Reaping The Rewards: Proven Strategies For Agriculture Email Marketing Success
The agriculture industry might be rooted in tradition, but it doesn’t mean you can’t give it a digital touch.
Agriculture email marketing is a powerful tool for farms, greenhouses, and the tourism department to connect with customers and build a thriving online presence.
The average open rate for the agriculture industry is 20.50%, which is pretty concrete considering the nature of business. It also suggests a good benchmark to compare your email campaigns and see how you’re doing.
A well-employed agricultural email marketing strategy can help you increase email open rates, maximize brand awareness, and boost sales.
Let’s explore the different facets of email marketing and leverage strategies to help you reap the rewards in time.
What is Agricultural Email Marketing?
Agricultural email marketing is a targeted method that uses emails to promote products or services within the farming industry. It helps farmers and agricultural businesses connect directly with customers cost-effectively.
Using email marketing, you can:
- Build relationships: Regular email communication keeps your business top of mind for existing and potential customers.
- Helps with targeted communication: Emails can be segmented to reach specific audiences based on their interests, preferences, and likes.
- Assists with promotions: Emails help you notify subscribers about new equipment, fertilizers, or farm stays to increase the likelihood of responses.
- Helps share industry updates: Customers can learn about industry news, market updates, and relevant information to make informed choices.
Email marketing can be highly effective when you adopt good-sending practices. By all means, build email lists with people’s consent (opt-in strategies) and maintain consistent email sending schedules.
To keep you on track, here are unconventional marketing ideas to explore.
Successful Email Marketing Strategies From Hunting to Farming
To build an effective email marketing strategy, you must have a list of engaged subscribers and keep their interest with relevant information.
Here are 5 proven strategies to get you started.
1. Build Your Agricultural Email List
Building a healthy agriculture email list starts with defining the right target audience. Develop ideal customer profiles to help you get closer to your target audiences. Once you’ve defined them, start to collect email addresses with people’s consent (permission-based marketing).
Use the following strategies to build an effective and compliant email list:
- Content marketing: Create a blog focused on agriculture topics or develop whitepapers and e-books in exchange for email addresses.
- Social media and online communities: Engage with agricultural communities on social media and promote your email list.
- Website optimization: Create dedicated landing pages with compelling CTAs or strategically use website pop-ups.
- Events and collaborations: Host or participate in agricultural events to collect sign-ups.
- Offline strategies: Attend cultural trade shows or local events and collect sign-ups via business cards.
If you have the budget, consider using paid media strategies such as ads to encourage more signups.
Know that all of these strategies combine well with email marketing, for example, social media can help you get more subscribers, and content marketing can help your reputation and email list as well.
2. Segment Your Email Audiences
After aggregating subscribers, segment them so they receive ultra-relevant email content. You can divide subscribers based on farming practices, location, crop type, or general preferences.
Segmentation also helps with personalized content, which is a must-have to foster higher open and engagement rates.
Implement the following personalization best practices:
- Use dynamic content fields: This helps you fit in relevant subscriber names and other details, such as previous interactions or shopping history.
- Automate welcome emails: Offer a warm welcome and send personalized offers to engage recipients and encourage further action.
3. Craft Compelling Subject Lines
A great subject line is critical to getting your emails opened.
Here are tips and tricks to craft compelling subject lines:
- Keep it short and relevant: Write relevant subject lines under 50 characters to ensure visibility on all devices.
- Highlight benefits: What’s in it for the reader? Increased yields? Tastier produce? Say it out in the subject lines.
- Use urgency: This is a classic tactic that, when done well, can get you better open rates. Send limited-time offers or deals to encourage immediate action.
- Use numbers: Numbers make subject lines pop and increase the likelihood of opens. For example, “5 ways to boost your harvest today.”
Let’s review some examples to help you craft your subject lines:
- “Limted-time to double your tomato yield.”
- “Sustainable farming tips for beginners.”
- “The secret to tastier vegetables revealed.”
4. Best Practices For Writing Effective Email Content
People trust you enough to buy from you and to keep that trust intact, create high-quality email content.
Follow these best practices below:
- Focus on value: Avoid generic email blasts and instead provide value through insights, tips, or offers relevant to subscribers’ needs.
- Keep the content scannable: Use bullet points, headings, and white space to create reader-friendly content.
- Include a clear CTA: Tell recipients what to do next. For example, “Visit our website to learn more.”
- Use mobile-friendly design: Ensure emails render well on mobile devices and offer a great user experience.
- Include an unsubscribe option: Include a straightforward way for recipients to opt out when they want.
Campaign Refinery automatically includes an unsubscribe link in all emails to maintain transparency and increase trust.
5. Structure Your Emails For Increased Engagement
Planning your email layout is as important as writing the email itself. While a great subject line can encourage recipients to open your emails, a cluttered email could quickly lose their interest.
Focus on enhancing user experience with the following tips:
- Use action words and hint at the email content in your subject lines.
- Write an engaging preview text to increase curiosity.
- Use a professional salutation.
- Use compelling headlines, visuals, and primary CTAs in the beginning.
- Grab attention with an interesting fact or a question.
- Use bullets and short questions for better readability.
- Use buttons or bold text to highlight the CTA.
- Include promotional offers in the middle section to encourage scrolling.
- Include links, contact information, and social media buttons in the email footer.
Even after you see success with your emails, keeping the conversation going is critical. Below, we’ll explore a few ways to help you do this.
Growing Reader Engagement The Right Way
While captivating readers’ interests is one thing, continually engaging them is a different ball game.
These tips below will add to your powerful strategies and complete the bigger picture:
- Use a conversational tone: Maintain a friendly and assertive tone from the subject lines to the email signature.
- Use lots of images: High-quality and relevant images can sell your stories even with fewer words.
- Encourage interaction: Don’t just keep sending them content; ask them how they feel about it or encourage them to share their opinions.
- Foster a community: Create a platform for readers to connect and discuss your content.
- Make it shareable: Integrate with social media to increase awareness and help readers share your content on their profiles.
Let’s examine email marketing for different agricultural sectors to help you craft emails suitably.
Agriculture Email Marketing For Different Sectors
Each email campaign contains a wealth of information to motivate customers to continue doing business with you. However, not all emails contain similar content, especially if you’re from different agricultural sectors.
You must know everything about agricultural sectors and crafting effective email content.
| Agricultural Sector | Target Audience | Email Content Ideas | CTA Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crop farming | Farmers, Agronomists | Weather updates, crop care tips, pest control | Download a free plating guide, visit the website to browse seed varieties, and order seeds for the upcoming season |
| Agricultural equipment | Farmers by farm size and equipment needs | New equipment launches and demos, trade-in programs | Watch a recorded webinar on equipment maintenance, get a quote for equipment |
| Precision agriculture and technology | Tech-savvy farmers and agribusinesses | Benefits of precision agricultural solutions (Drones, GPS, etc), case studies showing technology adoption | Sign up for a free trial, download a whitepaper on the ROI of using precision technology |
| Livestock and animal feed | Livestock producers by animal type (cattle, poultry, swine, etc) | Nutritional feed options for different animals, herd health management, industry news on livestock production | Browse feed products for animals, read an article on the best practices for raising healthy livestock |
| Agri-tourism | Travelers, families, foodies | Upcoming farm events and festivals, seasonal recipes featuring farm-fresh produce, special offers on farm stays, and experiences | Book your farm tickets today, learn how to make delicious strawberry jam, and sign up for our program to receive our weekly farm produce |
| Agri-education | Farmers, growers | Course announcements, success stories, insights, and trends | Read the blog post on the latest industry news, download the e-book to create fresh farm produce |
Following strategies and achieving the desired results is straightforward. But achieving solid email deliverability rates is quite complex.
Campaign Refinery’s primary goal is to ensure that your emails reach the intended audience and that your sender reputation is intact. This helps increase your email deliverability rates and, eventually, your marketing ROI.
Enjoy the Highest Email Deliverability Rate With Campaign Refinery
Campaign Refinery provides the highest email deliverability rate on the market.
Wondering how?
This is how our system works:
- Our system identifies and addresses common deliverability threats using powerful tools such as integrated email list cleaning and spam checker tools.
- We enforce mandatory domain authentication to verify legitimate senders, protecting your sender and brand reputation.
- We encourage practices that boost engagement, such as using the evergreen flash sale or engagement rewards features.
These core practices and our high-speed sending engine allow our clients to grow their business revenue — Gymlaunch grew their revenue from $0 to $3.6m in the first twelve months of joining Campaign Refinery.
Want to become a top sender with Campaign Refinery?
