Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

Archive for the ‘Tips and Tricks’ Category

So your Harvest Fest has been in full swing for a couple of weeks now….What do you mean you didn’t even put a Harvest Fest together for this year? Seriously?????

It really don’t take much to dot the fields with pumpkins of every shape and size. Offer special treats as you invite the public to view your corn maze or other demonstrations such as making Kettle Corn…let them pick their own ear right off the stalk and take it home to pop in the microwave.

An effective email marketing campaign requires framework. Successful marketers will always be the first to tell you that their campaigns are the work of careful planning and diligent consideration.

It’s actually much like building a house. There’s no way you can construct a building haphazardly, without direction, and turn out a flawless finished product. The result would be chaotic!

The same goes for email. You can’t randomly send messages to your clients and prospects without establishing expectations and formulating a plan, or they will tune out and unsubscribe due to your lack of organization.

Follow these guidelines for constructing a well built house and you’ll be on your way to creating a profitable and manageable email campaign in no time.

1. You Need a Solid Foundation

The strongest buildings are built from the ground up on a rock-solid foundation. For your email campaign, the foundation is your message content.

The whole point in sending email is to solicit an action. You want readers to click through your messages, buy products and respond to surveys. In order to engage subscribers and inspire those actions, you must consistently send subscribers interesting, relevant and incentivizing content.

• If you are using email as a sales tool, you want to wow readers with your products and your knowledge, and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
• If you’re using email as a retention tool and are primarily sending informational updates and newsletters, you want to create content that builds relationships.

2. Sources for Content

If your business has a blog, you already have one valuable  content resource well within your reach. Try restructuring older posts for your new messages and pick posts with lots of comments – they obviously piqued the interest of your readers and will be relevant and helpful to new subscribers on your email list.

Don’t have a blog? Look through old emails from your customers. If you see the same questions about your product or service over and over again, take that as a hint. You could probably create a whole follow up series addressing the FAQs.

3. Plenty of Windows

Windows let light into your home. They give you different view of your yard and help you keep watch when the kids play outside. They also let your neighbors see in.

Instead of drawing the curtains tight on your email campaign, take the opportunity to give your readers a look inside. Be transparent. Build their trust by making yourself available.

Don’t make subscribers dig for your social networking sites. Instead, purposely link to your Facebook and Twitter pages so that they can’t miss them.

If you put all of the information about your company out there for subscribers to see from the get-go, you will never need to Windex the windows on your campaign or backtrack to make yourself more transparent.

4. Curb Appeal

Anyone who takes pride in their home understands the desire to make your property as clean and beautiful as possible.

You landscape, paint and generally spruce things up from time to time to keep your house in tip-top shape. After all, your home is a reflection of you.

Your email campaign should be an extension of your business in the same way. You should take pride in its appearance, and realize that a neat and approachable design will only contribute positively to the perception of your brand.

Using beautifully designed message and web form templates is the perfect way to put a professional face on your campaign. With hundreds to choose from, there’s bound to be a least one or two that fits your style.

5. An Impenetrable Roof

The roof on your building protects your structure and everything inside. Email deliverability requires the same amount of protection.

There are a few things you can do to safeguard your list:

• Confirmed Subscribers:

Confirmed opt-in ensures that you only send messages to people who specifically request them from you. It also protects you from false spam complaints, and ISPs and spam filters give priority to senders who use confirmed opt-in.

• Get Whitelisted:

Ask subscribers to add your email address to their address books. While emails sent from AWeber customers are already whitelisted on an ISP level, it’s important to reduce the likelihood of your mail being filtered to a junk folder on an individual level.

• Don’t Take Permission For Granted:

Remember that subscribers are interested in a certain type of information, which is exactly what they signed up for when they gave you their email addresses. Send only valuable, relevant information that relates to the topics the reader expressed interest in.

6. A Maintenance Plan

Even impeccably built homes require maintenance. While autoresponders allow you to “set it and forget it,” the best email campaigns have owners that are extremely involved with their clients and their product.

Keep a close eye on the performance of your emails. Split test your subject lines and use analytics to track open and click through rates.

When necessary, do a little spring cleaning. Your campaign can never be to tidy!

My team at REAS can help you get started with your email campaign. You can contact us at information@easmyworkload.com to discuss your needs.

Creating videos to market your products and services became much simpler thanks to the introduction of a new set of cloud-based video editing tools from YouTube. Web marketers and content publishers can now build a library of online videos and increase opportunities for brand exposure at the same destination.

YouTube users have the capability to cut from videos, create montages of different clips and add or change accompanying music using YouTube’s commercial library of licensed songs.

If all the editing tools just seem so overwhelming to you, we can help. Contact us at information@easmyworkload.com to discuss your video needs.

I went to a local flea market this weekend and was so disappointed. Where were all the Farmers? The reason I bring this up is because Farmer Markets don't go over so big in my area mainly because there is so little advertising for them. So I thought for sure they would be at the flea market that is held every Sunday in Waterford, PA.

Think about how simple this would be to sell your product at the flea market. You pay a very small fee to set up a table or two. You lay out your produce in a pleasing manner by using some big wooden baskets. And don't forget to take the time to put a sign on the basket saying what it is and the price. Nothing urks me more than having to ask the price on the vegtables. Also be aware that some people may not recognize the produce you are selling if they never have eaten it before. That is why you need a sign saying what is in each basket.

I think it would also be very clever to print out some business cards that have the name of your farm and phone number so that if they like the taste of your produce they can call you up next season and order some more. The cards don't have to be fancy so don't fret over them. Also print off some recipe cards that show how to cook the produce. If they've never eaten them before they surely never cooked them before as well!

Here is a marketing idea that we used for one of our local clients…

Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame, right? So our client emailed everybody on his list that were local to his business and asked them to email him if they wanted to appear in his commercial.

If they responded back saying “Yes”, he told them to show up on a certain day and time to his farm and be ready to be part of his commercial. If they showed up they all got a great big basket filled with all kinds of goodies from his Country Store. And he got to make a commercial that looked like his store was busting at the seams with happy customers!

With the end of the year drawing near I started thinkng about things that I need to do to make the coming year more productive and thought you might be able to use some tips as well. So here are 7 Computer/Technology Ease Your Workload Tips to get you started.

1. Using the software programs on your computer can free up the most time in your day by taking over mundane administrative and sales tasks for you. So you need to get trained on your computer software so that you can take full advantage of it. The few hours you spend in a classroom or taking an online course will reap huge rewards of saved time later on. Check out a great online education center at ed2go.
2. Use a software product where you can keep your appointment calendar, contact list, To Do list, and “Tickle” reminders. I use Microsoft Outlook for these tasks, as well as for sending and receiving email. It’s a great all-in-one tool for the self employed and synchronizes with most PDAs so that you can take your data with you. Again take a look at ed2go for a course on using MS Outlook.
3. Back up your computer, at least weekly, so as not to lose valuable data and files. You can’t afford to re-create your work  if your hard drive should fail. Even though I’d like to think that my desktop and laptop should last forever in reality that’s not going to happen. So I back up both my desktop and laptop once a week.
4. If you can swing the expense buy yourself as a early Holiday present a printer that can automatically print double-sided. It’s amazing how much paper you can save when you print on both sides. I am constantly printing off information and have noticed a significant decrease in my “paper piles” since I’ve been printing on both sides. I’m still trying to work on being “green” when it comes to printing information out but somethings I’ve just got to have in print.
5. Instead of laying cords across your desk, run them under or behind your desk. Try to keep your work space as clear as possible so that you don’t feel like your working in a messy cluttered area all the time.
6. Connect your computer equipment to a surge protector. Not only will it protect your equipment, but you’ll have one central place to turn off all devices at once, at the end of the day. I don’t know about you but I’m not getting any younger and this is one thing that I have always tried to do since they say that you are wasting electricity even when you leave things plugged in. So I was always having to bend down, and crawl under my desk all the time to unplug everything. Well now I’ve put them all on a surge protector and just have to use my foot to switch it all off. Now I only have one plug still in the wall instead of several.
7. Instead of buying a fax machine, which probable means having to pay for another telephone line to support it, consider using one of the fax-by-email services that are available. You will be assigned a fax number, and when someone sends you a fax, it will be converted to a PDF file and emailed to you by the service. I have used two such services in my business, GoDaddy and Callwave, both with success.

Try implementing as many of these ideas as you can and in the coming new year you’ll be finding some extra time (as well as some extra cash) to relax.

Excel automatically by default moves the cell pointer to the next cell down when you press Enter after entering data into a cell. It drove me nuts because I enter most of my data across columns, not down columns. So I changed the direction of the cell pointer.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click on the Excel Options tab in the Dialog box.
2. Click on the Advanced tab in the Editing Options Section.
3. The check box that controls this behavior is labeled After Pressing Enter, Move Selection. When that check box is enabled, you can specify the direction in which the cell pointer moves (down, left, up, or right).

Your choice is completely a matter of personal preference. I prefer to keep this option turned off and use the arrow keys rather than press Enter. All I do is press the right-arrow key to move to the cell to the right. The other arrow keys work as expected, and you can even use the PgUp and PgDn keys.

Take full advantage of this easy to implement marketing strategy. An email signature tells readers who you are and what you do.

Using a “signature” at the end of all your email correspondence gives the reader important contact information about you and your compay. Your signature acts like an “ad” at the bottom of each message in that you can promote new products and special events.

So you’re saying now, Ok Sue we know about email signatures so what’s the twist?

Well the twist is if you use Outlook for your email messaging you have a very powerful simple way to easily insert reusable content at any point when responding to an email. This great feature is called Quick Parts.

Quick Parts exist both in Outlook and Word, and allows you to save pieces of content to easily re-use, like a seasonal promotion on your farm. Personally I like to use Quick Parts for all those answers that I repeat over and over again, and am tired of re-typing. I also have a few Quick Parts that contain different products I’m selling in my online store.

So how do you create a Quick Part:

1. Type the content that you are going to want to use over and over again. Or if you already have it typed go ahead and select it.
2. Now that the content is selected click on the Insert tab in the Ribbon, choose Quick Parts and then click Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery.
3. Type a name for your Quick Part and tab down to the Category selection. Type in a new category that you want your message to be filed under.
4. Now click OK.

That’s it…You’ve just created a Quick Part!

Now that you have seen how easy it is to create, start creating several Quick Parts to add to your emails. Whenever you want to insert a Quick Part just click on the Insert tab in the Ribbon, choose Quick Parts and you will see a gallery with all your saved Quick Parts.

Click on the Quick Part that you want to insert and it will be inserted at the current cursor position. You can find more advanced options by right-clicking the desired Quick Part.

Let me know how you’re using Quick Parts and I’ll share them in a future post.

Many restaurants have built their foot traffic by having a vendor booth at professional gatherings. Contact some of your local restaurants and ask if you can provide them with your products from your farm for their next booth. Be sure that you will be allowed to add your business brochures and cards on their display table.

You may also want to see if they will allow you to set up a display to have a drawing for a free breakfast, lunch or dinner basket Food Sampler Give-A-Way. This allows you to build your database for backend marketing.