Whether you’re a novice or seasoned farmer–one thing remains true: You want to sell more for your farm. But attracting leads, prospects, and even past customers to your store can sometimes be tricky. So here’s where the art of crafting great offers comes in.
We see offers everywhere: buy one, get one free, free shipping, and referral programs, to name a few. An offer is a sales tactic that provides a benefit to customers after a specific action is taken within a certain window of time.
Corinna Bench, founder of My Digital Farmer, explains it as: the right product, at the right price, for the right person, with the right messaging, at exactly the right time.
The offer acts as the ‘bait’. If you have an offer that is beneficial to your customers in all the right ways, it compels them to buy from you. Similarly, offers can ‘trigger’ a purchase and help avoid cold feet when it comes to buying. If a great offer appears in front of customers, it raises a sense of urgency to buy now rather than later. It urges them to take action in that moment.
Additionally, it can build constant curiosity around your brand. It helps to build customer buying habits around your product, which is important when examining buyer purchasing behaviour. There is a high likelihood that your customers (even die-hard fans) are looking for you to give them more offers.
Most importantly, offers are a great tool for increasing your average order value (AOV), the average amount spent by a customer per transaction. A low AOV can often be a symptom of too few offers. Your customers might not know what else you sell, how to pair your products with other products, or miss out on bigger packaging or new products. Offers force shoppers to explore more, which in turn gives them a larger bucket to shop from.
If you have a low AOV, chances are you’re probably not making enough offers in your marketing. If you’re looking for more ways to increase your AOV, check out our article on upselling and cross-selling.
Every offer has a recipe, and here’s how you can make a standout one:
The next time you want to make an offer, consider Corinna’s ‘four limited’s’ below:
Need some inspiration to get you started? Here are Corinna’s five favourite formulas, a.k.a her ‘grab bag of offers’. Once you get the formula down, you can create your own grab bag–convenient for when you want to take advantage of offers.
This ‘spend $150 and get a free ____’ is an excellent offer as it incentivizes the customer to want to spend more to be able to qualify.
$150 is only a placeholder, meaning the minimum spend is entirely dependent on your business and product. The freebie (e.g., free delivery, free pack of bacon, free plant) needs to be profitable. Ensure you’re doing the math so you’re not losing money on each order.
Giving free delivery is a great offer. Delivery is often an option a lot of customers are looking for–but not if it comes with a high fee. In one study done in 2022, 68.2% of global consumers were more likely to buy a product online when offered free delivery. This shows that free delivery guarantees a higher chance of customers going through with their purchase.
With this offer, be specific and strategic about the time the offer opens. If you launch your offer around a certain window of time, people have the need to show up as they feel like they might never get this opportunity again.
Corinna mentions using this offer for a spring pre-sale event she was running. She shared on social media saying the sale opened on February 24 at 8 a.m. sharp. This messaging creates a lot of hype and excitement but also pressures people into ‘lining up’ as supplies might run out.
A variation of this is a flash sale. Limited-time sales offers can tend to create a sense of urgency and encourage impulse buying, and possibly even impulse buying a lot of items at once (i.e., “Flash sale on BBQ meats” on Thursday, right before the weekend).
Free gifts with a first purchase add perceived value for customers, especially if they can only get the item this way. Corinna discovered that including free stickers with customers' first orders boosted her positive branding. This is a great offer, as some might even share it on social media, helping your farm’s visibility and reputation. It also makes these customers feel like they’re a part of something bigger.
Holding back some inventory (e.g., 25 crates of strawberries or 15 bundles of kale) to create the illusion of scarcity creates a sense of urgency for people to come in and buy. A limited amount of a product raises the value since people don’t want to miss out. Just be mindful of the amount (i.e., 20 pumpkins left creates more craze than 100 left) and space out the usage of this offer where it makes sense.
Announcing the addition of a popular item to your inventory mid-week promotes exclusivity. If they bought from you earlier in the week, it could drive another buying spree to snag the exclusive item.
Corinna did this when it was watermelon season (by accident). She emailed customers in the middle of the week about the remaining fifteen watermelons she had in stock, and in no time, a flurry of people rushed in and sold it out quickly. If you do this frequently, it might build a reputation among your customers, leaving them wondering what will come the following week.
At the end of our webinar, Maximizing E-Commerce Success: Crafting Offers to Boost Farm Sales, viewers were asked to share their best offers, creating an additional grab bag, and here they are!
Want to learn more about how to build a better offer? Or maybe you want to learn more about farm marketing? Corinna offers a monthly online membership to Farm Marketing School.
Making a successful offer will take practice, and your first few offers might not work out as you intended, but that’s okay! Finding offers that work is all about testing and revising. Once you start to build momentum, hopefully, you can see how offers can boost your farm sales and maximize your business success.
Now that you’ve formulated the next best farm offer, it’s time to try them out! Make your offers front and center on your online storefront. In our next article, we’ll walk you through how to use Local Line’s e-commerce features to highlight your offers. If you want a sneak peek, watch the recording here!
