Selling Points

While most retail marketing focuses on increasing visitor traffic and converting visitors into buyers, it is important to give equal attention to customer retention. Repeat buyers are the mainstay of many a small producer and critical cushion in an economic downturn.

Encourage visitors and customers in your Booth to register, join, preorder, or vote so that you have their name and contact information. This will allow you to alert them to special sales, new products, harvest dates or changes in your location.

The goal, of course, is to convert one-time customers into regular shoppers who will frequent your Booth often and allow you to personalize the shopping experience.

Here’s four effective marketing strategies for attracting repeat customers:

1. Newsletters. A successful newsletter should have interesting or useful content related to your products, such as recipes or topical news bits. Ask shoppers to subscribe at your Booth. Offer a discount or a chance at a prize when subscribing.

2. Preorders. With preorders, you have first chance at a second sale to the customer.

3. Subscriptions. Customers subscribe to or sign up for an ongoing round of purchases that the producer can act on without further permission. Community Supported Agriculture farms operate on this method.

4. Exclusive Offers, and Promotions. Offer customers an opportunity to get advance notice or special discounts when they join your “club.”

• Selling Points
• How to Lease a Booth
• Management of New Product Launches

With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook present an opportunity for farmers market vendors to connect with new customers, both locally and around the globe.

Whether they grow tomatoes or craft birdhouses or raise emus or make soaps, vendors can profit from social marketing with an investment of time online, but very little cashflow.

To get started, vendors should visit the following sites and look for those that seem best suited to their products. Search the sites for products by name and see what kind of conversations and networking they currently offer.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn

Once accounts are opened, vendors should build profile pages with links to their Farmer’s Market Online Booths, websites, email addresses, blogs, or other online presences. Make it easy for people to make contact by including invitations to social networking pages with each email sent.

Add photos, logos and links that best promote the product.

Crosslink with as many petinent contacts as possible, whether they be customers or colleagues or friends or neighbors. As with a busy open air market, the larger the circle of online contacts the more opportunity there will b for conversations and sales.

Vendors should use their social networking pages to announce new products, events, sales, bonuses, giveaways, contests and more.

• How to Lease a Booth

Although it remains an omnipresent force in the world of online commerce, eBay is making changes as the number of buyers on the site is declining and many sellers are going out of business or finding other ways to market their goods.

David Port of Entrepreneur.com reports in PC World that eBay’s decision to allow big-box retailers broader access to its site could endanger small sellers and fosters a bias toward fixed-price sales.

“Rumors that eBay is positioning itself to eventually do away with auctions or auction categories are unfounded, assures (eBay’s senior manager of seller advocacy, Jim) Griffith, who says the company has “absolutely no intention” of doing so.”

Griffith told Port that he understood why some sellers fault eBay for introducing “unnecessary complexity” to the auction marketplace. “Our mission today is to make things simpler through streamlining and consolidation.”

Selling Points

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension website explains the details of the Country of Origin Labeling law that went into effect in the U.S. on September 30, 2008.

The law requires labels identifying country of origin on certain foods, including meat, produce and nuts, when sold at particular retail establishments.

The website will help “anyone in the food system from farm to fork,” said Darrell Mark, UNL extension livestock marketing specialist.

The law will require livestock producers to document where their livestock was born, raised and processed. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture will not fully enforce terms of the law until April, “educational compliance” is being promoted now, Mark said.

The site includes a series of fact sheets, videos and other educational materials for livestock producers, meat processors, retailers, extension educators and consumers.

The site focuses primarily on meat but also contains some information about other commodities included under the law. Food included under the law include muscle and ground cuts of beef, pork and lamb, goat meat, chicken, ginseng, fish and shellfish, peanuts, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, pecans and macadamia nuts.

The labels placed on the products must state which country the product came from so consumers know whether they are buying products from the United States or other countries. Meat can be labeled “U.S. origin” only if it came from animals born, raised and processed in the United States.

The labels are required only at larger retail outlets, defined as those that invoice more than $230,000 of fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables.

COOL originally was contained in the 2002 farm bill but its implementation was delayed because of challenges in how to make it work,. Parts of the law were changed and modifications to the original COOL law were passed in the 2008 farm bill.