Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with customers and prospects. Marketers use email lists to stay in touch with past customers, and new customers to provide them with valuable content, and offers for products and services they might be interested in.
If you’re looking to grow your fruit and vegetable business, you’re probably wondering how to reach your customer base. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered on this front. Here’s a detailed guide on how to bring fruit and vegetable marketing to your inbox.
Step one: Join the Conversation
In the last few years, the conversation around food, and especially around food waste has shifted dramatically. While the term ‘food waste’ didn’t even exist a few years ago, today it’s commonplace to hear people speak of ‘food banks’, ‘food deserts’, and ‘food miles’. What does this mean for marketers? It means that consumers are paying attention to where their food comes from, and how much waste there is in relation to it. So if you’re looking to reach this audience, start by participating in the conversation. Here are a few ways you can do so:
1. Start a food Waste Revolution
In 2013, the UK government established the Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA), a coalition of businesses, charities, and academics that set out to reduce food waste. In 2017, after several years of campaigning, the FWRA succeeded in passing a new law that will cap the amount of food that can be wasted at home at 20 percent. This is a promising start, but there is still a long way to go. According to the most recent government statistics, around one-third of the food purchased by UK households never makes it to the table. This is a huge loss to the economy, as well as a cause for environmental concern.
If you’re looking to promote a range of fruit and vegetables, you can play an active role in shifting this trend. Not only will you be supporting local producers, but you’ll also be contributing to a more sustainable environment. You can take part in the conversation by:
- Emphasizing the positive impact that your product has on the environment by stating how much food is produced per unit of water, and how much food waste there is compared to how much is sold.
- Providing educational information about food production, and the environment in general.
- Raising consumer awareness of where their food comes from, and the issues surrounding sustainable food.
- Helping consumers reduce food waste through various tips and tricks. For example, you could encourage them to only buy what they need, or you could suggest that they cook something new every week so that they don’t get bored of the same old foods.
- Encouraging people to grow their own fruit and vegetables, as the former is known to reduce food waste significantly. If they do so, they can also eat what they grow, which is good for both the environment and the economy.
2. Position Yourself As A Leader In The Industry
Nowadays, consumers are more likely to visit a website than they are to visit a shop. This is why businesses must evolve and adopt the digital native perspective if they want to thrive in the future. You can position yourself as a leader in the industry by creating high-quality content that others are going to be eager to share, and by being consistently available for your customers via email and social media.
Creating useful content that people want to share is a great way to gain credibility with your target audience. There are so many ways that you can do this, from writing blog posts to creating videos and hosting webinars. These are all known to be effective sources of content that resonates with potential and existing customers. Additionally, continually being available to reply to their queries means that they have access to expert advice if they need it. This shows that you’re thinking strategically, and are willing to adapt to changing customer needs.
3. Build Your Email List
If you’ve been paying attention to the conversation around food, you’ll know that one of the major issues that needs to be addressed is food security. That is, ensuring that everyone has access to food that is good, and affordable. To be able to do this, businesses in the industry need to build strong, trustworthy relationships with customers. One of the best ways of building these relationships is through email marketing. This is why it’s important to add your email address to the list of contacts for major email marketing services, such as MailChimp or Aweber. Having an email address that is not captured simply goes to show that you’re not really committed to building a business, or that you don’t have the time to commit.
Even if you do have a legitimate reason for not having an email address (i.e. you’re still in the process of building your business), it would be best to take this opportunity to gain some credibility with your customers by getting one (or more) now.
Step two: Craft A Timeless Email Message
After you’ve started to participate in the conversation around food and the environment, you’ll find that people are responding well to your emails. This is because you’ve taken the time to research potential customers, and you’ve delivered a message that is both relevant and unique to them. Now you need to craft a timeless email message that will make your product stand out amongst the rest. Keep in mind that you’re not writing this email to get instant results, but rather, to provide enough information for readers to understand what you offer and why it is beneficial to them.
The first thing that you might want to do is to take a step back and analyze the last few pieces of content that you’ve published, or the last few conversations that you’ve had on social media. Now that you have some insight into what your customers want to read and hear about, you can craft an email that provides the best possible experience for them. You want to ensure that your product is visible, and accessible, so that they’ll want to read more about it. To achieve this, you need to focus on the following elements:
- The subject line of your email
- Your email’s opening paragraph
- A call-to-action (e.g. “Click here to learn more about our product” or “Download our company brochure”)
- Key supporting details (e.g. “Learn more about the leading causes of food waste in your area”)
- A summary of your email’s content
- An eye-catching header image
- Three to four supporting images
- An appealing offer
The good thing is that there are established best practices regarding email marketing, which you can follow to create an effective message. For example, you can utilize Hootsuite’s Marketo software, to gain insight into your target audience, and craft a marketing email that will resonate with them. Doing this doesn’t have to be hard. Simply follow these guidelines, and you’ll be able to craft a winning message.
Step three: Measure The Results
Whether you’ve been actively participating in the conversation or not, every business owner or marketer wants to know how much success they’ve had with their marketing efforts. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools available to help you figure this out, and the good news is that most of them are free.
The first step is to look at your email’s open rate. This refers to the percentage of your email list that actually opens your email. You can take this percentage and multiply it by 1.2 to get the percentage of your list that clicks through to your website, or other places where you can make sales. It’s essential that you look at this number every month, as some email marketing platforms will show you how many times someone opened your email, but didn’t necessarily click on any of the links within it.
If you’d like to see some concrete results from all of this, check out these websites:
- ROI: Return on Investment
- CPV: Cost per viewer
- LTV: Lifetime Value
- CTR: Click-through rate
- CPC: Cost per click
- SEM: Search engine marketing
- PPC: Pay-per-click
- APAC: Attributed purchase amount
Simply enter your email address in the appropriate field, and you’ll see a breakdown of how much each channel is worth. You can also use these tools to benchmark your competitors’ data, and determine which channels are proving most fruitful.