How to Get Contacted Through Your Farm Website

A few weeks ago we discussed how many connections you can make through your farm website. Today, let's talk about the safest way to get that email from the customer to you. Each Small Farm Central site comes with a contact form like this. It is your basic contact form: subject, name, sender's email, and email text -- the customer clicks submit and the email is sent off to your email address. You have likely seen contact forms like this a hundred times before. There is a reason they exist -- the other option is not optimal. The alternative method is to make your email address a link. When the customer clicks on the address and a new email message is opened on their computer with your email address pre-populated. This second method is a shaky solution for two reasons:

1. Many of us are now using webmail programs like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail and we don't have an email program installed and set up on our computer to send email. That muddies the process of how the email gets from the customer to you and will result in less connections.
2. Your email address is in plain text on the world wide web, so spam software will stop by your site, search for text that looks like an email address, and then add your email to their spam database. You will see the amount of spam you get increase swiftly after your email address is exposed to the Internet.

A contact form (the first method) never exposes your email address to the Internet and does not require any extra software for the customer, so it is the best solution. I am sorry to say that having a contact form on your website requires some programming, so your are unlikely to pull one off unless you are using a service or content management system (CMS) like Small Farm Central. This is not possible through simple HTML (such as what you could create through Dreamweaver or other desktop website development software). One other option for those developing their own farm websites is to use the ReCaptcha service to protect your email address from spammers (though it does not solve drawback #1). Click here for more information on that service. Just Call it Contact
It is important to keep it simple and call the link for your contact form something like "Contact Us" because the word contact has become an important keyword. Some customers will come to your site specifically looking for a way to send you a message. Make it easy on them! Have a link for "contact" in a prominent location..

A Few [Farm] Web Marketing Principles

Some ideas to chew on..

Working with many farmers with many different website goals, I have come up with a few general principles for farm websites. These have been covered in many other articles in more depth, but I hope it is useful to have them in one place. Update Often / Make it Easy A successful website grows slowly over time and gives return visitors something new to read so they will keep coming back and stay excited about new developments on the farm (surprisingly enough, customers are interested in details like chicken tractors and disease control). Farmers are busy people, so the only way to keep a farm website fresh throughout the year is to make it easy to update, create new pages, or post a blog entry. The best way to do this is to have your website built with a Content Management System (CMS) like Small Farm Central, Drupal, Wordpress, or any other system that makes sense. Aesthetics A farm website should be simple and elegant without using unnecessarily flashy elements. There is so much beauty on each farm: capture a bit of the farm with a representative photograph, put it in the header, add a clean navigation structure, and you have a great farm website. Commerce E-commerce can be a powerful addition to a farm website from pre-selling goods at farmers markets to selling to chefs to marketing items that will ship across the country, but farmers need to be comfortable with the process themselves and give it time to work. Customers will not just come out of the blue to order on your website: you need to advertise, tell your local customers, write a regular mailing list, and any other strategy that is available. It is a powerful tool, but not a free ride to extra sales. Content Use photographs liberally to illustrate points; take time to write about the passion that keeps you farming year after year; make sure visitors know what is currently available and where they can buy your products; and remember that customers are interested in the details that it takes to grow the food because it keeps them connected. These details are something they cannot get from any other source. Contact Make it easy for customers to contact the farm through the website - a link that is clearly labeled "contact" on each page of your site is a good goal. Blogging A farm blog can be a powerful way to communicate with customers because it encourages interaction through comments, keeps the site fresh, and is a good place to tell the farm story over the course of a season. It can be very easy: try posting a photo of farm work with a few explanatory sentences. Take note: either do it right or don't do it at all. A stale blog is detrimental to your goals and is much worse than not having one at all. The time investment will only pay off over time; think years instead of months, so a long term view is needed to successfully use the farm blog. Community Connections Getting listed on local food internet directories is important for a few reasons:

• It increases Google's trust of your own site and will result in higher placement in search results.
• Interest in local, authentic food is high - eaters in your area are searching for the products that you have and these links make it much more likely that they will find you.
• It's free!

Patience
Web marketing will not double your sales and customer base overnight. On the farm, building healthy soil is a long term goal that requires a long-term strategy and consistent effort throughout the year. Success is incremental and difficult to see in the span of months or a season, but very obvious looking back over the years. Execute your web marketing in the same way; create a strategy that makes sense for the amount of time you want to devote and then carry out that strategy over the long term to see results. Do not give up or radically alter strategy just because results cannot be seen after a few weeks or months.

 

Email Mailing List

 

Have one; allow prospective customers to sign up for the list on your website.

Websites That Generate Connection

When farmers are considering a website I often get questions centering around how much business a website will create for the farm. In other words, what is the return on the investment of time and money that goes into a website? We can look at quantifiable data such as hits or direct sales, but often a website is beneficial in ways that defy numbers -- such as professionalism, connection to the farm, and time-savings in having information available for customers. One quantifiable output of a site is the number of emails sent by customers or prospective customers from the contact page of the site (like ours).
The average actively updated Small Farm Central farmer site received 45.4 contacts in the last 6 months through the email form. Some did much better with as many as 120 contacts. In 6 months through one aspect of the site, these farmers found 45 new customers or were more available to 45 existing customers. Make your own calculations on this figure, but almost any way you do it, even this one data point justifies the cost of getting a website set up. I do not encourage looking at this sort of data as the only way to advocate for having a website because it is beneficial in many aspects of farm marketing. On the other hand, it is important to have hard numbers and "contacts per season" is one way to justify the expense and time required to get a website started for your farm.

Photo by tifotter.

How to Put Some Punch into the Mailing List Subject Line

Use the subject line to stand out in a crowded inbox. As I was sending out the first Small Farm Central monthly mailing list of the fall (click here to sign-up), I started to think about email subject lines.

This is, perhaps, the most important aspect of the mailing list because it determines if the recipient reads and acts on the email. If the subject line is uninteresting and causes the reader to ignore the email, then any text in the body of the email is meaningless.

I read into the subject methodology (see links below) and apparently the best route is A/B testing on possible subject lines. So if you have a mailing list of 95,000 -- a few days before the big delivery test one subject line to 1,000 readers (the "A") and another subject line to 1,000 other email addresses (the "B"). Then look at opening rates of the emails and the winning subject line goes out to the remaining 93,000 recipients.

Easy, right?

Well, when your email list is in the low 100s instead of the low 100,000s, you don't have the luxury of A/B testing.

So I guess us mortal mailing list managers have to try our best with the tools we have.

The October '08 mailing for my list was entitled:
"City Farmers get innovative with backyards and SFC cleans house"

which I think has to be better than:
"October 2008 Farm Marketing Newsletter"

Maybe you can think of an even more engaging subject line than I picked?

I think email subject lines are important for the farm mailing list because it absolutely does determine how many people open the message. Your customers are busy people just like you and you have to make them care.

Farmers have a distinct advantage over Target or Zappos.com because you have authenticity and you are selling something that consumers are actively searching for instead of a pair of shoes that can be bought at a dozen other outlets.

A good rule is to focus on what your customers care about first, so instead of:
"Weekly Product List for the week of May 5th",
try, "Last week for Asparagus! and see our young chicks grow"
 
This creates a feeling of urgency for asparagus and the promise of pictures or stories connects the reader to the farm. This type of subject line gives the potential reader a firm idea of the value that they will get if they click on the message.

If you want to go deeper into subject line research, you might like some of these articles:

• Copy blogger remixes some of his blog post title lines for more punchy goodness.
• Read this article for more information on the A/B testing as described above.
• Getting the subject line right: 5 tips for writing e-mail subject lines that'll get recipients to read on.

We've written about mailing lists a number of times in the past here on the blog

• 7 Thoughts as You Start the Summer Mailing List
• Sending emails professionally 
• Tips for collecting email addresses to add the farm mailing list.

Photo by procsilas