Successful farm email lists - Part 1 - Collecting email addresses

This part 1 of the Successful Farm Email Lists series. A few easy techniques, followed consistently, will yield surpringly good results in growing your mailing list.

Collecting emails from your customers is an easy task and a large email list can build up very quickly if you use some simple techniques faithfully. If you go to farmer's markets or otherwise interact with the public, your email sign-up list should be ready everyday. Each time you make a sale to a new customer be sure to ask them if they want to sign up for your mailing list and have an elevator pitch ready such as, "We just send an email out every two weeks with the newest products available, photos, and links to our website. You can unsubscribe at any time and it's a great way to learn about the products we have after the farmer's market season is over."

The sign-up for can be very simple -- I just made one up last week for a conference using an Excel spreadsheet and asked for the following information:

• Name
• Email address
• Demo (y/n)
• Mailing list (y/n)
• Signature

Although collecting the customer's name is not required, it is nice to collect that information to help your handwriting analysis as you decipher the email address. Most of the time people write their information down in a hurried way and are not thinking to write legibly so you can type the address into your computer, so the more information you collect the better off you are.

I wrote in large text at the bottom of each page: "We will not share your email address with anyone for any reason and you can unsubscribe at any time." Even though you know you are trustworthy and will not share emails with any other organization, many customers are wary of giving away their email addresses so remind them over and over that they can unsubscribe and that you only use the information for your farm.

To really increase the size of your mailing list and customer satisfaction, give some extra value to people that opt in to your list. Have extra flowers of one variety because you accidentally grew 500 row feet instead of 50? Give each customer a flower when they sign up for the mailing list to say thanks! They will appreciate the flower and you will appreciate the extra email address.

Another good place to collect email addresses is on your website; have a text box and submit button that adds any email entered to your mailing list. This usually takes some advanced skill or software (such as the Small Farm Central service and other options that I will discuss in Part 2) because you are going beyond the capabilities of normal HTML and getting into more advanced programming. A bare bones approach could just encourage visitors to send a message with "SUBSCRIBE" in the subject line to your your email address. This technique can turn a casual web surfer coming to you from LocalHarvest into a regular paying customer.

Legal issues

Unsolicited emails are a big problem on the Internet; Congress has tackled with issue with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act). It all boils down to this fact: you must give the recipients of the email list a mechanism to discontinue all emails from your farm.

This can be as simple as replying to you with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line or as complex as the way Small Farm Central and other mailing list software works. When someone requests removal from a farm's mailing list, we first check against the database to make sure the email exists. If  it does, we generate a unique link and send it to the address provided. Then the recipient simply clicks the link sent in the email and they are removed. This ensures that the person requesting removal from the list is the owner of the address.

Since your farm mailing list will likely not get huge you probably don't need to read all the laws related to spam, but it is important to follow the basic rules. Penalties can include being labeled a spammer on various spam databases (this means your emails will go to "Junk" instead of the Inbox), having your email account stripped by your service provider, fines, or, most importantly, the loss of customer trust.

Further reading

The CRITICAL Success Factors for E-mail Marketing
Email address harvesting and opt-out: Do the crime, do the time
Discussion board: How do you collect email addresses?
5 Quick Tips on How to Grow Your Email List
Get people to opt in to your email marketing

More next week

Next week I will cover how to get those emails from you to your customer. There is a better way than simply separating each email address with a comma in your normal email client. This will become especially important as you use the techniques described above and your list grows from 50-odd email addresses to many hundreds.

In North Carolina...

The Small Farm Central booth.

Thanks everyone who came by the Small Farm Central booth at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association annual conference. I had a great time and feel energized by the excitement of farmers in North and South Carolina. I look forward to working with many of the farmers I met.

If you are coming to this site through literature that I handed out at the conference, let's chat: info@smallfarmcentral.com or 412-567-3864.

Weekend Recipe - Honey-Glazed Turnips with Shallots

Another seasonal recipe for your weekly newsletter!

Honey-Glazed Turnips with Shallots

To prepare the turnips, you will want the greens cut and any purple removed from top. Look for turnips that do not have the purple, it means the turnips are more mature and tougher in texture. If they have some purple, you will want to peel these turnips for better texture and flavor. You can save the greens and use them to cook with as well, for example, in the last recipe on this page.

6 medium turnips, diced about 1/2-inch cubes
4 tbs. Honey
3 large shallots, peeled and quartered
1 sprig rosemary
3 sprigs fresh thyme leaves
2 tbs. Olive oil
Kosher salt and black pepper to taste (about 1 tsp. Salt and a couple grinds of pepper is a good start).

Preheat oven to 400.°

Toss all ingredients together in a bowl and spread them evenly out on a half sheet (jelly roll) pan. Roast in oven for about 20 minutes, turning once during cooking to evenly brown.

http://expatriateskitchen.blogspot.com
http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Small farm web marketing requires patience and persistence

This is the final installment (Part 10) of the "Farming the Web" web development course for small farms.

Many aspects of web marketing are frustrating; I think the most difficult for most people to accept is the here-but-not-heard nature of the web. Once you have a website on your own domain anyone, anywhere in the world can type in your address and read about your small farm, but still it is so difficult to rise above the noise of the Internet and be heard especially to the people that matter: your customers. But it is possible and beneficial in the long run.

Your small farm requires attention on every front from employee issues to equipment to taxes; it is difficult to invest time in a website that may not pay back for a year or more. Each photo you upload and each blog you write gives your visitors more context and keeps them coming back over the long run. As I have advocated many times before, these loyal readers will also be loyal customers because they support and understand the work it takes to bring food to their table. They will also be more flexible with price increases, crop shortages, and quality problems due to weather (for example, a freeze or hail). They will also market for you by talking to friends and electronically forwarding on interesting articles or opportunities that you provide. In short, they become part of the extended farm family and the bigger the community around your small farm the more resilient and financially successful you will be in the long run.

Of course, you may pay more attention to your website if it is making you money directly instead of just a cost and time center. By starting locally based ecommerce you are building a market "out" and "in." By this I mean you are growing your customer base through information in blogs, photos, and other content ("out"); with ecommerce you are eliminating barriers like coops, farmer's markets, and grocery stores between you and your customers ("in"). Read last week's article for more ideas on local ecommerce.

In some ways, building your website is like working with your soil. There is a lot of advice out there on how to build both soil and websites, but in the end you have to find a way to apply those concepts to your particular situation. It may take years to realize what advice was worthwhile and what was a waste of time. Over the years, with consistent effort in doing and learning you will build your soil and your web marketing to sustain your successful small farm.

As I noted above, this is the last installment in the "Farming the Web" web development course. I hope this has been helpful -- I would love to hear your ideas of web marketing for the small farm or anything else. I am always available at info@smallfarmcentral.com.