How to Use Drip Email Marketing to Increase Farm Sales
Email marketing is used by a lot of power players in the local food industry, and it can have a huge impact on your farm’s bottom line. Seven Sons recently revealed on their GrazeCast podcast that a massive 35% of their revenue is attributed to email marketing. They use an email automation platform called Drip, and here at Grapevine, we’ve been hard at work becoming Drip experts.
We’ve created dozens of Drip workflows for farms this year, and seen the amazing impact on farm sales first-hand. We’ve invested in Drip training for everyone on our team, and even worked one-on-one with Drip’s in-house deliverability team to soak up as much information as possible! (Email deliverability describes the rate at which your farm emails make it straight to the inbox, vs. getting buried in the promotions tab or spam folders—more on that later!)
What is Drip Email Marketing?
Drip is an email automation platform designed to build your subscriber list and boost farm revenue without a massive time investment. Drip email marketing will help your farm make more money and connect with customers, even when you’re busy building other parts of your business. Best of all, this solution integrates seamlessly with GrazeCart and emails can be personalized based on actions taken within your GrazeCart website!
For example, we can configure Drip to automatically:
Welcome new subscribers
Remind customers who haven’t ordered that the order window is closing
Email customers who never finished ordering that they have items in their cart (known as cart abandonment)
Notify customers that frequently purchase chicken about a chicken restock
Drip can also be used to send out newsletters and farm updates.
Best Practices to Get Your Farm Emails to the Inbox
Before you start sending to your farm’s entire subscriber list, make sure you take every step possible to increase the deliverability of your emails. When we talk about deliverability, we just mean how likely your emails are to land in a recipient’s inbox, versus their promotions tab or—worst of all—the dreaded spam folder. The specific algorithms used to determine deliverability, but this quick checklist will give your emails the best possible chance of reaching potential farm customers:
Ask subscribers to add you to their contacts list. Here’s an insider tip: emails from people in your contact list always go to the inbox. If you can convince subscribers to add you to that list, they’ll never miss an email because it went to the Promotions tab again.
Personalize your emails and use a conversational tone. The more personalized a message is, the less likely it is to end up in spam. So, when you’re writing to your farm email list, talk to them like you would an old friend. Using Drip’s personalization features, you can take it a step further, addressing each recipient by name, recommending products based on prior purchase activity, and more.
Avoid ALL CAPS and overt sales language, like “free,” “guarantee,” and “click here.” BUY NOW and receive a FREE farm gift — LIMITED TIME ONLY. If you received an email with that subject line, would you even open it? Just don’t do it. These words can be used sparingly but should be kept out of subject lines whenever possible. Remember, you’re recommending an awesome product to a friend, not making a sales pitch.
Keep your subscriber list healthy. Continuing to email contacts that consistently ignore your emails comes off “spammy” to email service providers. A healthy email list is one full of people that genuinely want to hear about and engage with your farm. We’ll share some concrete tips to maintain list health later in this post.
Optimize your photos. Optimizing images for your emails means they load faster and show up as intended (not blurry or distorted). Aim for images that are no larger than 1200 px wide with a file size of 1MB or less. (We’ll have a post coming soon to walk you through how to do this!)
Authenticate your sending domain. This is a technical process that confirms you own your sending domain and allows you to mirror it exactly in emails from Drip. For example, if we were to send you a marketing email from an unauthenticated domain, the email would appear to be from caite@grapevinelocal.com via dripmail.45678. The same email from an authenticated domain would appear to be from caite@grapevinelocal.com—that looks much more trustworthy, right? Email service providers think so too, and that means your emails are more likely to land in the inbox.
(Have enough on your list? We can handle Drip setup for you — just get in touch!)
Increase Farm Sales With These Drip Email Marketing Strategies
Getting farm email marketing right can be a challenge, but don’t give up. Emails are one of the most cost-effective ways to increase farm sales. And, with email marketing, you’re not competing for attention. Unless you purchased a list of email addresses (never a good idea), everyone you’re corresponding with supplied their email address freely, either by making a purchase, filling out a form on your website, or even jotting their name and email down on a clipboard at the farmer’s market. They’ve already given you their attention! Now, you just need to keep it. Here are a few ideas.
Here’s an example of a farm welcome email we recently developed for a Vermont farm. Drip automatically pulls subscriber information from GrazeCart, so emails can be personalized for each recipient.
Share your farm story and engage new subscribers with a welcome series.
When someone first subscribes to your list, they’re saying, “I’m interested. Tell me more!” With that in mind, here are some ideas for a welcome email series that works:
Introduce your business. How did you get started? What are you most passionate about? Your customers are looking for genuine connections and personal stories. Now, this part’s really important. Be sure to end on a customer-centric note. Why should they buy from you? What’s in it for them?
Include social proof. 72% of customers won’t take action before they read reviews. So, if you have them, consider sharing reviews, testimonials, and feedback from your loyal customers.
Share how to get started. Make sure confusion isn’t keeping your subscribers from turning into purchasers. Your welcome series is the perfect opportunity to address frequently asked questions, like, “How does your online ordering process work?”
Offer a discount. Has your new subscriber engaged with your welcome emails, but still not taken the leap to buy from you? Sending a discount or special offer can serve as that final push to turn leads into customers!
When building a welcome email series, you can start small with 1-5 emails, or go all out—Seven Sons’ welcome series consists of 30+ emails sent over 30 weeks!
Increase conversions with an abandoned cart workflow.
In our industry, 84% of shopping carts are abandoned. If you could win back even just 10% of that business, that would have a massive impact on your farm revenue. Our farm clients typically win back 19+% of abandoned carts (versus the industry average of 11%)! With Drip email marketing, you can create workflows that automatically try to win back abandoned carts for you.
You can download this GrazeCart-recommended abandoned cart workflow (the same one used by Seven Sons!) for free.
This is an abandoned cart email we designed for an Oklahoma farm. Products abandoned during checkout in GrazeCart sync with Drip, so we added a cart preview to show prospective customers exactly what they’re missing out on!
Remind loyal farm customers to keep shopping with you.
We all know how busy life can get, so be sure to stay in touch with your customers. Entice repeat purchases with emails like the example above, which links directly to the recipient’s cart!
Another approach you can take is to tailor product recommendations according to what customers previously purchased. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re just launching a new product, the “Breakfast Lover’s Variety Bundle.” You might make an announcement in your newsletter, but customers that previously purchased eggs, bacon, or sausage might be especially interested in your new product, right? Using the combined powers of Drip and GrazeCart, you could easily filter a list to show just those people, and craft a custom email to say, “Hey, we have a new product we think you’ll like!”
In short, Drip email marketing makes it possible to segment your list so subscribers are receiving offers and updates that are highly relevant to their interests. Targeted emails like this convert 202% better than generic emails.
Get feedback.
If you had something in your teeth, you’d want someone to tell you, right? Honest feedback is important in business, too! And Drip email automation isn’t just a tool for farm marketing, it’s also a tool that can potentially improve all your interactions with customers. For those that decide not to keep shopping with you, it’s important to learn why. Drip workflows allow you to easily request feedback following certain interactions (like after a customer makes a purchase or visits a specific page on your website). This allows you to make improvements where necessary, but it also lets you see what your customers love most about shopping with your farm!
Once you’ve solicited feedback, here’s another step we recommend. Earlier in this post, we mentioned the importance of social proof. So, if someone responds privately with great feedback, why not encourage them to share? Here’s a workflow we built in Drip. Take a look. Can you guess what it does?
This is an example of an automation we built in Drip. What do you think it does?
This workflow checks for anyone that responded to our survey saying they were happy with their experience. Then, it invites them to leave a Google Review (with a direct link, to make it easy). This is a great way to generate online reviews and build a positive reputation for your farm.
Keep your subscriber list healthy.
What does it mean to have a healthy subscriber list? Put simply, it’s about keeping your farm subscribers engaged. Engagement is typically measured in opens and clicks. Healthy engagement shows Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. that your farm is sending valuable, wanted content instead of spam. So, what should you do with subscribers that aren’t interacting with your emails at all? Unfortunately, these contacts will negatively impact the overall health of your list, but with Drip, you can implement a workflow that will keep your email list healthy and engaged.
This workflow, called a list pruning workflow, identifies everyone on your email list that has not engaged (made a purchase or opened/clicked an email) in a specified amount of time (we recommend 90 days). Next, the workflow will trigger an email to help you reconnect with these people. You might decide to send them a video about your farm practices, a coupon code, or just a text email that sincerely asks if they still want to receive correspondence from you. Once this email is sent, whatever form it takes, the list pruning workflow will wait and listen. If after 30 days, the recipient still hasn’t engaged with your emails, it’s decision time.
You can configure your list pruning workflow to immediately deactivate people at this point, or add a final, last chance email. Either way, if subscribers do not interact with the last email in your list pruning workflow, they will ultimately be marked as deactivated. In Drip, this means they will no longer receive emails, but you’ll still have all their data on file. If at any point, that person makes a purchase or re-subscribes to your list, they’ll automatically be reactivated.
One extra benefit of using a list pruning workflow is that deactivated contacts do not count towards your contact limit. So, if you’re nearing a new pricing tier due to your number of contacts, deactivating disengaged subscribers can save you money each month!
Chart your path forward with Drip Analytics.
Finally, you can leverage Drip’s powerful reporting tools to plan for the future. You can view aggregate reporting to see how your farm’s email marketing strategy is performing overall, or check in on an individual campaign.
With Drip, you can see your total revenue (synced from GrazeCart) and exactly how much of it is attributed to your email marketing efforts. This mockup gives you an idea of what the Drip analytics interface looks like. It does not contain specific client data.
If a person makes a purchase within 5 days of opening an email, that revenue will be attributed to Drip on the dashboard, as shown above. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Drip is taking all the credit for the sale, just that email likely contributed to the sale in some way. It’s possible the customer visited your website, opened an email, and clicked on a social ad, all in that 5-day span!
As you’re getting started with Drip, here are some industry averages that you can shoot for…
Average industry open rate: 20.5%
Average industry click rate: 3.5%
Remember, these are just averages. Some of our farm clients have more than doubled these rates with their Drip campaigns!
If you’re looking for even more inspiration for your farm marketing, we recommend signing up for the following newsletters:
Questions? Ready to get started?
We can configure your Drip account according to best practices, develop a strategy for leveraging Drip to increase your farm sales, and set up fully custom workflows (including writing and design) — or we can provide coaching if you’d like to learn it yourself. Contact us today.
More Farm Marketing Resources
For purposes of this comparison, we’re focusing solely on platforms that will enable you to have both your complete website and your online store together under one roof, so we’re zeroing in on GrazeCart vs. Shopify vs. Square.