Full Transcript:

Katie - ChopLocal [00:00:00]:
All right, everybody, we will go ahead and get started. So today we are focusing all about email marketing, which is something that I'm really excited to present about because it's something that I've been doing for almost 15 years now. But to really understand why email marketing is so important, you kind of need to understand the marketing funnel. If you've heard of the marketing funnel before, basically, it means that you take a whole lot of people that find out about your business and what you offer, and then some of them move down into considering, meaning that they are considering purchasing from you. And then at the end, at the bottom of the funnel, you have the buyers, and those are the people that actually make a purchase from you. Or if you are a processor, this might be all of the producers that are aware that you exist, the producers that are considering bringing you their livestock the next time that they need a locker appointment, and then those clients or those producers that are finally booking that appointment and bringing you their animals. One of the things that I see kind of diy or junior marketers do, and it's something that I was totally guilty of when we first started. Shop local and in some other positions, too, is that you want to move people from being aware of your business to being a buyer really quickly.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:01:28]:
And that is ideal if you can. The first time that they find out that you exist, they move through this process and they become a customer and they give you their hard earned cash right away. That is fantastic. And when we have a brick and mortar shop, that somebody walks into the shop and they see the selection and they meet the friendly face behind the counter, that can happen really quickly. There's a little bit of that added pressure of being face to face with somebody. Do you ever go into those little small town shops and you feel like you should buy something, or like at a farmer's market booth and you don't want to just awkwardly walk away. That helps. That face to face interaction helps move people through the marketing funnel to become a buyer.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:11]:
But when we are doing our digital marketing online, it's a little bit different. It can take several times for them to notice that you exist. And then they write, might really need to think through purchasing from you. And then finally they become a buyer. And it could be that, like, they just went to the grocery store and they stocked up and so they want to buy from you next time, but they don't need to right now. Or it could be that they want to check out some reviews before they make that purchase. But either way, you have a good chunk of your audience right here, that is in this consideration phase before they become a buyer. Now, your buyers, you can't forget about them in your marketing either, because you want them to come back and buy again.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:55]:
Hopefully they've worked with you, they bought from you, they are pleased with you, and so you want to convince them to come back. This is where email marketing can be super powerful, is in convincing those people that are considering buying from you and then bringing back repeat customers. When we talk about email marketing, it goes hand in hand with social media. But social media is really great for raising awareness but not necessarily moving people through this funnel. And this is why. Okay, these are 2024 numbers from Socialinsider IO that Sydney and I looked up recently. Email has a 40% average open rate. So that's one of the pieces of kickback we always get, is why email? Does anybody read email anymore? Well, yeah, 40% of the people open up the emails that they get.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:03:54]:
Now compare that to your social media reach. Facebook will only show your posts to, on average, about 4% of your followers. And Instagram shows them a little bit higher, about 8%. And I know a small brands, those numbers can be a little bit higher. And hopefully you are seeing higher numbers with your farms or butcher shops when you are marketing on social media. But you're also going to see higher open email open rates by being a small brand as well. So when we really start to dig into what this looks like, we're going to do some reverse math. We kind of referenced this earlier and I will introduce myself, I promise.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:04:32]:
But I used to be a teacher and it's been a few years since I did the 6th grade. Fractions and ratios and things like that. But if you look at the reverse math here, if you want to reach 50 customers, you can take your goal of 50, divide it by the average reach times 100, and that's how many followers you need to reach 50 customers with your post or your information. So on Facebook, to reach 50 people, you need over 1100 followers. On Instagram, you need over 650 followers. But on email you only need 125 subscribers. So no, email is not dead and you do not have to have a huge list to make a big impact with your email. Same thing we start to look at what if you want to reach 500 customers, that means you need over 11,000 Facebook followers or 6500 Instagram followers.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:05:27]:
But your email list, just over a thousand and you can reach 500 customers or even more if your open rate is even higher. So now that I've given you a little bit of background about why email is so important. Let me pause and I, like I said, I will introduce myself. So my name is Katie Old Toff. I am a former teacher, although it has been a few years after, well, while I was teaching and then after I quit to stay home with my boys, I actually was a mommy blogger. And that's when I started using email marketing. So that was about 13 years ago, I think now. No, gosh, wait.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:06:08]:
My oldest is about to be 16 this summer and I started my blog when he was a year old. So we'll make that 15 years ago now. I started using email marketing at that time. I also launched a small business where I sold actually like home decor farm junk type stuff at a local farm nearby me. And then I worked for a couple different ag organizations on their staff in communications, also using email at that time. Then in 2020, I helped start Chop Local, which if you are new here, many of you are not. And you know what chop local is. But chop Local is an online farmers market for meat that connects consumers with farmers across the country.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:06:53]:
We have about 70 farms, ranches and butcher shops on chop local right now selling their meat. But then we also received a USDA grant in 2022 to do something that I love, which is this education piece to help all of you. Again, that same audience, farmers, ranchers and butcher shops, to help you sell more meat online or to help you grow your business through digital marketing, including email marketing. So that's where all of this information is coming from, is my, I guess, 15 years of experience with email marketing and my background as a teacher that makes this type of experience perfect for me. I really, really enjoy getting to do this. So, so what I'm going to share with you today, now that we've kind of laid the groundwork, is my top ten tips to make the most of your email marketing. We recently finished up a six week course for our chop local vendors. So the farms and butcher shops selling on chop local were invited to spend six weeks, 1 hour a week with me talking about email marketing.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:07:56]:
And it was fantastic. We had a really great time and we learned a bunch, both of us. I learned what the needs are. They learned a lot about email marketing. These are kind of ten of the things that came away as some of their biggest learnings or some of the things that I saw that they really needed to focus on. And so that's what I want to share with you all today. We're going to go through each one of them. So I'm not going to read this slide right now the number one thing, and we're kind of doing this sequentially.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:08:27]:
Okay. So starting from getting people on your email list to what to send them, people ask, how do I get people to sign up for my email list? Number one thing to do is to give them something free. And we call that freebie a lead magnet. A lead is a potential customer. The magnet literally attracts the lead to you. So a lead magnet attracts subscribers to you. And you can see a couple of examples that we've used at chop local. In order to work really well, your lead magnet needs to be aligned with what you offer, and it needs to be valuable to the potential customer.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:09:08]:
So you think about your ideal customer. If your ideal customer. I just worked on a lead magnet for bison. Actually, bison is a very lean protein, and so a lot of times it's very desirable for people who are watching their calorie intake or are interested in health. And so your lead magnet needs to be tied to their health and well being and possibly how bison can help them. We also, in our lead magnet for bison, we included some bison recipes, because bison is not a common meat that we all have in our grocery stores or in our kitchens all the time. And so including some recipes, some tips for cooking, and then as well as the nutritional and health information related to it, really helps us find the ideal customer that is really going to appreciate bison and hopefully come back for more. You can see here we also have done the six easy lamb recipes.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:10:08]:
We have a guide to beef marketing terms for people who are confused and they want to choose the beef that's right for them. A chop Local first timers guide that helps them shop on our chop local website and know how to find exactly the right farm for them. And these are just a few examples. We have a lot of different lead magnets, and we actually use them throughout the funnel a little bit differently. So for people who are just aware of your farm or butcher shop, or you want them to become aware, a giveaway or a guide that solves a problem is a really great way. A really great lead magnet. So if you're doing a giveaway, you just say, sign up for our email newsletter and we will pick a winner that gets a gift card, or a winner that gets a smoker or a winner, whatever it is that you want to give away, and people will sign up in droves. It could also be a guide that solves a problem that they don't even know that they have or that directly relates to your products if they are aware of you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:11:10]:
And these would be people that like, are following you on social media already or are maybe local to your small town or at your farmers market. Again, lead magnets, good ideas are guides that solve problems or answer questions about your specific products, coupons and again, that giveaway. So one thing to note is that people who have never heard of you before and are visiting your website for the first time, a coupon is not super valuable to them because they haven't decided yet if it's valuable. They don't even know if they want to purchase from you. But once they've started considering it and thinking that you might be a good fit for them, then a coupon is very valuable. And a coupon is super valuable for past customers that you want to get on your email list so that you can remarket to them as well. Here's a couple examples of lead magnets that I really like. This one is from seven sons, which seven sons is a family that sells their meat direct to consumer.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:12:15]:
The problem here would be that the customer wants to ensure that the meat that they buy meets their requirements, aligns with their values. And so seven sons on their website has a little call out that says, visit our farm today. And it's not inviting people to actually tour the farm. It's a video tour. It doesn't even say, sign up for our email list and we'll send you a video of our farm. It actually says, visit our farm today. And then when you click on the link, there is an email sign up here in order for people to actually access the videos. And then from there, this is day one, they actually send out, I think it's five days of videos to introduce you to each of the products that they sell and really start to nurture that relationship so that the people who are going from awareness to consideration are more likely to become buyers as they get more information.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:13:13]:
Another example here is if you are selling quarters or halves of beef, there are cuts in there that your customer might not be familiar with. So a recipe booklet that shows them how to use those lesser known cuts, like short ribs or something like that. Um, or a guide to the cut sheet that just tells them, you know, things like, if you like your steak rare, you might want a thicker cut steak, and you might want to get inch and a quarter inch or inch or something like that. Versus if you like your steak more well done. Some customers do weirdos, but if you like your steak more well done, you could order thinner steaks and get more of them. Those are a few examples for lead magnets. Tip number two we spent a lot of time on tip number one, but tip number two is to use those lead magnets to collect email addresses online and offline. So you can promote your lead magnets on social media.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:14:11]:
But remember, less than 10% of your followers are going to see it, so you need to post it frequently. Like you could put it into your calendar to post once a month, and I don't think that that would be overkill on your website. A pop up works great. Some people will close them right away and so you want to make sure that you have your settings. Usually when they close the pop up it will disappear for a few days, but you want to make sure that it does come back up. The next time that they come back again, they're moving through that journey. And then at your checkout, if they do end up ordering, you want to make sure that they can sign up for the emails as they are checking out because they have, they've basically shown you that they are dedicated and committed to you at this point and so you want to stay in touch with them in person at farmers markets or at your retail shop. QR codes are great for directing people to an email sign up list and a lot of email providers will make this QR code for you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:15:15]:
Otherwise, you can make QR codes in canva. I think it might be canva Pro paid feature, but we love Canva Pro. It's worth your $120 a year, I think is what it is. So make sure if you are asking people for your email, it's not just at the checkout, at the farmer's market or at the shop if your shop is busy. If your farmers market booth is busy, people want to move through quickly because they feel like they're being courteous to the other people behind them in line, and so they might not stop to give you their email at that time. So have it posted in other areas around the shop or at your booth too. And when all else fails, an old fashioned clipboard where they can write their name and their email address works too, although you might have trouble deciphering their handwriting from time to time, but you can gather some emails that way too. Tip number three.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:16:14]:
After you've got them on your list, you want to send them a friendly, welcome email. Ideally, you use automation so that this happens immediately after they've signed up. What you need to include in this email is your lead magnet. If you have offered them something free, like a guide I didn't mention, but lead magnets could also be something like a free hat or a free t shirt or a free meat thermometer, something like that in your but include your lead magnet in your welcome email. If you've offered them something digital. Have your friendly welcome in there. You're trying to build their trust. Introduce yourself, your farm, your ranch, your business, your family.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:16:55]:
Give a brief overview of all of the products that you offer and then make sure that you include how to order or where to find you. They may have seen you at one farmer's market and they don't know that you attend two other farmers markets. Or they may have seen you at a farmer's market while they were in town visiting relatives. And they are ecstatic to find out that you also could ship your meat to them when they are out of town. I do like to include a little bit about what to expect from future emails and I didn't put this on the list, but a disclaimer that says that you can unsubscribe at any time. So what this looks like is something that says we're going to be sending you weekly updates about the specials on our farm or we're going to be sending you regular updates about the specials on our farm and a little bit more background information about our meat and how it's raised. And then if you can ask a question and get them to respond, this is really, really powerful. This helps to tell your email provider, the recipient's email provider, that this is a valuable email to them and so they want to interact with it and it's going to help keep that email from ending up in the promotions folder or in the spam folder.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:18:12]:
Now, after you sent your welcome email, what else do you send? One of the hesitations I hear from people is that they don't want to do email marketing because people's emails are just totally full. They're inundated with emails all the time and I don't want to be too salesy. Well, first, being salesy is how you make sales. Okay, you have to market your products, but secondly, you don't have to send every email with a strong call to action that says buy, buy, buy. You can send emails in between that provide value like cooking tips or storage and handling. One of our popular emails is how to thaw your meat. Recipes are great for that, so help them learn how to use your meat is one topic that you definitely want to cover. The other topic I called this building trust and that's really the getting to know you behind the scenes, the seasonal updates about what's happening on the farm, behind the scenes, photos from a butcher shop are so cool.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:19:13]:
Think about what you put on social media and don't be afraid to repurpose that into these emails, which kind of leads me into the next topic. There are two different types email formats that you can use. One of them is what I call a newsletter. And I'm going to give you an example from my own life because I do still have kids in school. I get a school newsletter monthly that has a letter from the principal and a letter from the superintendent, and a section from the school nurse on checking for head lice and vaccinations and whatever. And a section on upcoming sports camps and a section on the booster club activities that are coming up. That's a newsletter. It's very informational.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:20:00]:
It can also be very entertaining. It's like the magazine, or like a magazine that has a little bit of something for everyone. It does work well in some situations, and specifically, I'm going to say it works well for providing value and building trust. So a newsletter that has three recipes in it plus a pharma update. It's generally a longer email. Like I said, it does have a place in some situations. But a newsletter is not likely going to drive a lot of sales for you because the more choices that you give your email readers, the more diluted each of those actions or those choices become. So there's not a super clear call to action of exactly what you want them to do, which is purchase.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:20:48]:
And so these emails are more about building trust and providing value and getting them into the routine of opening your email every time. So that when you do switch formats and send them a flyer style email, they open it and they take action. Okay, so a flyer style email, I think about I get my school newsletter, but when it's time for a field trip and my kid needs to pack a lunch and wear her special t shirt for the field trip, I get a flyer that is just about that from the teacher. So when there's something really important that you want your customers to do, you send a flyer style email with one topic, one very clear call to action. And if it's really important to you, you're going to send it more than once with a sense of urgency. Examples? You're running a sale or promotion, or you really need to drive traffic to a special event. You have a special event coming up, or you're just feeling the crunch and you really need to get some sales and some cash flow right now. Maybe it is for cash flow purposes.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:21:58]:
Maybe it's because you've got fresh chicken that you're going to have to freeze if you can't move right away and then it loses value, whatever that may be. If you want them to take action, send a flyer style email. Forget all of the building trust, all of the little farm updates. Those will dilute their actions that they take following the email. I hope that that made sense because that's one thing that we talked a lot about in our course. I totally agree that you still want to give them that value and make that connection with them, but you don't have to do it in every single email. Now, something else I'm super passionate about is email design. Okay.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:22:45]:
And really, the way to summarize this is that you need to design for mobile. And it's hard because when we're doing email marketing, we are doing it on the desktop. Usually we are looking at it on our computers, but the people who are going to read it are, I think it's up to 70% are going to read it on their mobile device. And so you need to keep that in mind. I looked at these emails here. This one was a screenshot from a mobile. Two sentences takes up five lines. Five lines is a considerably sized paragraph for your eye to look at.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:23:20]:
It looks a little bit overwhelming and it causes people to skim. So the way that we combat that is we leave plenty of blank space. We use super short paragraphs. One or two sentences, two sentences is really pushing it. And I probably should have used shorter sentences. I could go back and edit and take out unnecessary words. You want to keep the entire email short because even though it doesn't look that big on your big screen, think about how many scrolls it takes with your thumb. I have this theory.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:23:49]:
Nobody told me this statistic. It's never been proven, but I have this theory that people will do three scrolls and that's about it. Then they're done. If they don't see anything in that three scrolls that stops them from scrolling, they're moving on. I definitely recommend using bold, italics and underlines to draw attention to important words and to make it skimmable, and then to use bulleted and numbered lists. You will also notice in both of these emails it is left aligned. If you have more than two lines of text, I like it left aligned. It's much easier for your eye to track it to the next line and to actually read it.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:24:30]:
And these are things, these tips that I'm giving you here about email design are not just based on, like, my preferences. Yes, they are my preferences. But in a lot of cases they are based on psychology and based on what I know about teaching young kids to read, because that's what I used to do. And also, I spent five years editing the Iowa cattleman's magazine, and Jackie was a great graphic designer there. And so we talked about the length of a paragraph in a column in the magazine and what that looks like and the power of using these bullet points or numbered lists instead. So these are the same types of techniques that newspaper editors, magazine editors have been using for decades, if not hundreds of years. But we need to apply them to reading on this small screen. So lots of white space.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:25:23]:
When people ask me for feedback on their emails, this is one of the number one things that I come back and say is more white space, smaller paragraphs. Get rid of these extra words. Let's really make sure that they know what is most important for their eye to see. Next one. Number eight. We talked about building trust. We talked about providing value. But one thing that you can include in your email campaigns is what we call social proof.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:25:54]:
And that is basically a digital version of word of mouth marketing. You want to show off the fact that people are there shopping from you, whether that's like your busy retail counter here or it is a picture of your farmers market booth when it's really busy. And in this picture, Tina is showing off that she is going to be shipping out some meat. Look at all those boxes behind her. I'm pretty sure those were all empty and in storage getting ready to be used later on. But it makes you think, gosh, a lot of people ordered meat from Tina, right? Then you can also include reviews. This seems like a good time to mention since I have photos here. If you are including photos in your email, make sure that you follow your email providers prompts to resize your images to make them smaller, because if they are too big, they will completely take over the inbox.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:26:50]:
And that's one of the things that can trigger your emails to end up in spam or promotions, is if there are really big images embedded in them. Number nine, jazz up the subject line. Okay, I can't tell you how many. I will tell you, organizations, nonprofit organizations in particular, seem to be really guilty of this, but they send the same subject line in every single email and it says monthly update. Monthly update. And then it says the monthly. I also see one of my farmers that I worked with. I gave her a hard time because she had a subject line that said farm update.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:27:33]:
And then I opened the email. She had been to Washington, DC that week to advocate on behalf of small farmers. And I was like, Anna, you could have used an email that said, guess where I was this week, or I finally got off the farm. Or, you know, something that brings a little bit of curiosity into it is going to get people to click and open up your emails. So I use this example of the AARp magazine because I just read a marketing book by Sabri Subi called sell like crazy. And he gives this example of AArp. It's not the National Enquirer, but it is a very popular magazine that you find at newsstand checkouts. And they use these types of clickbait type headlines to get people to buy their magazine at the checkout.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:28:26]:
And that's exactly the way that you need to think too. You can also bring in some fomo fear of missing out. So some urgency, like going fast. Last chance, don't miss out. Lists are super popular anytime you put a number in there. Emojis I use with caution. It kind of depends on your audience, and I feel like emoji use is definitely part of your personal style. I'm not a big emoji user, but I'm a little bit older, you know, so there are people who are big emoji users and that's fine.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:28:59]:
I have seen people try to hack the system and put forward at the beginning of their subject line to make people think that this email was actually forwarded to them by someone that they know. Not a super big fan of that. I do see it used. It might be effective. I've never done it and I don't love it, but you could try it if you wanted to. If you were going to share a review that somebody gave you, that might be a good place to put forward because then you could really make it look like somebody emailed you a review and you really are forwarding that on to somebody. Number ten, this is a little bit more advanced, but once you get all of those other things in place, you get a good rhythm going. You can actually set up automations that will do the work for you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:29:53]:
Maybe automations come first and you go to all those other things later on, but you don't have to sit down weekly or monthly and do an email. You could sit down quarterly and do all of your emails and schedule them. You can also. What we do for chop local is we have a welcome sequence, which is a series of emails that builds trust and converts those browsers into buyers. I went over this in the course, but we have, I think, about 13 weeks of emails and they start out a little bit more frequently. Every two or three days, show people how to use chop local, how to find a farmer near them. They do get a coupon that they can use for being a new email subscriber. And then as we go on the email spread out a little bit.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:30:42]:
And we have one that focuses on lamb and one that focuses on bison and one that focuses on thawing your frozen meat and one that talks all about how our producers are shipping their meat so that they can feel more comfortable with how it's going to arrive to them. So we have this, all those ideas that we talked about earlier, we built up those emails over time and we just have them automatically scheduled to go to new people without me lifting a finger. It just happens. And so even when we get busy and we don't send out a weekly email or something like that, our new people, our new subscribers are still getting those emails all the time and our email is doing the work for us without us having to do it. Second, automation that is really great is an abandoned cart automation. It reminds people who start an order to come back and finish it because we know that that happens. People put things into their cart. It's one of my favorite pastimes is to put clothing into my online shopping carts and then never check out with it.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:31:44]:
Right? So my email is full of abandoned cart emails. On chop Local, we actually take care of this for our vendors so they don't have to worry about it. They get an automatic email from chop Local, the customers do, reminding them to finish their order and then a post order sequence could be two or three emails that ask for reviews and invite the customer to order again after a certain period of time. If the customer has not come back in a few months to order again, we do give them a coupon. We dangle that carrot to get them to come back and order again. So those are my top ten tips. I'm going to take a look at this question. How much time should you put between the welcome emails? Excellent question.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:32:32]:
So I do like to put them a little bit closer together when we start out one or two days, you know, back to back, one day after another or two or three days if you one of the things to think about. And hopefully this doesn't get confusing, but if you are also actively sending regular email updates, we don't want that brand new person that's just signed up for your email to also get your regular email updates and end up with three or four emails in a couple of days or something like that. And so I think it kind of depends on the rest of your email sequence. I hope that that helped. If you do have questions, go ahead and put them in the q and A for me. Otherwise, give me a quick raise your hand if you have learned something new so far today. If you feel like this has been helpful for you so far. Good.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:33:33]:
We got a couple. Oh. Oh, great. I love watching all these hands raised. This is fun, isn't it, Sydney? Okay, awesome. You can put your hands down. So I am really glad that that was helpful because that was my goal, was to give you something that you can take away today that will enhance your email marketing. If you want to go deeper into this.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:33:54]:
We are taking that course that I just did with our chop local vendors and we are relaunching it. It's going to be six weeks. It's going to be live. It's going to be right here during this timeframe, 02:00 p.m. central time on Wednesdays for the next few weeks. And this is basically what we're going to cover. I know that this is kind of small. Let me go to the next.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:34:19]:
I'll read these to you here. So the first one is getting set up for success. There are basically ten steps that I say that you should do in your email marketing account that are going to help you get established and make it easier for you down the road. Draft and design emails like a pro. This is where I'm really going to talk to you about design and show you a ton of different options or different examples of how you can, how you can design your emails to get a lot of information in a way that people can skim really quickly. And it's something that we come back to throughout the course because like I said, I found that it was something that people really needed to see more examples and really put in action. Number three, how to get strangers to want to sign up for your email list. We did talk about lead magnets for quite a while today.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:35:11]:
We're going to get so much deeper into that. As far as lead magnets that work, we might cover. I'm actually running some ads to lead magnets right now on Facebook, so I'm testing out the best strategies for those ads. We'll talk about how to design your lead magnet, how to deliver it, that type of thing. Session four is going to be more about the types of emails to send, how to structure those newsletters versus flyers, and we go through a list of, I think at last count there were 39 different topic ideas that you could use to build trust, provide value, and then have those sales emails too. Session five, use email marketing automations. You can't read the bottom of that, but we're going to talk about automations. And then in session six we're going to talk about the numbers.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:36:02]:
What should your open rate be, what should your click rate be? And if it's not there, how are we going to boost those? How are we going to make that better? You also get several free downloads. These are just a few of the reviews from the last round of the course that we did. Like I said, it was a great experience and I loved seeing the results of our farms that we worked with. One of them, Fluffy butt farms, had started with her email marketing. She wanted to make sure that she was using every feature available in Mailchimp. That's what we typically use. But she says here that her open rate was averaging 30% to 40%, which is very respectable. But by the end of the course, it was averaging 50% to 60% and people were coming to her at the farmers market saying that they had seen her emails.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:36:52]:
Linda was a beginner to email marketing, did not use it whatsoever, was very overwhelmed at the beginning. I love this message where she says, I may be the tortoise in the class, but I'm proud of the distance I've traveled. Thank you for your help and patience. So even if this is brand new to you and seems overwhelming, it is possible Linda is proof. And then Gerald has taken a couple different courses with us and he was very active getting on the group every week. He let me use his emails for examples and show him again how to break it up into shorter paragraphs and had great feedback for us as well. I'll let you look over this. We have another not a question, but something helpful from Lisha, who said, I recently used the AI option to jazz up her subject line in a Mailchimp newsletter and the options were way better than anything I came up with.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:37:47]:
Yes, so we have used AI to draft emails or in like the subject lines or to come up with ideas too. It can definitely make your job easier. Sometimes they get a little bit cheesy. And I'll give the example of like, if I use the AI option in mailchimp and it gave me a bunch of emojis and emojis are not my style and I've never used an emoji before in my life. It could go two ways. People reading it could be like, whoa, what's Katie doing with these emojis? I better open this up and see what's going on. Or they could be like, this seems totally fake because it's not like Katie whatsoever. Right? So I guess what I'm saying is use AI with caution and use it smartly.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:38:30]:
But it can definitely be helpful for you. So if you are interested in this course, we have uploaded it to our chop local university website. Sydney, did you drop the link in the chat or can you. Okay, so it's also on the [email protected]. it's email marketing. Email marketing. It starts a week from today, so you only have a few days to sign up for it. Like I said, I'm really excited.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:39:04]:
I don't anticipate that we will be offering this course again live anytime soon. We may offer a recorded version of it, but that's not nearly as much fun. We will probably do some other live courses later throughout this year. And so this one is going to be the one chance to get the email marketing course and to go through all of these things, get that coaching and plus you and I can do a one on one marketing consultation where we can talk through if you're having trouble. Where is the problem? What is that looking like? Are there other things in addition to email marketing that we think that you should really be focused on? What can we do to really help you build your meat business? And so you'll get that one on one consultation when you sign up for the course as well. There any other questions that we have right now? One of the questions that we do get asked a lot is which email platform is best? I have used Mailchimp since the beginning of my email marketing journey. I have used a couple other platforms along the way in different positions and I keep coming back to Mailchimp. I think it is fairly user friendly.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:40:23]:
It integrates with a lot of different platforms and it does integrate with the chop local platform for our vendors as well. And so the course will use examples from Mailchimp. If we talk about specifically how to do something on the technology side, it is going to be talking specifically about Mailchimp. But a lot of the things that you saw, like the ideas for what to send, the email design tips, those are obviously universal no matter what platform you are using. Another question we get asked is how often should I send emails? How often is too often? And my response is that I think that you can send it up to twice a week during your busy seasons or when you have really important things that you want to send out. I think if you send it less than once a month, it's going to be a lot less effective. But I will say if you have a special event coming up and you are wanting to use that flyer style email, but you haven't been in touch with your email list very often in the previous few weeks or months, plan ahead a couple of weeks and send a couple newsletter style emails to get them warmed up, get them refreshed, get them remembering why they have considered or have previously done business with you. And then when you send that flyer email, it's going to be that much more effective because you've taken that time.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:41:55]:
You still get the best of both worlds where you can move them through that marketing funnel, but then give them that really direct call to action as well. All right, I don't think we have any other questions. So thank you, everybody for jumping on. We will put this on YouTube. We will send out an email to you so that you can all watch it. And then we'll be using email marketing to tell you more about this course. If you haven't signed up for it yet, we'll send a couple more emails over the next few days before we launch the course next week.