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There's a number in your farm business that quietly determines how much money you make every year, and most farmers have never actually calculated it. Today, we're gonna find it. And once you see it, you won't be able to unsee it. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's. 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. Well, welcome to episode three, 359 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 get more confident in their marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Big shout out to all of my regular digital farmers. Welcome back to the show. If new to the podcast, I'm so glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out my first 10 episodes because I designed them years ago to be an onboarding into the marketing lingo. Yes. When I first started this show, I actually thought about my future listeners years from now. And I intentionally stitched those first 10 episodes together because I wanted to lay kind of a roadmap foundation for people. So that's always a good place to go. You can also get onto my email list, which is free. And when you do that, I'm going to send you an email into your inbox every four or five days for like three months. And those are also very intentionally sequenced so that they build on each other and you learn the framework of marketing. I point you to certain podcast episodes, certain resources, free trainings and tools. It's really good. I encourage you to get on it. Hopefully you find it value. And if you don't, you can always unsubscribe. So you can get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at localline. If you run a CSA or you sell direct or wholesale, or you manage both, Localline helps you simplify your operations and scale with confidence. I love this platform. In 2025, farms and food hubs using Local Line grew their sales by 33%. Average order values increased by 31%, and total order count grew by 9%. That is real results across operations of all sizes. Local Line brings everything together into one platform. So CSA management, wholesale ordering, access to new wholesale opportunities. They have automated inventory, barcode scanning, a box builder. They even have a pos. And that means you spend less time managing admin and more time growing your business. Switching couldn't be easier. There are no setup fees, no sales commissions, and their onboarding team will even migrate your storefront for free, taking the workload off your plate. As a podcast listener, you'll get one premium feature free for a full year when you use the code MDF2026 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline all one word. Then use that code MDF2026 and you'll get that discount. So start the season strong with Local Line. It's streamlined, efficient, and built for growth. And now back to the show. All right, today we're starting out with some mail that I got. This was so fun. It came from a podcast listener, Kendall Meadows. I got it yesterday. It's this really beautiful postcard that it looks like she actually drew some asparagus spears on the front with either watercolors or marker. I can't tell, but it's really pretty. And then on the back, a handwritten note, and I wanted to read it. She wrote, thank you for episode 355. That was just a few weeks ago. I felt like you were talking directly to me, and it was just the encouragement I needed. I suspect you know that your work helps a lot of people, but I'm sure it's still nice to hear it. Anyways, have a great season. Love, Kendall Meadows. Well, Kendall, yes, it really is nice to hear it anyways, and I want to thank you for taking the time to hunt down my address on my farm's website, probably so that you could send this to me. It was very thoughtful, and I'm going to put it on my bulletin board here in my office and be inspired by it. So if you're enjoying the show, everyone send me a note like that and I'll read it online. I'll read it on the air, or you can go to the podcasts on Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. I love. I love reading them. I do read them. And when they come in the mail like this, that is just like, one of the best things ever. So if you're getting anything out of my podcast, let me know. Sometimes I just sit here and record onto the airways and I wonder, I mean, I can go look at my stats. I know people are listening, but still, it's nice. It's nice to hear. All right, today. Oh, I'm excited about this one. This topic was inspired by the time of year because, you guys, we are getting started here with our main season. If you're in North America, at least some of you have started already and I'm kind of switching over. I'm turning away from my off season schedule and getting back into a new workflow and I want to set us up for success as we're beginning to pitch offers and get more intentional about sales and marketing in the main season. I want to point your eyes, fix your attention on a very important metric that you should be measuring that you should actually know by heart. So let me start out with a question. What do you think is the way to grow your farm business? Like, if you wanted to grow the amount of revenue that you produced on your farm, what would you say? What's your go to answer? Just say it right now. Wherever you are, in the tractor, in the car, maybe you're in the pack shed, just speak it out loud. Or if you're with a team, let's all make a guess or hit pause and share your ideas. Okay, I am guessing that many of you probably said something like, oh, I need to find more customers. I'm raising my hand here. That is what I used to say all the time. That was my go to default answer. That is actually a legitimate way to grow your revenue. I'm not knocking that. But what if the real lever isn't actually getting more people, but rather getting more value from the people you already have? And there is a number that tells you exactly how your business is doing. And most farmers have never calculated it. And that number is customer value. Customer value. What is that? Well, customer value is the average amount that a customer spends with you in one year. And how do you calculate it? Well, the easy way to do it is to go into your E commerce provider. If you track that or maybe the square, whatever, and take your total revenue and divide it by the number of customers, that'll give you kind of a basic customer value number. This, it's called the cv, the acronym. Another way you might do this is to kind of ballpark it. If you don't have an E commerce platform that you can use, you can take a Look at your signature products, the things that you typically sell, and you can estimate how many of those products most of your customers buy in a typical year. And then that can kind of get you at a ballpark figure. Okay, those are a couple different ways you might figure out what that number is. Okay. Now, there's also something called lifetime customer value. This is known as lcv, and that is simply computed by taking the customer value and multiplying it by the average number of years your customer stays with you. Okay, so now that I have defined this metric for you, do you know what yours is off the top of your head? Everyone's shaking their head. I hope that by the end of today, you will do the work to figure out what this number is, and I'm going to make a case for why this number is so important. And I'm hopefully going to empower you and inspire you through this episode to show you how you can get this number to go up pretty easily in ways that you may not imagine. So my customer value is $2,050. That means I know that my average customer spends about $2,000 a year with me. And that means that as new customers come into my funnel, I can pretty. Pretty almost guarantee that within a couple of years, they're going to be earning that much for me. Right. That's really exciting when I think about it that way. Now imagine if you knew what your number was. Now you have that benchmark in mind. And of course, the goal is to always try and get that to go higher. If you don't even know what the number is, then you. You're kind of shooting around in the dark. You don't know if what you're doing is making an impact. So I really encourage you, at the very least today to go and try to figure out what your CV is, just so you're aware. And then we can begin the work of trying to do different strategies to get it to go up. We're going to spend the rest of the episode talking about that. Now, just also imagine if you could raise that customer value, the average amount a customer spends with you in a year. If you could raise that by 20%, what does that do to that number? If you could raise it by 50%, if you could double it, that's. That's significant revenue for some of you. All right, so I've talked about this several times on the show. It gets brought up a lot in farm marketing school because it's important. There are four main levers that you can pull that will increase your Customer value. If you want to know, how do I get that to go higher? Corinna, if that is the focus this year, year you want to make more revenue, well, you need to increase your customer value. How do we do that? There are four ways. Number one is you can increase the prices of your products. That's a really easy way to do it. Even if you just increase it by 10%, you'll see a bump in your customer value. The second way is you can increase the average order value. That's the amount that a person spends, spends in any given transaction. Again, if you can just raise that by 10 to 20%, you'll see a bump in your customer value. If you can increase the purchase frequency. So the number of times they come and buy from you in a given year, even just increasing that by 10%, 20%, one or two or three times, think about how much that would add if everybody did that. It's another way to increase your customer value. And then the fourth way is you can expand your product ladder. That's kind of getting at number three. But if you, if you sell more things, if you make more offers, then you will pull that frequency lever, right? A person comes back and buys that thing because you now have something else to offer, or they stick it in their cart and it increases the average order value. So increase price, increase average order value, increase the purchase frequency, or expand your product ladder. Offer more products. Now, in the early years of our business, I would say the first seven, six, seven years, all we had was a CSA box shared. Legacy Farms sold a CSA share for 18 weeks. It was priced at a certain amount. I want to say it was like 400 bucks. And that was it. We pitched it. We found our customers, we delivered on the product. At the end of the year, we pitched something else. We pitched it again, right? Will you renew your share? And we didn't have anything else to offer them. I think by the second year we were offering a fruit share. So now we could give them another product. We made a little bit more money, but we didn't have any other moment in the year where we sold anything. And looking back on that now, I see what a missed opportunity that was because that, that was my ceiling. I would Only EVER earn $400 from this customer every year unless I found some other things to offer them, unless I had other products to sell. So adding products is a huge part of unlocking your growth and breaking that ceiling. And some of you need to hear that today. For some of you, that's the big aha, moment because you're still early on in your business and that hasn't occurred to you yet. Okay? So keeping your eye fixed on this customer value number, the number they can spend with you in one year is really important. If it is locked in place because you only have one thing that you sell per year, then you're, you're landlocked, right? You won't be able to to make that go higher. So why does this metric matters so much? Okay, why do we even care? And I actually want to suggest that this might be one of the most important metric numbers in your entire business. Because once you know it, a few really powerful things start to shift and happen. I have a big list of things here. I really tried to cut it down, but they are all so important for you. And I want to make a case for what seeing this number is going to help you analyze and how it's going to shift the way that you do marketing and sales. Okay? So first of all, it's going to give you predictability and the peace of mind that comes with that. When you know your average customer's value or worth, let's say it's $400 a year or $1,200 a year, or in my case, $2,000 a year, you can start to forecast, you can say, well, If I have 200 customers, I can expect around this much revenue and you can count on that and you can budget for it, which is huge when it comes to peace of mind. And if you have, you know, a goal in mind for sales, like, okay, I want to grow by 10 more customers who are going to produce at that level, you can predict, you know, a five year forecast of how your business will grow and what you can do in terms of capital expenses or how to slowly invest in your business to get to where you want to go, right? So if I grow to 250 customers, here's what that could look like in terms of numbers. And now you're not guessing anymore. And you can budget with confidence and you can make hiring decisions or plans, or you can plan inventory and mix up things with your crops, right? You start to understand what a normal year looks like, what the benchmark is. And that allows you then to feel really good about, oh, I actually grew this year, I actually developed. I can see progress. Okay? That's the first thing. Second of all, knowing your customer value completely changes how you think about marketing, because now you're making smarter marketing decisions. You know what a customer is actually worth. So instead of asking things like, is $30 too much to spend on acquiring a customer through a Facebook ad. You start asking, okay, well if a customer is worth $600 to me in one year, would I spend $30 to get one? And suddenly that Facebook ad, that cost per lead feels different or doing some kind of a giveaway. When you try to get someone to take your gateway offer and you're taking like a five dollar hit because you're basically giving it away for free. Like it feels different because you know what your customer is actually worth. Lead magnets feel different and you begin to understand there's a difference between the cost per lead, which is the cost of getting someone on your email list they may not buy yet. Right. First they're just an email lead, and the cost per customer, which is getting someone to actually convert and buy. So you just stop guessing about what's too expensive or you stop feeling guilty about that. You step more confidently into that space space of investing in lead acquisition because you have a number that is guiding those decisions that is really huge. Because I used to be totally against spending money to acquire customers because I'm like pinching pennies. And now, now that I know what, what an average customer brings me in a year, it's like a no brainer to spend 10, 20, $30 to acquire that customer. Okay, number three, the other reason I love knowing what my customer value number is is it shows me where the growth is actually coming from. And I think a lot of farmers get this, get this wrong or just miss this. A lot of us think, if I want to grow my business, I need more customers. That's kind of our default setting and that's where we spend a lot of our attention and a lot of our marketing. That is common for farmers who come into farm marketing school. They come in thinking, oh, I'm, I'm joining farm marketing school because I need to learn how to get more customers. But when you, when you study, when you take the metrics class in farm marketing school, we go really deep into all this and you start to see, oh, there's an amazing calculator in there that kind of shows you what it looks like in the 3D world in real time if you were to shift very specific numbers. But you start to see that growth looks more like getting someone to buy one more time per season or getting someone to spend 10 more dollars per visit. That also has a huge impact on your revenue growth. Those are some powerful levers you can pull instead of just, oh, that one lever of get more customers in the door. Well, what if you're also pulling the other levers of getting the AOV to go higher and getting them to buy more frequently and raising the price? I mean, you can quickly double your revenue if you raise all four of those by just a fraction of percentage. Right? That adds up fast. So if your average customer is spending just $300 a year and you increase it to 375 using some different marketing strategies that we learn in from marketing school, you just grew your business by 25% and you did it without adding a single new customer. Okay, so let me show you what this looks like in real life. I wanted to have a real life example here and I, I had to go to ChatGPT for this because I, I needed it to help me kind of do the scenario and the hypothetical, the numbers. So let's just imagine a vegetable farmer selling at a farmer's market. I know that's a lot of you who are listening. And let's just say you've got about 150 regular customers. So this is where I just plugged in numbers and I asked AI to help me flesh out what this would look like. On average, let's say each of those customers spends about $30 per visit. Again, I was just thinking through like what we typically saw when we were at the market. And let's say that those customers shop roughly 10 times in the main season. Okay, so if those are your metrics, your customer value would be $30 times 10 visits and that's $300 per customer per season. Okay, now if you had 150 customers at that $300 level, that's $45,000 per year. And that would be your baseline. That's what your current system is producing. Okay, now I want to walk you through what happens when you pull these different levers. Okay, so let's just say that you chose to pull the lever of aov, you are going to increase the average order value. What if we don't get more people that season? We just help each person spend a little bit more time each time they're at the booth. So maybe you introduce dinner kits or 35 to $40 bundle options. Maybe you even have a sign up that lets people know that most people are spending about $30. Or you build offers that encourage people to spend $40. 45 because if they do, they're going to get a free seasoning packet. I don't know. Okay, so now your average spend per visit might jump from $30 to $36. So now your customer value changes to $36 times 10 visits. Now you're at $360 for your annual revenue per customer. And that bumps your revenue up to $54,000 a year. If all 150 customers do that right, that's a $9,000 increase. And you haven't found a single new customer. Now the other option is you could pull a different lever. You could pull the frequency, the purchase frequency lever. So if instead of spending more each time, you're just finding ways to get those 150 customers to come back more often and spend what they typically spend. So maybe you increase their visits from 10 to 12 visits per season. How would you do that? Well, if you get consistent about sending a weekly email reminder, or maybe you're including fun recipes with a particular seasonal item to get people's curiosity piqued. Maybe you introduced loyalty cards. There's lots of different ways you can do this. And now let's say your customer value bumps up to 12 visits, that's $30 times 12 visits, that's $360. Okay, and again, pulling that, that particular lever, you would have $54,000, same result, just pulling a different lever. Are you seeing how this works? Now the third lever you could pull is just to add a different product. Maybe you expand the basket. So you add eggs and bread and herbs and value added items to your product suite and the average spend rises to $45 per visit because people are putting more stuff into their basket. The customer value jumps to $450 a year from 360. That's $45 times 10 visits. And so your new revenue under that system would be 150 customers times 450, 67,500 same customers, but they just buy more products from you. Okay, now stick with me because I have one more like example here. What if you stacked two of these levers at the same time? What if you got the AOV to increase a bit from $30 to 36 and you got their frequency to rise from 10 to 12 visits. Now, if you do all the math, I'll spare you the details, your new revenue would be $64,800. That's a twenty thousand dollar increase again, without adding a single new customer. So let's compare that to the, the default strategy that we all have of just trying to get more customers. And that's what we think is the way to grow our revenue. If your customer value stayed the same at 300 and you would want to hit that $64,800, you would need 216 customers instead of your 150, that's 66 new customers you'd have to find. So what's easier? Finding 66 brand new people to shop from you or getting your current customers to spend $6 more per visit and come two more times? Right. Do you see that this is a big shift? And I think a lot of farmers market vendors are playing like this traffic game when we need to be playing the relationship game. So that was a lot for number three. But I just want to hammer home this is why it's important to know your customer value number, number four. It also helps you identify your best customers and build around them. Not all of your customers are the same. Right. And we tend to treat everyone equally. But when you look at your data, you're going to see that some people are spending $100 a year, some people are spending $1,000 a year. And you can start to ask some better questions like who are my best customers? What are they buying? How are they buying? How did they get there? What path did they take through my business to turn into that kind of buyer? And that's where it gets kind of fun. Because now you're reverse engineering the journey of your ideal customer and you're not just guessing what people want. You're starting to build a system that creates more of those best customers. And it really is about building a system. That's what farm marketing school is all about. Helping you build each of the marketing assets, each of the different pieces of the marketing machine, eventually stitching them all together and tweaking them until you get this optimized customer. It's just moving through. It's almost like a race, a runner on a race. And we're passing the baton through the race from one piece of your marketing machine to the next until they graduate and turn into this frequent buyer. Knowing your customer value also helps you design better offers. And I want to distinguish that not not just better products, but better offers. Customer value is really a reflection of how many times people buy, times how much they spend, times how long they stay.