Email Marketing campaigns can be an extremely profitable endeavor for your winery. More specifically, having a sound email marketing strategy to drive sales from your website is a huge advantage.
The problem is most wineries don’t have a strong email marketing strategy. Worse, some don’t do it all. In the age of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) selling, the growth and success of your business depends on adopting and understanding how to sell more wine. Not having a digital selling strategy is a missed opportunity.
Before we get into the campaigns your winery should be running, let’s look at some key metrics about email.
- By 2017, The Radicati Group estimates there will be 4.9 Billion emails worldwide
- Email now accounts for 7% of all eCommerce user acquisitions (and growing)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is 12% higher than average for customers purchasing via email
- Wines and Vines suggests Direct to Consumer sales exceeded $2B from April 2015 to April 2016
You need to be excited about the opportunity to market your products effectively and efficiently. Email Marketing provides great ROI for your business with the average being 3,200% for the wine industry. Every $1 you invest sees $32 in return.
Email Campaigns
Here are the 7 email marketing campaigns that you should consider for your winery.
Thank You for Visiting
Wineries have a great opportunity for thanking every customer that visits the tasting room. By building a strong email acquisition strategy, you can create an email campaign that is automatically sent to every visitor. A standard campaign will thank a customer for their visit, introduce the customer to the brand, offer them an incentive to repurchase and even provide them an invitation to join your club. There are lots of things you can do to educate and inform your guests about your brand. Research suggests that almost 75% of people who subscribe expect an email. Those that receive a thank you campaign are more likely to purchase from you in the future. Further, guests will be more engaged with each subsequent email you send.
Event or Tradeshow Campaign
Did you try to collect email from attendees at Paso Wine Fest last month? Collecting email from trade events requires you to thank people for coming to your booth. Give event goers an incentive to connect with you so that you can market to them in the future. It is not uncommon to give away prizes for email acquisition. Get a complimentary 2 for 1 tasting for giving us your email. Make a game out of it with corn hole or a prize wheel. Ancient Peaks used a prize wheel at Paso Wine Fest with great success. In the email you send (pending you are collecting via iPad), have another contest involving social media. Get them to follow you and post something interesting using a hashtag. You can go in and announce the winner at a later time. Make it fun and cool for your guests. Be rewarded with a large number of leads for future email marketing and more direct to consumer sales.
Nurture Campaigns
Not everyone on your list is always ready to buy. However, you need your brand to be fresh on your customers’ mind when they want some wine. It is very important to nurture your leads so they remember your brand. There are several ways to do this from newsletters, new release emails, event happenings or just keeping in touch with random communications. Research suggests that nurtured leads are 50% more likely to buy from you in the future. Your email marketing strategy isn’t all about promotions and selling. Nurturing emails are interesting, educational, informative and down-to-earth. Stay in front of your customers; it is key to generating more sales.
Ecommerce Transactions
Ecommerce transaction emails are not marketing emails. Wineries need to understand that there is a clear distinction between when to market to someone and when to provide them critical information about their recent purchase. Your ecommerce system should provide you a set of transaction emails that are triggered when customers complete actions on your website. The most important ones will be purchase confirmations and shipping notifications. Sending transaction emails gets customers acclimated to opening email from you. It is said that customers open 70% of all emailed receipts. Branding is also very important with transaction emails. Customers should receive consistent look and feel from you to build trust and connection. It will make future marketing efforts easier with the recognition of your brand.
Club Recovery or Win-Back
The recurring revenue model is a beautiful thing. Wineries spend a lot of money to train their staff to sell club memberships. One thing that I don’t see wineries doing is leveraging email to recover their canceled club memberships. Keeping record of former club members is critical for recovering their business in the future. We recently built a campaign for SummerWood Winery & Inn where they experienced great success in recovering former members. We actually ended up canceling some re-enrollments because folks had moved to new states restricting wine shipments. Anyone who says this can’t be done, I challenge them to think again. If you still don’t believe it, read the case study we did for this campaign. We made the winery some serious coin when considering lifetime value of their club members.
Shopping Cart Recovery
Wineries supplementing their business with ecommerce need to be up-to-date with best practices. For example, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.68%. This can equate to a lot of lost revenue for your business. Ecommerce systems that are smart can track abandoned Shopping Carts. It is not uncommon to remind people that they have a pending order they need to complete. Shopping Cart recovery, when implemented correctly, can recover up to 20% of your abandoned carts. This means more revenue with more wine sales.
For those with Vin65, you can generate a sales report of your abandoned shopping carts. I believe Vin65 is the only winery software that automates a Shopping Cart recovery process. I may be wrong. If I am, please correct me by commenting on this post.
Emails That Work for You
Vingage Consulting can help your business with all your Email Marketing needs. Our digital marketing firm will help you sell more wine, while building raving fans for your product. Sign up now for a Free Consultation.
