Marketing Your Flower CSA

My husband loves to remind me of my idea of selling flowers in the beginning: if I grow them, they will just sell! To be fair, this idea wasn’t all wrong. After all, if the flowers didn’t grow, what could I possibly sell? 

Ultimately, he was right, but let’s keep that between us. 

We needed marketing to promote our business and sell the flowers. Even with a background in sales and marketing, I don’t think I was prepared for the uphill battle of getting the local community to know about our existence. 

A marketing strategy for promoting a pop-up is much different than one for a product requiring a pre-payment, such as a flower CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). 

Before taking the steps to market your flower CSA, if you haven’t already done so, read our blogs on Structuring Your Flower CSA and Pricing & Selling Your Flower CSA before continuing. 

Trust is required for customers to purchase a flower CSA. Building that trust takes good marketing. Don’t worry if you feel uncomfortable - we will walk you through various approaches to successfully market your flower CSA!

Selling Your Flower Farm’s Story 

Before all else, I want you to re-wire everything you think you know about marketing. 

Marketing can be overwhelming, but I want to encourage you to look at it from a fresh perspective: making a human-to-human connection while bonding over something you have in common: a love for flowers. 

Marketing for a flower CSA is much less about the flowers than it is about your flower farm, your flower farming business, and ultimately you. Marketing a flower CSA is about connecting with fellow humans and the environment. As flower farmers, we have what many would consider the “dream life” they want to support and enjoy a piece of that dream. 

Snagging a piece of that dream is why, despite the year-round accessibility of flowers in grocery stores, customers are willing to pay you upfront for flowers that they then must wait weeks or months to get.

When you approach marketing your flower CSA by creating a genuine and personal connection, your marketing tactics will start to feel more natural — less like marketing, and more like talking to friends. In turn, you may feel more comfortable marketing with this approach. 

Let’s first talk about how to utilize social media as a marketing tool to create genuine connections.

Marketing a Flower CSA with Social Media

Social media is a great way to reach your followers and potential customers’ eyes. I think of our social media feeds as the first “hello.”

Your flower farm’s social media feed should be beautiful and focus on what you offer, in this case, a Flower CSA. If it doesn't have flowers or your farm, save it for your personal social media profile. 

When a new person lands on your profile, they should instantly be able to tell what you do and offer. Photos or reels of past flower CSA product pictures or action photos of you working your field or sowing seeds for the upcoming season are all great ways to show what you do. 

Bring the customer into your flower farming world in an upbeat and exciting way. Show the journey of the flowers from seed to their hands!

Social media will best serve you if you consistently post and engage your followers. Relevant social media content for your potential buyers of is created by showing what you are growing rather than how you grow. This will help you engage more with those looking to buy cut flowers instead of those learning how to grow them for themselves.

When it comes to choosing your social media platform, it's important not to overextend yourself. Focusing on one platform is better than doing a little bit on every platform. The primary focus for our farm is on Instagram and Facebook, but we also like Pinterest.

Selling a flower CSA on social media can be tricky since people generally don't engage as much with posts that mention “for sale." It can also be difficult for a local flower farm to take advantage of all the business profile settings, such as selling directly on Instagram, since we often do not ship our products (which is one of the requirements for utilizing the storefront at the time of writing). 

Still, by showing beautiful blooms and using personable captions, you can capture a potential customers’ attention and start building that customer relationship.

You should:

• Use relevant hashtags to your local community
• Tag locations on posts for markets you attend
• Team up with other local businesses or nonprofits to share each other’s content

Once you get potential customers to visit your profile, you need to set it up to guide them to purchase a flower CSA. 

Using Your Social Media Profile and Links Appropriately

Use your profile section to clearly and concisely explain your flower farm’s location and offerings. Your profile should include:

• Business name
• Your name
• Business location
• Product and service offerings
• Links to your website

We have found that potential customers like to “check us out.” After scrolling through our social media feeds, if they get hooked, they will follow up on our website, which is ultimately our goal.

We aim to keep our website user-friendly and pleasant to use. Since our website is where we most commonly sell our flower CSA, let’s go over how to increase visitor traffic to make that sale. 

Marketing a Flower CSA on Your Website

Our website is the storefront for our flower CSA, and we aim to attract customers who want to join. 

We advertise our flower CSA on the welcome page and utilize promotional banners across the site. Photos should be appealing, and the website should be clean, easy to navigate, and load quickly. Avoid using any type of pop-up sign-up forms that can cause friction for the user.

Your website should provide an experience like holding your customers’ hands and walking them through it. Utilizing SEO with relevant keywords and tags can also help drive traffic to your website. Staying active on your website by updating photos, content, or information weekly will also increase customer trust.

Another driving force we use to funnel customers to purchase our flower CSA is our most powerful tool, which ties into our website: email campaigns. 

Email Campaigns for Flower Farms

We may mention the opening of flower CSA signups on our social media posts or the website, but email campaigns do the best job of getting the message in front of our potential customers. 

In our experience, most flower CSA sales happen within the first forty-eight hours after sending an email campaign to our newsletter subscribers. Having signups for email newsletters available on your website and having an email signup list with you at any in-person event is essential. (Pro-tip: have a QR code that links to an email sign-up form that people can scan and fill out using their phones!)

There are many different email campaign platforms to choose from. The best ones are the ones that can easily integrate into your website. You can most likely use a free service for your emails, especially in the beginning. 

People who sign up for our newsletters are more likely to purchase a flower CSA from us, especially if the purchase button is conveniently in their inbox. They are already invested enough in our story to want to know our offerings. From here, we need to remind them of who we are and make it easy for them to purchase our flower CSA.

When sending out an email campaign to market a flower CSA, it should be clean and focus on one item: selling the CSA.

The email should include:

• A quick, friendly greeting
• A photo of flowers or a flower bouquet that represents the actual Flower CSA product
• A link or button to purchase
• Supporting links to FAQ pages
• Subject lines that are concise, personable, and relevant

Marketing a Flower CSA In Person

When making genuine connections with potential customers, nothing is better than being face-to-face. There are no distractions from other sales pitches or products in front of their eyes. They are nose to nose with you and your flowers. Being in person with your potential customer allows you to create a more personal experience and connection.

When we are at a farmer’s market or pop-up and open for flower CSA sign-ups at that time, we put the sign-up on our offerings board with the price. In the early years of offering a flower CSA, this is how we sold a majority of them.

Related: Flower Pop-up Sales for Increased Profits

How do I Get People in My Local Community to Know About My Flower CSA?

The answer is simple: immerse yourself in your community.

There were plenty of times where we didn’t make great sales selling bouquets at an in-person event, but we did get generate some significant word-of-mouth interest that helped us capture CSA sales later. 

Always keep an email signup list available when selling in person, and even if you are not actively selling a flower CSA, talk about it! Get them to sign up for the email list so you can put the flower CSA back in front of their eyes when it's open. 

Marketing to Past Flower CSA Members

Last season, 98% of our flower CSA members were repeat customers. Many have been with us for over five years, some even more! I adore our flower CSA members. They are lovely, understanding, and loyal.

It all goes back to our customers wanting more than just pretty flowers; they are invested in seeing our flower farm succeed and love what we do! I have gotten many texts over the years where they confess to “cheating” on us with grocery store flowers, which I find hilarious and wonderful that they feel comfortable enough to joke with us.

We built this by delivering consistent products over the years, listening to them, hearing their feedback, and nurturing our relationship with them with more personalized marketing techniques. 

We have successfully captured repeat sign-ups for our flower CSA at the end of the season by creating hand-written thank-you notes to all of our current members. 

Out of all the different ways to market, though handwritten messages take a bit more time, I enjoy that it allows me to thank each member individually. I make the cards and leave them with the last bouquet of flowers for the season. I credit this personal touch to our loyal and repeat CSA members over the years! 

You Can Successfully Market Your Flower CSA

Marketing your flower CSA shouldn’t be a scary or daunting task. Being yourself and showing your beautiful blooms will create connection and trust with your ideal customers, who will then choose to support you and your flower farming business. 

Remember, when marketing your Flower CSA, you sell your flower farm’s story more than flowers alone. Bring your potential customers into your circle and share the beauty and passion of the flowers tucked into each bouquet.