Solving Your CSA’s Biggest Challenge: Three Tips to Retain Customers Year After Year
If your CSA is like most, customer retention is your biggest challenge. Are you keeping and growing customers from season to season? It takes an investment of time, effort, and money to get customers to sign up, and every year they stay with you, the returns on that investment grow. Read on for advice on how to do just that.
Retaining CSA Customers Year After Year:
The following tips are excerpted from our free e-book “How to Cultivate Customers and Grow Value.”
1. Start Early.
It’s never too soon to start selling next year’s shares to your current subscribers. Consider offering them an early bird discount on next season’s share. Keep in mind that you don’t have to cut into your margins in order to offer a discount. By making the cost of later sign-ups slightly more expensive, you can create a perceived discount for early sign-ups.
2. Build Healthy Connections Through Marketing.
Marketing to your existing customers can seem crazy, but it’s essential to cultivating the lifetime value of your relationships with them. Every additional season your customer stays with you cuts down the cost of acquisition.
Read More: Social Media Strategies to Maximize Your Online Store.
3. Be Responsive to your Customers.
Late fall is the perfect time to ask your customers what did or didn’t work for them this season. Ask in person, or share a short and simple survey via email. Be sure you ask your customers how likely they are to sign up next year—and why. Their feedback can be the key to helping you understand any changes you may need to make before next season.
You can find these tips and so much more in our resource: “How to Cultivate Customers & Grow Value: A Guide to CSA Retention.”
What Tools do I Need to Run a Successful Farm Share?
✔ A user-friendly website
✔ A way to manage deliveries or pickups
✔ Flexibility and customization options for customers
✔ Easy inventory management
✔ Email communication with customers
Local Food Marketplace offers all of these tools in one single platform. And we’ve even added new features especially for those farms and food hubs that offer CSA shares and subscriptions.
Want to see LFM’s Subscription Builder in action?
Watch the Video Preview!If you have any questions about how LFM can help you to set up your farm shares for success, just click here to set up a free demo call.
More Resources to Help Upgrade Your Farm Share Subscriptions:
Still searching for a CSA software solution? Meet with us for a free demo!
