Basic CRM Tactics Analysis: How Does Farmison & Co’s CRM Taste?

We analyzed the basic CRM tactics of award-winning online butcher Farmison & Co. Check how they score and rank

August 25, 2021

Farmison & Co is a sustainable online meat company that supplies hand-cut meat to home cooks and professional chefs throughout Britain and beyond.

How do you think the North Yorkshire online meat company scores when it comes to its basic CRM practices? Let’s dive right in.

Be Transparent 10/10

Farmison & Co’s founder and CEO John Pallagi, spoke with The Grocer about the raison d’etre behind the company’s first brick & mortar store, “Cut by Farmison & Co” – which opened recently.

In all, the interview was in-depth and informative. We also found out that Farmison & Co’s publishes a monthly CEO update on its website. From where we’re standing, Farmison & Co does a great job of being transparent by keeping customers updated about its activities. The more transparent a brand is, the better it is positioned to create meaningful relationships with its customers.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

Farmison & Co’s fed us with a lot of incentives and perks! Here’s what we got when we landed on the website:

Free standard weekday delivery on orders over £40
15% on Yorkshire grass-fed lamb

£5 off any order over £20 using the code REWARDS

Clicking on the OFFERS tab, we were presented with no less 19 mouthwatering offers to choose from!

At the bottom of all the pages we clicked on, we were encouraged to sign up for the brand’s newsletter in exchange for 15% of our first order.

At the bottom of the HP, we saw a “refer a friend” link to get 15% off our next full-price order.

For offering customers a tasteful selection of incentives and perks, Farmison & Co gets a 10. Being so generous is part of what customers expect – and with lots of options, the brand here could take the next step and personalize them for site visitors and existing customers. Personalized offers are an incredibly powerful tool in creating a habit for customers to buy with a brand again and again.

Be Relevant 10/10

In tune with customer’s need for convenient shopping, Farmison & Co recently opened a brick & mortar store “cut by farmison & co” to serve walk-in shoppers.

The brand also offers Next Day Delivery and click and collect for customers who want quick and flexible delivery options. No brand can afford not having such options these days.

In addition, Farmison & Co is on a mission to help customers eat better meat sustainably. All of the cardboard boxes Farmison & Co uses to send orders are biodegradable and 100% recyclable. The brand also offers eco-packaging from felted wool for an additional charge of £3.99. Also, all customer deliveries are carbon neutral.

Farmison & Co has a “eat better meat” subscription that guarantees customers a regular supply of meat either weekly, fortnightly, or a 4 weekly service.

Being relevant as a business shows you’re in tune with what customers want and is key to building a long-lasting relationship with them. For being relevant to today’s modern customer, Farmison & Co gets a 10 from us.

Be Helpful 7/10

Besides the brand’s fantastic ongoing sustainability initiatives, we didn’t see any recent/ad-hoc give-back programs on Farmison & Co’s website or social media accounts. We had to dig through Farmison & Co’s emails to customers to find information about how the brand is being helpful.

In an email to subscribers dated April 10, 2020, the brand’s CEO stated, “In the last two weeks, we’ve hired over 40 new members of staff from our local community.” But that’s about it.

By not publicizing how it gives back on its website and social media accounts, Farmison & Co misses using social responsibility to build a strong relationship with its customers.

Master UX 8/10

Shopping online for groceries has become a regular habit for many (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic). Let’s assess how Farmison & Co’s site stacks up when it comes to the user experience.

Farmison & Co website is clean and super easy to browse. The product categories are visible at the top level of the main navigation and the categorization structure is neither overly narrow nor too large. This helped us browse the website easily.

The borderline overload of offers is also woven in nicely into the browsing experience – we have seen other sites where the “wealth” of incentives and perks makes the site feel like a public billboard. This is not the case here.

The product page is functional with descriptions, imagery and useful recipe tips. User reviews and ratings are present on the site, aiding us in decision-making.

In addition, the FAQ page is uniform and easy to scan. In all, Farmison & Co’s website is user friendly but not mind-blowing or uniquely memorable.

RealTime Personalization 3/10

Sadly, realtime personalization isn’t part of Farmison & Co’s customer relationship management strategy at this point in time, and/or at this stage of the customer journey.

It seemed that nothing we did on the site resulted in a better, more personalized experience in realtime. Not even returning to the brand’s HP after adding a chicken supreme to our shopping cart, not to mention other messages around the site.

Apart from showing us other poultry cuts we might like, no other cross-selling or up-selling techniques were implemented.

Farmison & Co misses opportunities to entice us to make an additional purchase. For instance, Farmison & Co could easily have provided some condiment suggestions during checkout to go with our chicken supreme purchase.

Also, we weren’t retargeted on social media, not even with ads containing the items in our cart. Farmison & Co’s CRM strategy takes a hit for not creating realtime personalized experiences for its customers.

Leverage Social media 6/10

Farmison & Co has an active presence on social media and a strong social media following. The brand has almost 32k followers on Instagram, a little over 11k on Twitter, and 15,300 likes on Facebook.

The brand’s Instagram feed is deliciously curated with stunning food shots. Posts are mostly promotional with a few contest posts. We saw no user-generated content.

On Facebook, the content is similar to what we saw on Instagram. The Farmison & Co Twitter page is made up of product posts, with some event-related content, such as YorkshireDay and National BBQ week.

While Farmison & Co’s social media pages made us terribly hungry for some BBQ, the brand posts identical content across its social media channel. This can be fixed by optimizing content for each social media platform, its style and audience.

In all, we think Farmison & Co should do more to use social media to fully engage its customers and actually have relationships with them. For instance, a sprinkling of user-generated content will help the brand to build more personable relationships on social media. It can also be used to talk more about the people behind the logo and the brand – followers want to feel that that are humans on the other side. That’s a key in nurturing customer relationships online.

So how does Farmison & Co’s CRM taste overall?

Farmison & Co is getting a 54/70 here (77%) – enough for joint 20th place out of the 55 brands we’ve analyzed so far. Like many of them, the brand falls super short in realtime personalization.

As more customers switch to buying groceries online, Farmison & Co has to give its customers a generous serving of realtime personalization to build a lasting relationship with them.

One way to do this is by delivering individualized customer experience for each website visitor by offering tailored product recommendations and changing website content and customer communications in line with a customer’s contextual data. Find out more about advanced realtime personalization here.

By adopting our realtime personalization suggestions we’re sure Farmison & Co’s CRM will reach CRM Michelin star status in no time.