Brooks Hitzfield From Seven Sons Farm

Sam: Brooks, welcome to Beyond the Inbox. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Brooks: Hey, I’m super excited to be here. I actually didn’t officially hear the name of the show yet, so Beyond the Inbox—I like it. Excited to be here and share more.

Sam: Thank you very much for the compliment. It’s always nice to know that the name resonates with people.

We’re definitely going to explore a host of topics in this episode, but before we do, can you tell us a little bit about the history of Seven Sons and how it has evolved over time?

Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll try to do the two- or three-minute version.

My parents are first-generation farmers, so Seven Sons is an actual farm.

They farmed very conventionally, raising confinement hogs and row-crop corn and soybeans in rotation. We’re in northeast Indiana, in the middle of the Corn Belt, so that was what they knew.

They bought the farm from an existing farmer and operated it the same way.

Eventually, through a series of family health crises, they started thinking very differently about how they were approaching agriculture.

My mom developed a pretty severe autoimmune disease, and it got them thinking about how they could use nutrition to improve her situation.

She had doctors telling her that she might be bedridden by the time she was 40.

It’s good that it got them thinking differently, because if you look at her today, it has been a tough journey for her, but none of those predictions came true, which is great.

It got them thinking differently about nutrition, which led them down the path of thinking about how food is raised and how that contributes to the nutritional profile of what we put into our bodies.

They really subscribed to the idea that you are what you eat, and it was a lightbulb moment for them.

It had them thinking very differently about how they were contributing to the problem while being in agriculture themselves.

There was a complete 180-degree paradigm shift at that time.

Dad sold the confinement hogs. He started converting the row crops into planted pasture and building fencing, and then he started raising livestock.

He started with cattle—grass-fed beef out on open pasture—and eventually got us into pork, poultry, and a lot of other animals as well.

It was a leap of faith for them.

It was an odd thing to see a farm do in the middle of the Corn Belt. You don’t see ranches and animals out on pasture here the way you do out West.

It definitely was not a business decision.

But we got very fortunate, and the name rings true: there actually are seven brothers.

Eventually, my parents had to develop quite a few different means of income on the farm because they were so financially strapped while making that transition.

Anyone in agriculture who has made a transition like that knows that it is financially intensive.

Eventually, a couple of my brothers got involved on the farm as well and started to realize that there was a developing market for products like grass-fed beef.

There were people who were thinking in a similar way to my parents five or 10 years earlier: you are what you eat.

We started retailing the products we were raising at farmers markets and through a farm store, and eventually started selling online.

That was great timing for us. It was probably around 2010, when ecommerce was making a really steep incline in growth.

At the same time, awareness of pasture-based foods and getting connected directly with your food source and your local farm was also growing.

Those two things reached an inflection point at the same time, and that really helped us.

From around 2010 through the last decade or so, it feels like we’ve been learning a lot and trying to keep up with the incredible customer base that has decided to support us and know where their food comes from.

Sam: It sounds like there were multiple inflection points.

How has the shift toward ethical and sustainable farming practices affected Seven Sons’ business model, and how has the company adapted to those changes?

Brooks: If you think about it in terms of the farm, the shift was from raising animals very conventionally.

My dad was raising hogs in confinement and tight spaces. I think a lot of us have watched the documentaries at this point, and those are tough conditions for the animals.

You’re having to use daily doses of antibiotics to keep the animals healthy.

Especially when you grow up in agriculture, nobody knows anything different. That was just the way things were done.

When it comes to the business model evolving through that, there are a lot of financial investments that need to be made to go through the transition.

It is mostly tied to infrastructure and land costs.

When you think about converting land from row crops to planted pasture and building out fencing, there are some very steep investments required to make those decisions.

The reason I think more farms don’t convert to a more ethical style of farming is that, even though there are a lot of long-term benefits, making the transition is the difficult part.

At the end of the day, what we’re really focused on today is soil health.

If we can improve the health of our soil, that helps us increase the forage yields we get, which becomes the food for the livestock and animals.

It also decreases our dependency on chemical fertilizers and other inputs that we have to use on the farm.

Those are ongoing costs.

When you look at the long-term benefits of what we’re doing, there are a lot of benefits that many farms would like to move toward.

But making the transition is the tough part because it is a three-, four-, or five-year process.

When you make the transition, your overhead costs go up while your revenue and income streams take a dip.

Getting through that transition period is really tough, and it takes a major leap of faith.

When you look at agriculture, especially small family farms, it is a tough business to be in. It’s a low-margin industry.

For us, the biggest challenge was getting through that financial investment.

There were definitely days when my parents did not think they were going to make it and thought their dream of having a farm would not become a reality because of the financial side.

Again, I think we got fortunate with the timing, and looking back now, I’m very grateful for it.

My parents make decisions based on conviction. I have to put a pencil to things a little more.

I’m not sure I would have had the gumption they had to simply dive in, because at the end of the day, they weren’t making a business decision.

They were making a decision based on the product they wanted to raise and feed their own family.

It was what they felt was the right thing to do.

When you’re in agriculture, you have a certain responsibility when it comes to the health of anyone who is ultimately going to consume that product.

Sam: You mentioned earlier how you’ve built this customer base.

Can you walk us through the process of creating that customer base and explain how you’ve used retention and loyalty marketing to build and maintain it?

Brooks: At first, we benefited from the growth of the internet that I mentioned earlier.

A big area for us was SEO.

In the early days, it really wasn’t us finding customers. People were finding us because we were positioned as a farm using the internet, and most farms weren’t doing that—especially at that time.

That gave us a lot of visibility.

At first, we used to go to local farmers markets, and we had a little store on our farm outside Fort Wayne, Indiana.

We had customers who were finding our website and driving all the way from Chicago to load up their coolers and haul product back.

That’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive, and it shows how hard it was, especially at the time, to find the types of products we offered.

That was a strong benefit for us early on.

We were fortunate because one of the primary tools we leaned on to communicate and interface with customers was email.

We spent time on social media here and there, but it quickly became apparent that it was much easier to get into customers’ inboxes than to beat the algorithm and get in front of them on Facebook and Instagram.

We leaned into email early on.

Going back to around 2011 or 2012, we have been absolutely religious about sending a weekly newsletter.

Early on, we started with some free tools inside our ecommerce software. Then we were using Mailchimp, but it didn’t get much more sophisticated than that.

We were simply creating content and doing a lot with video.

At the end of the day, we knew our customers were buying from us because they wanted confidence in where they were buying their food.

They were tired of simply trusting the blank piece of paper or label inside the grocery store.

They wanted to know what we do, what goes into raising the animals in an ethical and sustainable way, and why that ultimately matters for them.

We leaned into email paired with video.

We made lots of videos showing a day in the life on the farm and explaining what we do.

Those two tools were really strong for us.

From 2012 to around 2017, it was organic growth. We rinsed and repeated and continued leaning into email with a weekly newsletter.

Eventually, we had ambitions to grow faster, so we started looking for an acquisition marketer.

We thought, “If we can get an acquisition marketer on our team, we’ll grow through new customers.”

We ended up getting connected with a Drip-certified consultant.

We originally brought him into the business to do a couple of projects, and he looked at the size of our email list and the number of customers who had purchased once over the years but never purchased again.

He saw a huge asset there.

He told us there was an asset we could unlock by doubling down on the existing customer base and email list. There was growth hidden in there.

That was a lightbulb moment for us.

We went down the path of really leaning into email.

We migrated over to Drip and went deep into building nurture campaigns and onboarding workflows for new people coming through our doors, so we could build a stronger relationship.

We had 10 years of awesome content sharing what we do, but it would only get promoted once in a newsletter and then end up dying as a blog post somewhere.

We were able to resurrect a lot of that content and put it in front of customers the minute they joined the list, when they were at the height of their awareness and the recency factor was really high.

We went deep into that, saw the benefits right away, and continued to rinse and repeat.

We became much more intelligent about how we communicated with new customers coming through the door, as well as existing customers.

Another big growth factor on the retention side was taking Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula course.

That guy truly knows his stuff.

A lot of the people following him are launching digital products and courses.

When we took the course, we were excited, but then we got a little disappointed because we thought, “How do we apply this to retail?”

We’re a farm-to-fork business, so maybe it didn’t make sense.

But at that time, we had never spent $2,000 on a course, so we said, “All right, we have to at least try it.”

We tried the formula and created a launch event around wild-caught salmon, which was something we had sold for a long time.

It produced a ton of results.

I think we sold more salmon in a two-week period than we had in the entire year prior to that.

Jeff’s system worked really well.

We found a lot of other new products we could launch and created a lot more sales events from there.

That was another huge tool for us.

Again, it had nothing to do with acquisition. It was about leaning into the existing customer base we had built over the previous decade and finding creative ways to give them more compelling reasons to remember us and support us again.

Sam: There is so much to unpack here.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Jeff Walker or the Product Launch Formula, can you break down what it is and explain specifically how you used it for the wild salmon campaign?

Brooks: The best analogy for describing it—and I think Jeff does this very well in his material—is that we have all watched major events and product launches that we were excited about.

There are times when you have your credit card out the minute you have the ability to buy an item you have anticipated becoming available for a long time.

I have always been a big fan of Apple.

Their keynote events are really interesting to watch, especially the amount of anticipation they create around events and the newest and greatest iPhone.

You saw the incredible lines at Apple stores, especially around the first couple of iPhones.

The question is: how do you recreate something like that?

Jeff has unpacked the secret of what they were doing.

There are many other examples from the past where people created attention and awareness and effectively sold almost anything.

He provides a framework for giving you the ability to create that attention.

He does a lot with digital products and courses, but we’ve proven that you can apply it to a retail event.

The best way I can describe it is the idea of launching a new product or an event.

For us, we’ve also launched promotional events where we give customers a compelling reason to stock up on products.

We farm very seasonally.

When it comes to raising grass-fed beef in the northern part of the country, we do a lot of that during the growing season, and we harvest many animals late in the fall and winter.

We then have to store that product all year to make sure it is always available whenever a customer wants to buy it.

We give customers a compelling reason to stock up in the winter when we are long on product.

It saves us the cost of storing inventory longer.

We run a sales event that lets them stock up on beef at the best time and at the best price they will get during the year.

We build a launch event around that.

Jeff has a five-email series formula, and we have definitely tweaked that formula over the years.

But the core is about building awareness for whatever you’re going to launch and creating an event around it.

Everyone understands how Apple created hype around launching new products. Nobody has done it better than them.

Jeff has figured out the secret of how to do that and packaged it into a course and a book.

It was money well spent.

Sam: It’s a fascinating story.

I remember when the Product Launch Formula was really big many years ago, and I could never have imagined that a non-information marketer could use it so effectively.

Congratulations on doing an amazing job with it.

How are you putting all of this together?

You have campaigns for certain seasons, I assume you’re still sending a weekly newsletter, and you also have automations.

Can you explain how it all fits together?

Brooks: I can’t go super deep into the technical details.

Chad was the original Drip consultant we connected with years ago when we were trying to find an acquisition marketer, and he showed us the error of our ways.

He is now part of the team and on staff as our director of digital marketing.

He has done an incredible job.

For one thing, he is an end customer of ours as well. He has been buying from Seven Sons for many years, so he does a very good job of wearing the customer hat.

We’re very intentional, and he keeps his antennas up to make sure we’re doing a good job with segmentation.

We want to make sure every email we send to a customer is one we have a high degree of confidence they actually want to receive and will open.

The more you simply blast the entire email list, the more people start to experience fatigue and slowly tune you out.

Drip is the product we use to keep everything together.

It has the right degree of segmentation capability to make sure we’re segmenting customers based on where they are in the journey with us.

Chad goes very deep into tags and other features inside Drip to make sure he’s pulling people into the correct workflow.

When we do a major launch, that is a period where we may send five to seven emails over a two- or three-week period.

When we do a launch, we have people opt into it.

We’ll do a sneak peek of what the sale is going to be about.

If it’s a sale on something like grass-fed lamb or wild-caught seafood, those are products not all customers are necessarily interested in.

We have people opt into being part of the launch.

They have to opt in to receive those five to seven emails over a two- or three-week period because we don’t want to send that sequence to the entire list.

In addition, they still receive the Sunday newsletter.

Once someone has joined a launch campaign, we apply what I think is called a “pitching” tag.

It tells us those people are in the middle of being pitched an offer.

While they are getting that offer, we pause any other workflow they may be in.

If they are in a nurture campaign or a long-term nurture campaign, we pause future emails from those workflows because we don’t want to distract from the focus of what we want them to do.

We want them to take action and, at the end of the day, give us money.

When we’re doing a major launch event, we’re also highlighting that launch event in the newsletter.

The newsletter is probably the only email that hits the entire list no matter what, so we’re getting into everyone’s inbox at least once a week.

Outside of that, each workflow is intentional about pressing pause when needed.

Chad does an excellent job of reducing fatigue and the inbox load while still making sure everyone interested in an offer sees it and has the opportunity to participate.

Sam: We’ve talked a lot about email.

What role does social media play in Seven Sons’ marketing efforts?

You talked about having a face for the brand, and I love that. People want to buy from people, and they want to see where the food is coming from.

You mentioned video as well.

How are you using social media today?

Brooks: It has never been an anchor tool for us.

We definitely have a presence there, and as of last year, we hired someone part-time to help with content publishing because there is obviously work involved in that part of the business.

Most of our marketing and content efforts are tied to making content for the email list and the weekly newsletter.

But most of the content we create—whether it’s a video that is going out on YouTube or something else—can be repurposed into pieces for social media and Instagram.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our growth to organic work on Instagram, Facebook, and those platforms.

A lot of the growth has come from our strong web and SEO presence.

When it comes to organic search, we get a lot of visibility.

We also have a strong lead magnet and tools on the website that try to capture an email address.

That’s really the job of the website: get an email address as soon as possible, get the person onto the list, and then focus most of our content efforts on the weekly newsletter.

At this point, we have also officially brought on a partner for acquisition marketing.

Most of our efforts involving creative and social-media platforms are now connected to advertising.

We run ads through Facebook, which also run on Instagram, and we do a lot of Google Merchant shopping ads.

Those are contributing quite a bit of growth.

We’ve been doing this for a while, so a lot of other farms, butcher shops, and people in the farm-to-fork world turn to us for advice about growing a customer base.

Quite honestly, we don’t have a lot of experience getting strong organic growth through social media.

For us, it is a good interface for people who don’t live on email anymore.

It is a way to get in front of those customers, let them see our face and hear our voice, and help them still feel connected to the farm.

Sam: I want to touch briefly on SEO because you just brought it up.

Are you ranking for commercial-intent keywords like “buy salmon,” or are you ranking for informational keywords where people are searching for recipes and similar topics?

Brooks: A little bit of both.

Historically, it has been keywords around the products we offer and sell.

We’ve optimized those products. There are around 350 SKUs in the store, and our early SEO efforts focused on optimizing those product pages and improving their rankings.

Within the last year, we brought on an SEO firm to create recipe content and blog content and optimize it.

They have definitely gotten some traction.

It is an art to make sure you get the right traffic and the right buyer intent.

At the end of the day, you might optimize a recipe, but we’re selling a very niche product.

Grass-fed beef will be around double the cost of conventional beef at a local grocery store or supermarket.

It has been hard for us to fully leverage content in the way a traditional food brand might with recipe content.

It is difficult to convert that traffic because someone searching for a recipe is not necessarily interested in making sure the chuck roast is grass-fed instead of conventional or paying double the price for it.

Sam: What would you say is your best channel for the ideal buyer?

You’re saying it’s not always coming from SEO and maybe not coming from social.

Is it more about brand awareness at this point, where a lot of people are familiar with the brand and the best customers are coming direct?

Brooks: If you had asked me that 12 months ago, that definitely would have been my answer.

The brand has a strong presence and has been around for a while.

We have this customer base, and word of mouth has been great for us.

But we have been leaning into advertising again on Facebook and Google, and those channels are really starting to change the game.

We have some pretty ambitious growth goals for this year.

Historically, we’ve grown in the 20 to 25 percent range annually for the last seven years or so, which has been great.

It has been a consistent, manageable growth rate year after year.

I think you can attribute that kind of growth in our industry largely to word of mouth and a strong presence in organic search.

People usually hit a trigger point when something happens in their lives.

They may start a family and have kids, so they become more intentional about feeding them the highest-quality products they can.

Or someone may end up in a health crisis, as my parents did years ago.

That’s another typical trigger point that causes someone to start searching for a product like ours.

Our position in Google search has helped us through that.

Anyone positioned well in organic search will also benefit more from word of mouth.

You may hear a friend mention a brand in a conversation.

If you Google it the next day and the brand doesn’t appear, your intent is probably gone, and you aren’t going to do much more work to find the brand your friend mentioned.

But if the brand pops up easily, you benefit more from word of mouth.

Our brand also tells a good story.

The farm-to-fork industry benefits from conversation.

People have conversations about their food, especially when they take pride in where they’re sourcing it.

There are more conversations around our product than we might benefit from if we were in a different industry.

Sam: It’s fascinating what you’re saying about these tipping points that lead people to start exploring grass-fed meat.

Are you addressing that in the copy and creative for your ads?

Are you targeting different pain points?

Brooks: We have about four customer avatars.

It has been a balancing act, trying to figure out which one we speak to the most.

We ran a campaign using a tool called RightMessage.

We surveyed customers and asked, “What is your number-one reason for buying from Seven Sons?”

We always knew we had people who were proactively taking control of their health.

That is often parents who have kids and are being very proactive about their family’s health, so they want to source from us.

Then we have the reactive-health people I mentioned earlier—someone who is in a health crisis and gets pushed down this path.

Then we have people who support us because of the animal-welfare aspects.

They want to eat meat, but they are appalled by how conventional agriculture raises animals and the environments those animals live in.

Then we have the environmentally focused person who sees sustainable and regenerative agriculture as a solution to some of the biggest problems involving the planet and carbon emissions.

We knew those were the four main trigger points inspiring people to support us.

We always assumed the proactive person trying to feed their family healthier food was our number-one avatar and represented most of our customers.

We’re a very family-friendly and family-focused business, and our story leans into that well.

But the animal-welfare people are actually the number-one avatar we identified.

We have always done a good job of sharing what we do.

If you see it, you can easily contrast it with animals raised in confinement.

That really speaks to someone who wants to see agriculture done that way.

That customer is also very loyal.

Someone who starts a health kick in January and decides to invest more in their health can fall off the wagon fairly easily.

But someone who cares deeply about how animals are raised is not likely to change that conviction over time.

That customer has been very loyal to us, and we really appreciate those people.

A lot of our marketing can easily touch the top three avatars and the very health-conscious people, while also showing holistically how caring for animals well translates into a healthier product.

We take a lot of pride in the nerdy side of agriculture.

If we care for the soil well, it creates more nutrient-dense plants, which creates a healthier animal, and that ultimately translates into your health.

That story can touch almost every one of the avatars.

They are not siloed enough for us to feel that we need to identify exactly which avatar every email is speaking to and communicate with each one very differently.

The message stays fairly holistic.

Sam: It’s fascinating to reflect on how, when a value is so important to you, you are going to do everything you can to protect it.

During something like a pandemic, when a lot of people were curbing their spending, if you are spending money on something that helps you honor a value—such as seeing yourself as someone who feeds your family well and wanting to spend extra on grass-fed meat—that is something you’re going to stay committed to.

I think that’s really worth emphasizing.

Brooks: For sure.

As we continue to scale up, we see other people in the industry who get into it for the right reasons but eventually run into problems with scale.

They start cutting corners around the supply chain and where they source products, and the product may no longer be quite what their customers think it is.

We take that responsibility very seriously.

At the end of the day, we know we have a business because customers have placed their faith, confidence, and trust in us to do what we say we do.

We make decisions on the agricultural side and about the partners we work with based on whether it is a product we would feed our own families.

There is a huge trust aspect involved.

I agree that there is strong loyalty that comes from that, and we have a high level of responsibility to do right by it and follow through on those commitments.

Anyone who comes to buy from us is doing so because they lost trust in Whole Foods or wherever they were buying the product before.

Sam: Brooks, this has been a fascinating conversation.

I’ve learned so much, and I really appreciate the robustness of Seven Sons’ marketing strategy. Major props there.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about Seven Sons?

Brooks: The website is sevensons.net.

Actually, we do have the .com now, so both work. We finally got it after 10 years.

Sevensons.com works fine and will take you to the website.

There’s a blog on there that will take you to our YouTube page.

We do a lot with video, so if you’re curious to see and learn more about the farm, the partners we work with, and what goes into it, that’s another great resource.

Sam: Perfect. We’ll put all those links in the show notes.

Brooks, thank you again for taking the time to join us today, and all the best in the future with Seven Sons.

Brooks: Absolutely. I appreciate everything you guys are doing at Drip. Thanks a lot, Sam.