Online Plant Education And Sales Become a Necessity for Grower-Retailers
March 29, 2020 
Grower-retailers such as Boulevard Flower Gardens in Virginia have had to make adjustments in how they engage with their customers.
Despite the trickle-down effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, grower-retailers who are still open need to be able to educate their customers about gardening tips and how to properly take care of a plant once they’ve brought it home. The question is, how can you do this when consumers are not able to walk through your store or attend an in-person class.
The answer is bring the class to them.
That’s how several grower-retailers have responded this spring. Greenhouse Grower reached out to a number of plant businesses to find out how they were planning to keep the sales and education process running smoothly. Here’s what some of them had to say.
Mark Landa, Boulevard Flower Gardens (Virginia): “Consumer education has been big for us in the past, and it has basically gone electronic. The weather is the tricky factor in terms of trying to schedule classes outside. We have a nice area to do this, but you can only plan so far out due to the weather. We have been using live video when the weather is good. This has worked well, as the consumer can relate to this because they have seen the area before and have related to the person speaking when in the store.”
On what’s happening so far this spring: “We were having the best March on record, but it has started to slide a little now. Store traffic is still pretty good, with a lot of interest in early veggies. The biggest loss of traffic I’ve seen is Tuesdays, which is senior day for us and has become our third busiest day of the week. This has been going on for years and is always good even if the weather is bad. This past week was beautiful here, but the senior traffic was probably about 70% off, as they are just plain scared to venture out, and I don’t blame them. My biggest fear now is that we are going lose the Easter church business, which is huge for us, as we send out 2,000 gift plants to churches for Easter. We have already seen the majority of our early orders cancelled; a very big loss especially when we produce a lot of the product we sell. My daughters have been communicating pretty regularly with our customer base through email, keeping them up to date on what’s new and timely to plant. We have been offering free local delivery and our inventory of plants is completely online for them to view. I believe that the edible side of the plant business is going to be strong during this crisis. We have already seen consumers purchasing summer veggies now, and we are still five weeks from our safe planting date. Many of these have said they want to get them while they can because they believe it will be a big shortage later on when everyone is ready to plant.
Sandi Hillermann McDonald, Hillermann Nursery and Florist (Missouri): “FaceTime shopping and education has become a valuable tool. Our customers can call us, and we will set up a FaceTime call to walk them through our greenhouses and plant areas, as well as our entire store for products they may need. From there, they can arrange for delivery or pickup.”
Kate Terrell, Wallace’s Garden Center (Iowa): “We usually offer free Saturday seminars every week from January to the middle of April, with attendance between 75 and 180 depending on the topic. We obviously had to cancel those because of guidelines prohibiting large gatherings. We turned the remaining topics into blog and e-newsletter content. We are also contemplating having seminars in June if things are back to normal. We considered doing our seminars on Facebook Live, but decided against it. It takes hours to build the presentations, and I have decided to spend that time adding products to our online store so we can sell and deliver to people at home.”
Ken Lain, Watters Garden Center (Arizona): “As of mid-March, we were trying to continue classes through spring until further notice. We set the class up in an open-air greenhouse as normal and spaced chairs at least 6 feet apart. We live-streamed all classes via Facebook and uploaded the edited video to our YouTube channel.”
Peter Mezitt, Weston Nurseries (Massachusetts): “While we made the decision to cancel all our in-person events and classes for the immediate future, we worked to put as many classes as we could online. We knew how passionate our customers are about their gardens, and we wanted to help.”
What About Podcasts?
Online classes via Facebook and YouTube are just one way to talk to your customers about plant care. Podcasts may be an even better tool. Data from the 2019 Digital News Report from WhatsNewInPublishing.com indicates that most people listen to podcasts to learn something new. Even more important, young people are very engaged with podcasts, and many people listen to podcasts at home (a location where most people have been isolated this spring, unfortunately).
Ken Lain of Watters Garden Center offers podcasts as a resource for current and potential customers. Better yet, it’s a fairly easy process that allows him to share the same message across multiple platforms. He writes a weekly garden column that is shared with several local media sources. The column topics then become an outline for a radio show that airs on eight terrestrial stations locally. The hour-long program is then edited into Lain’s “The Mountain Gardener” weekly podcast.
Subscribe to eNewsletter
