Starting a food hub is exciting and the novelty of your new offering will often attract your early customers fairly easily.
The trick, however, is to keep them coming back, to steadily add new customers over time, and to maximise their purchase value. This guide helps to identify the important things to pay attention to and the key actions that can make a big difference.
Increasing Customer Numbers
There are 3 main ways to grow the number of customers.
Retain current customers
Apart from the obvious advice of delivering great quality products on time, in full, at fair prices with fabulous customer service, it will also make a big difference if you establish a program with a combination of a. strategically timed follow up calls, b. seeking feedback, and c. offering loyalty incentives.Reactivate lapsed customers
Customers lapse for many reasons. Sometimes it’s because you don’t offer what they want, but often it’s simply because they forgot about you. A combination of reactivation prompts, feedback request calls, and reactivation incentives can keep them coming back.Acquire new customers
If you’re offering great products with excellent service at fair prices, then most of your customers will come from referrals. This is always the best way to grow. However, the tried and true trinity of for acquiring new customers is a. outdoor brand exposure (typically as enticing graphics on your delivery van), b. regular social media content on local groups and regionally targeted ads, and c. in person direct sales at community events, farmers markets, street stalls etc.
Increase Transaction Value
There are 3 main ways to increase transaction value.
Increase box sizes
Most food hubs offer Veg Boxes as a core product that customers can subscribe to. Often the box sizes are based on what the hub operator thinks people can afford, but, if you offer bigger box sizes, you’d be surprised how many people will choose the larger sizes. Each year you can safely increase the volume of food in the boxes a notch and the prices accordingly. Customers get the same value for money. If the new prices fall close to half way between the old prices, most customers will stick with their usual box and very price sensitive customers can move down a size to save money. Also, include an extra large box in the range. This makes the large boxes appear more affordable and there are always some customers who will go for the extra large.Increase range of relevant products
The more relevant products on offer, the higher the average transaction cost and the more customers that you become relevant to. Eggs, bread, milk, fruit bags, spreads, chutneys, whatever you would expect to find in a farm shop.Prompt and incentivise for larger orders
One of the simplest and proven ways to increase sales by 20% or more is to send weekly 'Sneak Peek' emails to all your customers letting them know that the contents of their upcoming box can now be seen on their customer dashboard and that they have until the order cut-off time to add any extra products to their next delivery. Your customers will click the link in their email to see what's coming and then when they land on their dashboard, they'll be enticed to add some yummy extras. Another way to increase order values is by having delivery fees for orders under a certain value. This is very effective at increasing revenue for small orders and also encourages customers to place larger orders to avoid the fee. Free products for orders over a certain value can be an added incentive to increase order sizes further.
We hope you’ll try some or all of these tips. They’re not guaranteed but they’ve worked for others so they might work for you. Of course, the quality of the execution really matters, so if you would like some expert support, please get in touch and we may be able point you in the right direction.
Take a look at this article Success Metrics for Small Farms and Food Hubs on Ooooby to give you an idea of the average and median sales and revenue results that Food Hubs running on Ooooby are achieving.
If you would like to know more about how Ooooby can help you set up your Food Hub for growth, you're very welcome to Book a Demo. We'll listen to what you would like to do and show you how the Ooooby system can help.
