Grow Your Farmers’ Market Business
March 8, 2013 Editor’s note: King presented this information in January 2013 at the Mid-Atlantic Fruit and Vegetable Convention in Pennsylvania.
The customers of today’s local farm are concerned about where their food comes from and who is growing it. They are hungry for information about how it is grown, where it is grown, and all the different facets involved. The more you can communicate with your customers, the closer they feel to you. Your customers want to be able to say, “Bob Brown is my farmer.”
The best way to achieve a close relationship to your customers is with a weekly in season newsletter. This way your customers can get to know you and your farm better, while at the same time you can lure them to your market or farmers market with specials or sale items.
Getting Started With An Email Newsletter
It doesn’t matter if you are selling at a farmers market or at a farm market, collecting names takes time. But getting quality names is worth the time. People get tons of emails these days. You have to give them a good reason to sign up for your newsletter. “You can find out what I am going to have at the farmers market the day before the market if you sign up for my newsletter”, is a perfect way to get emails. A sign-up sheet next to the checkout is best with that heading. For your farm market it is just a matter of letting people know that you list your specials each week in your newsletter. A heading on your sign-up sheet of “find out what’s on sale every week” would work well. It wouldn’t hurt to also add “I talk about life on the farm.”
What To Write About
Write about whatever is going on at the farm that week. Your life is much more interesting that you think. Just think how your customers would think. When they see red ripe tomatoes for sale in June, they probably are thinking “how do they get them so early?” So tell them how you do it. But don’t fill your entire newsletter with detailed agronomic jargon. What they really want to read about is personal stuff. They want to feel what you feel when you have a perfect harvest of some crop. They also want to feel what you feel when you have a disaster crop too. They want to know how you hire your employees, how you train them in food safety, and how you can get all the work done. They especially want to know about your family. Just keep in mind: they will sign up for your newsletter to read about the sales or specials, but the thing that will make them click on your newsletter every single week, while passing up others in their inbox, is the personal message that you give them. Because they want to read about what “their farmer” is doing this week.
Frills And Pictures
I don’t use any of the email marketing programs. There are lots of them available and according to the Email Marketing Service Review, IContact and Benchmark email are the best ones. IContact is the best overall, but Benchmark is the best with help & support. I usually do not put any pictures or frills in my emails. I have put a picture in from time to time, but I feel that sometimes a picture changes the effect of the purpose of the email. People will always have a picture in their mind of what you are talking about. They picture it the way they think it should be. Putting my picture in sometimes will change what they feel the situation should look like. If you don’t feel you can paint a good picture for them with your words, then by all means, add a picture.
That Spam Filter
You may think I am going to great lengths, but I always send less than 100 emails at a time to avoid spam filters. I simply group them with less than 100 and send each group separately. I sounds arduous, but it really doesn’t take much time. I just forward the email and then delete the forward, rather than typing the subject over and over. If you have problems with your emails ending up in a spam filter you can use a spam test. Here are two of them that I can recommend:
- Lyris Content Checker at www.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/
- Spam Analyze at www.spamanalyse.com/
Recipes And Healthy Eating
Most of the people that are your customers are good cooks. And most good cooks are always looking for a better recipe. I like to customize my own recipes. Ok, truth is I don’t always try the recipes, just because I don’t have much time to cook in season. I like “Allrecipes.com” the best. They show how many people have saved the recipe, and how many stars people have given it. When I find an appropriate recipe (ie: Onions are on sale that week) I tweak the recipe to fit my products. If the recipe calls for sweet onions, I change the recipe to call for PA Simply Sweet Onions. Or if the recipe calls for something we sell at our market, I might put an asterisk by it and below will say “available at our market.”
I have also added a “health benefits” paragraph on a vegetable that I am trying to promote that week. There isn’t a single one that doesn’t have some amazing health quality. For my CSA newsletters I always have a “vegetable of the week”. I write a sentence or two on the history of that vegetable or some tidbit about it in my life. For instance: “Washing beets was always my job when I was 10. I was convinced that the 15 minute job was going to take me hours. I didn’t like eating them then, but I like them now, after all they are the highest sugar vegetable.”
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