You’ve spent time building your farm or ag-business website. It has quality copywriting, beautiful photos, and a few videos about the farm (I recommend “Why you farm” and “What you farm” videos as well as farm tour videos).
You’ve done great work, so people will learn more about your business. Your website analytics are telling you that people are visiting the website. You are proud and you have every right to be.
Now, do you know what they are doing after they read an article or watched your video?
Do you know anything about the person who just visited your website? Is there any way to know?
Depending on what you want these visitors to know or do, there are a few ways to capture their information. You can then send them more information about you and your farm, especially if you have an upcoming breakfast event or tours or maybe you are selling products to the public.
The best way to capture people’s information is to have an email marketing system. Two of my favorites are Mailchimp (free for up to a certain amount of people/email sends) and Constant Contact. There are many other email systems that work great, too, so choose the one that fits best for you.
A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook. — Radicati
By having an email newsletter signup or a discount to capture their email address via a web form or website pop-up, you will get a valuable piece of information that allows you access to that person’s attention, their email inbox.
People check their email inbox the most for personal information. While social media is great, it’s not where they most likely will take action on something. I believe that email addresses are just as important, if not more than, as home addresses (plus the cost of email marketing is much more affordable).
90 percent of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2 percent of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. — Forrester Research
Once you have their address, you can set up the email marketing system to send them emails to let them know everything you have going on at the farm. Email marketing will also let you know how many times they opened your email and clicked through it to get to your information.
Don’t discount email marketing as ineffective. It is still one of the strongest marketing vehicles to get the attention of the consumer to return to your content.
If you have any questions about email marketing, please let me know at don.schindler@dairy.org. If you are a dairy farmer and would like to know more about your national dairy checkoff, you can email me to join our Dairy Checkoff email newsletter or visit our Dairy Checkoff Farmer Facebook Group.
