so I approached them about it last year in 2025 to see, hey, can we beta test, like, selling your meat to our customers and like, what's the profit margin for us? Like, if you basically gave it to us at wholesale, like, what could this look like? How could we create it? So we don't have a lot of work to do. You do most of the work, but we've got the email list, we've got the customer base. How can we make this work? Right? And so we ended up putting together an amazing package and figured out the fulfillment of it. I'll go through that in a minute. But ultimately it was a wonderful experience. They were super professional. We made some good money, it was easy and their quality is excellent. We trust them. Our customers have come to trust them. And so it was a natural question at the end of last year to say, how can we do this again? And how can we scale it? Like, how can we ramp it up? And do you have anything else we could sell? Like Maybe, maybe we could sell your beef. Maybe we could sell your pork. So we decided that we would try to beta test adding a new protein share to the mix. Not only would we duplicate the chicken share again this year, but we were going to try to add pork. And so we wanted to make sure that this was something that our customers would want. We kind of polled the audience. Would you be interested in a beef or a pork share? They were interested in both. Most of them actually wanted beef if there was a preference. But the Andersons are still working on that. They're like, well, that's going to take a few years for us to get that ready. But the, the protein share, the, the pork share was something that they wanted. So it's solving a real problem or a real desire for our current customer base. It was going to be easy to do the, the, as I'll talk about later in the fulfillment process, we don't, we don't do a whole lot like we just sell it. And then the Andersons show up on the different days with their trailer at our pickup site and they're passing out the shares to our customers. Right. We just have to communicate to the customer and remind them that it's the day to pick it up. But we don't really have to do a whole lot beyond that. And so that makes it really easy for us to promote. It also doesn't create freezer storage headaches for us because the product never comes to our farm. It stays with the Andersons. They're coming to the pickup site and handling all of that. So it just kept it nice and clean and it works for financially, as you will hear later, there's a pretty nice profit margin for us. So it's just a easy yes. So once we sort of decided that we wanted to, we identified and targeted a product that we wanted to build a promotion around. We once again adopted the, the beta test mindset. And I wanted to bring that up too here on the front end before I go into the weeds about how the promotion works. Because I think this really helps you as you're thinking about creating your own first time monthly meat share. Take the pressure off by framing the promotion as a beta test. Like literally use that term as you're promoting it. 2025 was our beta test year for the monthly chicken shares. And this year we're positioning the pork shares as the beta test. We don't have as many of them, we only have 20, so there's automatic scarcity there next year if we are able to add in the Beef that will also be positioned as a beta test. And why is that, I think, so important? When you call something a beta test, first of all, it lowers the pressure on yourself because you're coming into it with a different mindset. For you, it feels more like playing in the sandbox. Like, you know what, we'll just be curious. We're gonna play, we're gonna throw this out there. We're gonna see what happens. If not a lot of all right, that'll be data and we're not going to beat ourselves up and we'll learn from it and change it. Right. It just creates a different energy around how you show up to sell. It also helps you see possible future demand as you put the offer out there. You may be surprised to see that, yeah, people really like it and it sells out and they give you feedback throughout the season of what they're thinking and you ask for feedback and they're telling you, this was great, this part wasn't so great. Um, but you can kind of anticipate then for the next time around that you'll probably sell that same amount the next time and maybe even a little more. Right. You'll be able to tell if people were bummed that they missed out and didn't get one. It just helps you feel more confident then the next time around to pitch it again and to know whether you can even up the numbers. Um, it creates exclusivity as well. Anytime you can call something a beta test or you make it sound like you're limiting something. Now people want to, they want to be in that club that's testing, that's giving feedback. And it makes you, I guess, feel a little more comfortable making mistakes and creating as you go. You have the freedom to say, I don't have to have this all figured out. My customers know it's a beta test. They'll be okay if I make a few mistakes and I ask for feedback and there's just going to be this forgiveness. Right? So we literally used that language as we are pitching it. You know, we're starting with 120 chicken shares, 24 pork shares. If it goes well, we're going to expand next year. Help us, you know, beta test this concept, help give feedback along the way, Help us learn. See if this is a good offer. People love being early adopters. So I just want you to borrow that idea, borrow that concept and, and use that language of beta test. Okay. All right, part three here. Decide your non negotiables with your producer, or maybe you are the producer, but in my case, I'm not actually producing the pork. So we had to meet with our partner farm with the Andersons, and we had to go through some very specific questions to get clarity about how could I even build this offer? What is it going to look like? Right, so how many animals total? How many shares will that create? What cuts are going to go into the monthly bag, what could they confidently promise? And you know, how heavy are, what's the weight of those products? Will the bags be consistent? Will the product inside be consistent? Or is it going to be like a rotating feature? And this was all stuff that I didn't know. I don't produce animals. I don't have the first clue about how that works. So I really had to just educate myself on what could be possible. Who's going to transport the product? Are we going to have to store it here? Or can they actually bring it to the pickup location for us? Who is storing the frozen product? What's the wholesale price? What's the retail price? Did they have a suggested retail price? Because they're selling this somewhere else, right? They're selling it in BG to their products, to their, excuse me, to their customers in bg. And so I wanted there to be kind of a similar price point. What's my margin going to be? It had to be a win for both of us, for both this farm partner and for us. And so we met together, we got all clarity around that. We settled on what we thought this could look like. There was really good back and forth communication. So this step really matters, especially before you get into the weeds and try to obviously build an offer. If this isn't crystal clear, your marketing becomes really painful because you won't be able to answer the questions that your customers will inevitably ask. So we also got really clear about what are the frequently asked customer questions going to be. And I actually asked Stacey for a Google Doc of answers to some of these questions. And then I said, hey, can you brainstorm some other questions that you often get from your meat customers? Things that I'm maybe not thinking of. So we had things like, do you use antibiotics? What's the feed type? Are they pastured? What does pastured even mean? How fresh is the frozen product? What's in the sausage ingredients? Exactly. What happens if I miss my pickup? How are they packaged? Can they buy more than one share? And do I have to buy a vegetable share in order to get a meat share? These are some of the questions that come up. Or like, when is the pickup site time. So Stacy and I worked together to figure out the answers to those questions because I knew I was going to have to communicate that as part of the promotion and I wanted to make sure that I knew what I was supposed to say. And the answers to those questions later became email and social media content. Okay, so what I want to point out here is in this step, when you're figuring out the the non negotiables with your producer or trying to figure out what the product's going to look like, make sure that you're thinking through what are the FAQs of my customer? Because your FAQs are future emails. All right? They're going to be really helpful. Okay. Part four is I picked one target audience for this offer and this promotion. First. I am not advertising this to the general public. Now, you could choose to advertise it to the general public, but I'm not. I'm selling it to past customers who bought the chicken share last year, current customers that buy anything in my product suite, especially CSA members and just email subscribers in general. So in other words, a warm audience, people who already trust us, who have been getting emails from me, who have probably already bought something from me, that dramatically increases your conversion. If you pitch this just to a cold audience, you're just not going to see the same kind of conversion rates. Can you do that later? Sure. You could scale this very same promotion and try pushing it to the outside world, but I think it's smart to just push it at first to your internal audience. It's kind of fun to be able to tell them, hey, before I make this offer available to everyone else, I'm giving you first dibs because you're in my world. You're on my email list. So we're going to run a promotion just for you for the next seven days. And if I have offer any offers after that or product available after that, I'll send it out to the big wide world.
- [20:54]
B
Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends@citizensalmonalaska.com if you run a CSA and you're always looking for value added products that feel aligned with your farm but don't create more work for you, I want to tell you about Citizen Salmon Alaska. This is my fifth season partnering with them and we keep coming back for a really simple reason, it works and I genuinely love their product. Our CSA members love it too. The wild sockeye salmon is a standout and the scallops disappear fast. And I just trust the people behind the business. Citizen Salmon is a small family run seafood company working directly with independent fishermen out of Homer, Alaska. They offer wild sockeye salmon, halibut, black cod, shrimp and even in house smoked seafood, which makes it an especially easy add on for CSA farms. Here's why this partnership is such a win for farms like mine. I get to expand my product suite without taking on fulfillment. I promote Citizen Salmon to my audience. My customers order directly from their website using a farm specific code. Citizen Salmon ships the frozen fish straight to them and I earn a commission without handling inventory, packing or delivery. And the timing just works. Halibut in the spring, salmon as the summer approaches and beautiful seafood offerings for the holidays. They're currently signing up new farm partners through April.
- [22:27]
A
So if you're curious whether this could
- [22:29]
B
be a fit for your CSA, head to citizensalmonalaska.com and reach out to Erin to get the conversation started. That's citizensalmonalaska.com wild seafood done the right way and a partnership I'm proud to recommend. And now back to the show.
- [22:51]
A
I will say that the week before I began the internal promotion to my email list, I was telling the outside world that I was going to be promoting a new chicken and pork share. But the only way that you would be able to hear about it and purchase it is if you were on my email list. And I did get a bump in my email list during that week. So just realize that that could also be a way for you to grow your list. So the moral of this section is to sell this offer to people who have already raised their hand. Especially because it's a high dollar product. It's something you want to pitch to people who know you. And maybe the second kind of lesson in here is to make sure that you are cultivating and collecting an email list so that you can do this. If you haven't started this process, my friends, please please come inside Farm Marketing School so I can teach you how to do it. I have so much. I have an entire like hardcore course on email marketing 101 for farms which teaches you everything but you need to have a process for getting people on your list. I use kit.com as my email service provider. I know a lot of farmers start out with mailchimp. I find that to be a little bit clunky once you get to a certain level. I think you kind of need to graduate at some point out of that one, but it is a good first place to start. However, automations and some of the fancy stuff that you can do, you really need a more robust system I think so. I really like Kit.com. i'm an affiliate for that product, actually. If you decide to try that out, you can use my affiliate code, which is mydigitalfarmer.com forward/kit K I T Active campaign is another one that I like. And drip is good. There's a. There's a lot of good ones out there, but in case you're wondering which one I use. Okay, so pick a target audience first. I encourage you to choose your warm audience. The next step that I did was I chose my cart open date and time. So I decided, when am I going to promote this? Right? Every promotion has an ideal time for it to be promoted in your calendar. I want you to think about that for a second. You've got 12 months in which to promote your products, and there is an ideal time for you to promote something, right? That's just common knowledge. That's. That's common sense. And we decided to promote the chicken share in the month of January. When I look at all the different things I sell throughout the year, that felt like a good month to try and do it, because it is, you know, a $750 price point. I didn't want to bundle this promotion in with my fall CSA early bird renewal campaign. When I'm asking them to renew their CSA share, which costs $620, and, you know, get a fruit share and an egg share and cheese share and like all those add on shares, that's kind of one big offer. If I was worried that if I added meat into that as well at the same time that it would limit the amount, the average order value, because I feel like customers are really only comfortable spending like $990, $1,000 with me at one, at one time. So I'm trying to be cognizant of that. Knowing that about, about my. My stats try to make my offers fall underneath a thousand dollars. So I didn't want to put this in the month of December either, like, to compete with holiday spending. January is like a new year. People are home there. There's really nothing going on in my promotion calendar this month anyway. I didn't have anything to sell. There was a big gaping hole. And in farm marketing school, I talk about this concept of marketing peaks and valleys. And so when you're building your promo calendar, you're looking, you need to have four marketing peaks where you're making most of your money in the year. And then you're looking at, where do I have valleys? And then that becomes an opportunity for you to bring your cash flow up by creating a promotion in that month where there's a valley. So January was a valley. We chose also to target a weekend when we would open the cart. So the first day they can buy is January 31st. That felt like something that would be easy to remember the last day of the month. And it's also a Saturday. I wanted. Didn't want to open it in the middle of the week. I wanted it to be on a weekend when people are maybe still at home, they're not going to work, and they can wake up in the morning at 8am and there's an equal chance of more people like being able to access that offer. Now, when I advertised the day that the cart opens, I also make sure that I advertise the time, not just the day, but I say 8am if I just said, you can start buying it on January 31, that feels weak. Right. If I say offer open Saturday, January 31, 8am that has much stronger language. Do you sense that? And there might be a few people who are wondering, why is she saying 8am like, is that important? Like, is everybody going to be lining up? Like, do I need to. Do I have to get there right at a. Or I might not get it right? So we're trying to create urgency in our customers and I'm going to be dialing up urgency in a lot of other language and in. In. In my marketing and pre messaging. This is just another way that I do that. So ask yourself, when is the best window of time to promote this kind of a product? It needs to fit into your promotion calendar. And if you don't know how to build a promotion calendar, I have an entire project inside of our marketing school that will help you do it. Shows you exactly what goes in a promo calendar, gives you a template, and you can get that whole process done. I don't know. In under, like definitely in under eight hours. So really good class. So you're going to be looking at, where does it fit? You don't want to be selling this kind of a thing at the same time as another big promotion because you won't get good results. Right. But you're also asking on like a micro level, how many days am I running this promotion? When does the offer open? Specifically, when does the special offer close? Am I going to offer a bonus? Right. We're trying to come up with some timing for. For clarity. That also just takes pressure off you so you don't feel like you're eternally promoting this product. You can give Good energy and focus in your marketing and in your content for a short period of time. And I do recommend that it be short. Like seven days is usually what I recommend for a launch like this. And maybe the seven days prior to the cart opening is when you're doing some pre launch work where you're teasing the offer and you're sharing the information so that they have everything they need to know before the cart opens. And that way when the, when the cart opens, they, they're prepared, they're ready, they go in, they buy and it's done. And then those last seven days of the actual offer is mostly just you like trying to get those stragglers to come in. All right, so you've set the date and the time for the cart open and for the launch. Like when are you promoting this? The next step is that I set my revenue targets. So every promotion in my promotion calendar has rough revenue targets. Like this is what I'm hoping I will earn and that informs my budget. My husband and I build a budget at the beginning of the year and we look at past numbers and what we've done in the past and we kind of say, well, I'm pretty sure I confident I can repeat that again. And I usually try to add a little bit more percentage increase in those sales for most of my items, not all of them. And that way I know, okay, for in this case, like I really want to sell 100 chicken shares. I could sell 120, but I'm pretty confident I'll sell 100. I know I'll sell 20, 24 pork shares. I know the cost, $750 per share, right? And this is a five month share. That's how we're doing it. So every month starting in June, June, July, August, September, October, they get a bag of chicken, frozen chicken or a bag of frozen pork, depending on which one they want. The chicken is 17 pounds total, the pork is 12 to 14 pounds. And I'll actually walk you through what cuts we're, we're giving them to in just a minute. But I know the math right. I know how much revenue is possible if I fully sell them all. My, my, my revenue is going to be a hundred and eleven thousand dollars. And I know what my cogs are going to be because I've worked that out too in advance. My profit would end up being $22,200 if I can actually sell all this without a lot of like work on my part to fulfill on it, which is the beautiful part. So we've defined like, what does success look like for this promotion? It isn't just about the revenue. It's also about creating another opportunity for people to come in and buy something and add on other vegetable or fruit or egg or cheese. Add on shares. While they're in there, they're going to see all the other CSA shares in the same price list. And maybe some of the people, while they're choosing their chicken are going to be like, you know what, I want that cheese too. I was thinking about it last November, but I didn't do it and now I want it. And so we might actually see more of the add on shares. Come on. That's what I'm hoping will happen. So that's also kind of a goal. And it's another idea of success for me is just to create energy. Like, I want to have another moment where we get together and we rah rah around a product and get excited. Because there's a lull when you run a CSA like mine and you go dark for a few months in the winter. It's kind of nice to have something to talk about and get excited about. So set your revenue targets, decide what success is going to look like for you, and you know, what are some of your other goals in building this promotion? Maybe, maybe part of the goals for you isn't so much about your revenue targets, but maybe you just want to get the promotion built. You're like, I just want to create a beta test and get the first draft out there. Or maybe this is the first time you're going to be using email marketing and you just want to experiment with a promotional email sequence. I don't know, that could be a goal of yours too. So there's lots of different ways to define success. All right, I want to talk in the next section about the fast action bonus building. The offer is important what is going to be in the actual product itself because you'll want to be clear about that with your customers. And the first thing that I want to talk through here is what does. What is actually in our chicken share and in our pork share. Because I know some of you who are listening are actually really curious about that. You're wanting to know an example. So each month we are including a whole chicken, about four and a half pounds. Three packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, that's six breasts total, about four pounds. A package of specialty chicken sausage. And this will be one that rotates every week. So they have a cheddar cheese, an apple, a chorizo, a sweet Italian There are lots of different ones. One package of chicken patties. These are four quarter pound patties, about a pound. Options here include tomato basil sausage patties or ground chicken. A package of chicken drumsticks, that's four drums, 1.2 pounds. A package of chicken thighs, that's four thighs, 1.5 pounds. And two packages of chicken wings. Six wing or drumette combos per package, which is about 2.8 pounds. And I also have to get clear when I'm pitching the offer. Just I make sure they know how this works. I say shares are going to be distributed at your CSA pickup site on the second week of each month starting. Then I say the date they're going to be frozen and ready. The chicken will arrive individually packaged in freezer sealed plastic, delivered in an insulated bag. I have a picture of what that bag looks like. And then I even tell them we'll expect you to return the bag the following week or the following month so that we can reuse them for the next pickup. And then I give the total cost. It's $750 or $150 a month. And it's for five months in a row beginning on such and such date. How does payment work? I expect them to split it into two installments. I want 50% due at signup. The balance is due by June 1st. How they can pay and then I talk about the bonus. So I think it's important to offer some kind of incentive to get them to buy on the first day. So what we've decided to do this time around is to offer a chicken sausage. Well, it could be pork sausage too. Chicken or pork sausage bundle prize to one person who purchases on the first day before noon. So that's. They have to, they have to hit the window between 8am and noon. And I'm going to pick someone at random that first night and give them the prize. Yes, this is going to cost me a little bit of money. I think it's like 50 to 70 bucks. But that is so worth it because I have seen this work again and again that when I offer some kind of a little tantalizing piece of bait like that, people who know they want to get this anyway decide to do it on the first day, they get it over with. And I just have that confidence. Then when I see the sales roll in on the first day in a huge amount, right. It creates this one day or day one momentum. And I'm gonna walk home on the first day with like 80 or $90,000. Like that's just so motivating. Can you just imagine, like day one? Momentum changes everything psychologically for you as the salesperson, how would you feel if you sold 75% of your inventory on day one and you saw this huge amount of revenue come in? Right. How would you show up on day two to sell the remaining shares? Right. You would just, you would just come from a place of confidence and you would probably be okay even if you didn't sell the rest of them, if you didn't hit your 100 goal because you're like, wow, that was amazing. People really wanted this. So bonus offers work. There's many ways that bonuses can be put together. So I will link up in the show notes. I have a whole podcast episode from long ago, but it's still good about how to come up with a great bonus offer. So I'll encourage you to go listen to that. If you want some ideas of what that could look for or what that could look like for you, I wanna, before I move on to the next section, I know some of you are wondering, what does the offer look like for the Berkshire pork share? So I'm going to open up my product description here inside of Localline and read you the fine print. So this monthly bag includes bacon, pork loin chops, pastured pork sausage. So each package will include four pounds of some kind of pork sausage, plus a rotating selection of two additional pork cuts from the following list. Either a ham, small hole or slices, a pork butt or picnic roast, baby back ribs, spare ribs or country style ribs, or tenderloin or hocks. So these cuts rotate month to month so they can kind of enjoy some variety and that gives farmers a little bit of flexibility. But we're, we're giving them sort of the framework like this is what you can expect to see in the bag. This one doesn't have, because it's the beta test. We don't have exact weights yet for each of those things because we don't really know the pattern. But that's part of being a beta tester. But we do tell them it's 12 to 14 pounds. It's non GMO, it's pasture raised, it's Berkshire pork, $150 a month. And then we have like pictures again, pork arrives frozen, individually packaged, delivered in an insulated bag. It will have been recently processed, freshly frozen to preserve the quality and the flavor. Okay, so some of you are listening. That's what we're putting in our bags. I'll let you know what people think, but I'm pretty confident it's going to be good. Now, the way that fulfillment works, just so you know, we worked this out with the Andersons, and I love it. Once all the sales come in and I figure out, you know, where the different customers are landing, they choose different pickup locations. We have three of them. It's possible. So two. Two of the biggest pickup sites, the Andersons are actually volunteering to go to the pickup site that month and set up a tent for that hour and a half or, sorry, their trailer, and they'll be part of the pickup line. So as customers come through, they get most of the other CSA shares from the first pickup tent area, the vegetables, the fruit, the cheese. But if they have chicken or pork, they get directed to go to the next location, the next stop in the line, and pick up the bag from Brian. And he has his own list, hands them the stuff right out of his freezer, which is in the back of his trailer, and people just move on. That way Kurt and I don't have to worry about hauling trailers, an extra larger trailer, getting a bigger box truck to be able to fit those freezers, and just all the like logistics, it's just so much easier to have that. That was the arrangement we worked out with the Andersons, and they were willing to do that. So if you're just kind of wondering how fulfillment works, that's how it's working for us. No brainer. So really, all I have to do is sell the product and then communicate to my email list, hey, it's time to come pick up. Occasionally we have people who forget, and then we'll bring those frozen chicken bags home with us and put them in our freezers. We do have one or two empty ones here for the Elmore pickup site, and people then have to come and pick those up within five days so they can get out of our inventory. All right, so create some kind of an offer with a possible fast action bonus as well. All right, farmers, let me ask you something. As we step into a brand new year, do you actually feel ready for the marketing side of your farm business? Or are you quietly hoping you'll figure it out as you go, like last season? How'd that work out for you? If marketing your farm feels like a constant scramble, something you know matters, but never quite gets the time or clarity it deserves. You are not alone. I hear this from farmers every single week. And that's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School to help you. Farm Marketing School is my monthly membership designed to help farmers build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually fits into your real farm life. Inside you will find bite sized step by step do it yourself. Marketing projects that take the overwhelm out of things like writing sales emails or how to plan your promotions, how to build your social media strategy, how to update the homepage of your website, how to write an email nurture sequence, or setting up systems that work on autopilot even when you're busy in the field. Each month you choose what to focus on and I walk you through exactly how to do it with my on demand video trainings and my bonus resources. And you're not alone doing this. Each month we meet live on Zoom where you can ask questions, get group coaching and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor and a room full of peers in your corner. This is not a massive, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days so that you're making real progress without marketing taking over your life. So if this is the year you want to stop winging it and finally feel confident in a marketing system that brings in steady sales, I'd love to welcome you into farm marketing school. Join today at mydigitalfarmer.com FMS that's mydigitalfarmer.com FMs and now back to the show. Okay, the next thing I did, once I knew what my bonus offer was going to be, how I was going to drive scarcity, I had to decide on my messaging. I call them messaging buckets. Before I started writing my emails or my social media posts, I listed my core message buckets out. And here were some of the things that I included that I want to encourage you to think about. And I used ChatGPT to help me with this. So I started out with a list and then I said, what am I missing? Can you give me any other suggestions? So what is in the bag? And you'll notice that a lot of these things that are on the list here are frequently asked questions like that was what was driving my content? How does it work? Like how does pickup work? Who is producing it? So making sure to point to the Anderson so they get to know this beautiful family. What does pastured mean and why is that better? Berkshire pork as opposed to, I don't know, normal pork? What they get in the grocery store. Spent some time talking about that. Payment details, how payment works. This is kind of cool this year because we are adding Venmo as a payment option. I finally got a business Venmo but I am telling them, hey, you've got to pay the processing fee. And this is one of the cool features inside of localline is that you can check mark a box and it will and then write the percentage in there. And so just simply by doing that, the customer, when they check Venmo, they're agreeing that they are going to pay their invoice, is then going to add a 1.9% processing fee right to their invoice and charge them that when they go to Venmo. So I'm pretty excited to see that little element working, see how that works. FAQs, social proof. So if you've got past testimonials or raving fans or pictures of people making cool stuff with chicken in your Facebook group, I mean, I took a bunch of screenshots and I'm using that in some of my content. And then the scarcity, so always making sure that people know, hey, there's only 24 of these. Better make sure you come in the first few hours if you want pork. Here's the URL address. Here's the URL address. Here's the URL address. And it opens on the 31st at 8am like those, those are in every single email, every single social post. So I kind of came up with a list of what are the key messaging buckets. And there were a lot of other ideas. Like I had some fun quizzes and engagement kind of posts, but when you, when you finally then try to map it out into the amount of containers you have, there's only so many social media post times I have, right? Only so many emails I can send. There's really not a lot of space. And so you'll find that you actually have to make some hard decisions about what really needs to be said and what else is fluff. So I plotted them out just by topic onto a promotion container. I just used a, like a PDF, a printed monthly calendar of the month. And I used seven days for like a pre launch period. So I had seven days of content where I could before the cart opened where I could be teasing some of this information. And then I have seven more days after the cart opens where I could also do some fun content. That's a lot of time to pack in the different messaging elements or to repeat information that you may have already said before. Okay, so that was sort of step one here was to decide what those message buckets were going to be and make sure that I mapped out what order I wanted to tell those messaging buckets what time builds on each other. Then there was the sequence of the emails. So I made a decision to use email and a private Facebook group. Those were the two marketing channels that I'm using for this promotion. First I built the emails and here's. I'm just going to give you kind of the, the rough flow. I have seven emails that I re that I wrote. Each email has one primary focus. One, one job to communicate. So I don't throw everything into one email. And email number one is the coming soon chicken and pork. Sort of like the teaser email to get ready. Email number two was all the chicken details. So what's going to be in a chicken bag? Email 3 was what's going to be in the pork bag? Email number four. This is all before I open the cart. Okay. Email number four is a few days later. This is the faq. Everything you wanted to know about the chicken share that I've explained in the other emails but maybe you missed it. Like it's in this email in one email. Email number five was the night before. That's basically just set your alarm and I or I deliver the fast action bonus and I talk about that special bonus, present or prize. Email number six is when the cart opens the day. The cart opens at set in the morning and then email number seven is like four days later which is the social proof email where I'm sharing screenshots of people from the past who have purchased and things they've made with chicken. That one I. That one is the last one. I may add additional ones if I don't sell a lot, but I'm anticipating that I'll sell a lot of them on the first day and I may not even need to work so hard. Now if you want to know what exactly is written in each of those emails again, you can come inside farm marketing school and I'll have this whole Google folder in there that you can click on and just you'll be able to copy and paste, you'll be able to view it and copy and paste it to use for your own promo or at least as a template. Now these emails, the topics in these emails sync up with what I'm going to talk about on social media in the private Facebook group too. I just want to make sure you know that. So but I always start with the emails and get those mapped out. Now once I know what I want the topics to be, I actually go and write the emails. And this is so much easier now that I have chatgpt to help me. Actually I saved last year's chicken promo in a Google Doc, right. I already did this work last year, and as I've said on other podcasts before, I just, like, repeat it. I don't make this hard and feel like I have to write brand new emails every year. I go and I copy those emails. I change out the photos, I change out some of the language and the dates and the times. And the offer's a little different, right? But mostly it's just rinsed and repeated. I did have to add an extra email this year to explain the pork share, and I had to weave that into some of the language. So that was the one kind of addition. But what I did to rewrite that pork share is I basically took the notes from my meeting with Stacy with the Andersons about what would be in the pork share. And then I also copied and pasted the what's in a chicken bag email from 2025 that I used last year into ChatGPT and said, I want you to write an email just like this. What's in a chicken bag for pork? Using this information from my meeting with Stacy. And I clicked send or, you know, clicked the button and ChatGPT wrote an email that sounded like me, and I used about 70% of it. I added a little bit of soul, a little bit of humor to it, but, man, AI just really saves me a ton of time. If you've already done the work of writing a lot of this stuff before or versions of it, you can go back and just, you know, give a sample of your work to your virtual assistant chat. And she he, whatever it can write, can write the. The draft for you. So my teaching point here is like, don't be afraid to use Chachi bt. You do need to edit it and make some adjustments, but it really takes a lot of the. The fear of writing off of your plate. It doesn't replace you, but I feel like it removes that blank page syndrome, you know, where you're staring at a page and you're like, I don't know what to say. Okay, So I had my emails, and I got those into place. I scheduled them inside of kit.com and once that was done, I turned my eyes to social media and I paired each email with my private Facebook group so that I could create a post for each day. Okay. So I would take the email that I'd written, put it into ChatGPT and say, please help write a social media prompt or post around this topic. And it would give me a basic framework to start with. I usually remove a lot of the emojis because I'm not really an emoji girl. I switch up some of the language, but it got me 80% there. And then I did have to go into Canva and create a graphic. But again, because I did this last year, I already had a lot of the template there. I had a folder called Chicken Promo and I went and found it, switched out some of the pictures and I just downloaded those images. So I was able to schedule those social media posts. I added a few extra fun engagement ones for after the cart opens and yeah, simple system one and done. So I can now just let the promo happen. I'm sitting here on January 25th recording this to you. By the time you listen to this episode, it will already have happened. My promo will be done. I'll let you know how it goes later. But I, I don't have to think about it. It's all scheduled and ready to go. And when it happened, I guess I really just have to remember to go into local line and turn on the products at 8am on January 31st. But that's pretty much it. All right, so once that promotion now is done, I've got the email scheduled, I've got the social post scheduled. I've got clarity around the offer. There's a few final things that I do to to make this promotion repeatable. I create a master promotion document inside of Google. So this is one Google folder. Inside that Google folder is a Google Doc. In that Google Doc I have links to the day by day emails. I have all the social media posts copied and pasted in the right order. I have a picture, the social media graphic that goes with each post in there as well, I have the Canva image links so it links right to the Canva folder where all those images are. I have notes to myself to remember things I still have to do live throughout the week. So for instance, I made a note on January 31st in the evening at 8pm that I have to post the winner of the bonus. That's something I can't do in advance. And then I will eventually put my metrics and my promotion results into that document. And this is great because next year I can go back to this folder and I can see what did I do. I can be reminded of the flow and be like, oh, okay, I don't have to worry, it's all here. And I can just go click on the links, find the original emails, duplicate them, replicate the whole thing again, run it again, fix it based on the notes, right? This is so, so key. And this Google Doc is the Doc that I'M sharing with my Farm Marketing School members. If you want to have access to see it, just join Farm Marketing School. Just join for a month and get access to that one Google Doc to help you build the build this project. So it's totally worth it, right? But this is a gold mine that practice alone and do that for all your promotions and a year later you will, you will be so far ahead. Now I want to make sure before I wrap up here, I just want to remind you that the timing matters more than you think. I intentionally did not run this during my CSA early bird campaign because high priced add ons like this deserve their own spotlight. They deserve their own moment in the sun in the promotion calendar. Put a container around big offers like this. It increases your conversion. So if you've ever tried to to run a promotion like this and it failed, maybe ask yourself, did I try to do it in a month when I was also asking people to buy a lot of other things or where it was competing with other products? Or maybe it was in a in a month where people had just emptied their pockets and they didn't have the resources to reload and buy this. Also, I don't feel weird about selling this product this time of year. Number one, it's a great product, it has clear value and people are excited about it. I was picking up on that even before I started planning the promotion because I had seen so many people reaching out to me saying, hey, when's it happening? When do I get my chicken? You've been talking about how it's going to happen in January and it's like January 20th and I still don't know anything. And that just made me feel like really confident. Like, Corinna, it's okay. Like just throw this together. People want it. Don't make it hard. Don't make it complicated. They're going to sell themselves. And that really gave me a lot of confidence. This can be fun, right? Selling doesn't have to feel heavy. When you build offers that people genuinely want, marketing feels easy. So don't make it more complicated than it has to be. I'm really leaning into this. As you know, if you've listened to my podcast, my word of the year is enough. And I'm practicing. When is it enough? Like I don't have to go a hundred percent. I could probably just go 70%. That's enough to get it done. And just releasing that pressure I put on myself to be amazing and build this outrageously complex promotion? No, it can be simple. Okay, so there you have it. That's. That was the promotion plan. I built that in about eight hours. That includes the brainstorming of the offer, the writing of the emails, the scheduling of the emails, the writing of the promotion, social media posts, the making of the images in Canva, getting those scheduled, putting the Google Doc together. And if you want to see that Google Doc, where everything lives, I'm dropping it into farm marketing school in February for a couple months. Just that Google Doc alone will be like a road map for you. Eventually, I'm going to turn this into a project in farm marketing school, too, and that Google Doc will be part of that project. But for now, honestly, the Google Doc is really all you probably need because the training was right here in the podcast. So you'd be able to adapt that for beef shares, pork shares, chicken shares, lamb seafood shares, probably even. And you could use ChatGPT to customize it. Right. If you have access to my Google Doc, you could go in and copy and paste my emails and say, hey, here's a sample email. I really like this style. Could you write an email like this in my voice? Here are my specifics of my product, and it's just gonna make the whole process for you faster. You're gonna get a baseline, right? I'm not saying copy my emails literally, but use it to help you and use ChatGPT to help you make this faster and easier. You don't need to make this complicated. So start small, start simple, run a beta test. You don't need a giant audience. Just build a clear offer and get that email in place. Those emails in place, figure out what you want to say, put those social media posts together, get that Google Doc from me. Use ChatGPT. This can be done fast, my friends. This can be done fast. All right, the show notes for today can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 3 4, 7. If you like today's episode, or if you know a farmer who could benefit from this information, please share the link with them and help me get the word out that this podcast exists, please. I just really want people to know about it. I want farmers to get better at selling. And if you want to get on my email list, I have some free stuff to send you to make your marketing stronger. You can get that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. You can also find me on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I show up there in stories mostly throughout the week with little tips here and there, and I would love to connect with you of course. I'm also inside for a marketing school. Every single month I have a monthly zoom coaching call with all of my members. We meet up, we talk through your problems, your troubleshoot, your projects that you're going through, where you need support, sharing wins. I love all of you who are in FMS so much and it keeps growing. So I'd love to have you guys join that community. It's really special and it's keeps getting better and better. So check that out@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS thank you for joining me today. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Bye Bye.