“We had a good month yesterday”, said the winery owner. This quote came from one of my winery clients, on a call discussing the results of a single promotional email we put together that generated $30k in revenue. Admittedly, the bar was low. Over the previous 5 years, this winery had seen a cumulative total of about $15k from email (not counting wine club revenue). By the time this meeting took place, they were on their way to $100k+ on an annual basis, and email had become a major revenue source. And it remains so today. For many (if not most) wineries, email is the life blood of the company, often in more ways than one. If that’s not the case at your winery, you might be doing it wrong.
Email is dead. Long Live Email.
The long, global love/hate relationship with email has being going on for decades now. Along the way, we’ve had a relentless march of new tech tools like Slack and WhatsApp that were supposed to liberate us from the spammy depths of email purgatory. But alas, rumors about the death of email, to butcher the Mark Twain quote, “have been greatly exaggerated”. Email remains the 800-pound gorilla for point-to-point communication in the digital world. Want proof? Simple logic will do. For one, spamming wouldn’t exist if it didn’t so consistently generate positive returns. And it wouldn’t work so consistently if people weren’t faithfully continuing to use email as their primary communication tool.
A Competitive Advantage for Wineries
While most consumer brands struggle to build their email lists, some industries have an “unfair” advantage in that effort. Many apparel brands, for instance, are fortunate to have massive lists of opted-in customers, because those customers are keen to know how the fashion winds are blowing every spring and fall. This creates significant efficiencies for them in terms or marketing & sales efforts. But I don’t think any industry has as much of an advantage as the wine industry, because when it comes to purchasing wine, consumers are accustomed to a membership (wine club) model. So most wineries have a pool of users (members) who expect to receive frequent emails, as well as first-time and repeat customers who submit their email addresses in order to receive wine shipments. For most consumer brands, this is that most precious of commodities, the opted-in email list. But few wineries, in my experience, make optimal use of it. You can email all of your customers (over and above wine club communications) without much fear of damaging your email domain reputation. That doesn’t mean you can spam them, of course, but it’s a huge advantage if you don’t abuse it.
So how best to exploit that advantage? There are many answers to this question, so I will try to present a few of the most common ones. Listed below are a few tactics for wineries who might not be squeezing all the juice from their email lists.
Email Tactics for Wineries to Boost Revenue
1. Strong Branding and Design
Are your emails boring? Do they reflect properly on your estate and your brand? Do they hold the promise of a great customer experience? If you want customers to think about enjoying your wine, you need to hold that experience in the best possible light. Romance your band. Visuals matter! Many wineries struggle with the look and feel of their emails. One common limiting factor here is the terrible email editors that are packaged with wine e-commerce platforms. But there are reliable ways around this now, and very effective HTML editing tools that give you the flexibility to achieve any look you can conceive. And if you’re worried about the cost of making new templates, some simple math will help convince you: get a bid from a designer, and figure the number of additional cases you need to sell to get that money back. If your list is anywhere north of 5,000 names, it’s probably a slam dunk.
2. Frequent, Routine Email Promotions
Don’t be shy. Your customers need to be reminded that they love you. I recommend to all my winery clients that they do at least one promotional email per month. That may seem conservative to some, but many wineries don’t do this, either because of time/bandwidth issues or because they want to avoid “spamming” their customers. But I have yet to see this fail. It’s not always a game changer but it always increases revenue, and I have never seen any significant blow-back from customers or mass unsubscribes as a result.
3. Triggered Emails
Many e-commerce platforms with integrated email functionality offer the ability to set emails to be sent when certain events occur, such as a wine club membership anniversary or a birthday. In the best case, this is yet another opportunity to generate incremental sales by making special, customized promotional offers related to customer events and milestones. But even a simple, unassuming “happy birthday” message can generate good will that improves or extends your customer relationships, thus adding value in the long run.
4. The Forgotten Email Stepchildren: “System” Emails.
Your customers are probably getting many emails from you that you don’t even realize are being sent. These are the “auto” emails that go out when an order is placed, cancelled, or changed, as well as a host of other reasons (credit card expirations, change of address, etc.). Many wineries overlook these emails, both from a design standpoint (they are often forgotten and fall out of date, brand-wise) and a sales opportunity standpoint. These emails offer opportunities for systematic cross-selling and upselling. And with a bit of additional effort, templates can be rotated in and out during key seasonal sales events. Many, if not most, wineries overlook this key communications opportunity.
5. Segmentation
Even though segmentation (breaking your customer list into smaller segments and customizing the messaging) has a achieved “no-brainer” status for large consumer brands, smaller brands typically struggle with this because of the limits of their e-commerce platform, or simply because of bandwidth issues among the marketing staff. The remedy here is to smart small and take a long view. The end objective is to understand consistent tendencies that identify certain customer types whose buying behavior can be accurately predicted. If you get to that objective, you will increase your revenue because your emails will be more appropriately targeted and thus have higher conversion rates. But that objective is a bit lofty and fuzzy, so where to begin? Simple – get scientific. View the process as a series of experiments that will teach you about your customer segments over time. Then choose one straightforward experiment and run it. An example would be the hypothesis that somebody who buys a given varietal might like to try earlier vintages of that same varietal (not a big leap). But you can test it by sending a cross sell message (additional vintage at special price) to half the people who place order for that varietal. If the group that gets the cross-sell message buys more wine, then your experiment is a success. If not, you try something else. The key is to give yourself the luxury of building this knowledge over time, and stick with it.
6. Extra credit: Omni-channel Marketing.
Sending emails is not the only way to market to an email list. If that seems counterintuitive to you, you may be missing out on an important additional channel for revenue. You can upload an email list to a social media platform, like Facebook, and send targeted ads to the people on that list. Why would you do this when you can just email them? Because messaging can often be more effective and memorable if it is delivered through multiple channels. Remember, your customers are getting bombarded with emails from other brands. If they see your brand in an unfamiliar context, your message may have greater impact. So think about supporting important promotional offers or seasonal sales with social media messaging targeted directly to the customers on your email lists.
The Future is Coming
I’m going to go out on a limb and make three predictions here (comment if you disagree) about email marketing for wineries. First, email is not going anywhere. It’s too firmly entrenched, with too many people habituated to its use. So optimizing your email channel will remain important going forward. My second prediction is that it is about to get a lot easier to do it effectively. Why is that? Because analyzing data sets and parsing the effectiveness of sending personalized messages to consumers is exactly the sort of thing that artificial intelligence can do very well. A new set of tools is coming that will make this easier and more cost effective.
And the third prediction? There will be good news and bad news. The good news is that you will have new tools and new opportunities to derive revenue from email campaigns. The bad news is that anything that gets easier becomes more common, so you will have a new wave of competition. If I owned a winery, I would deem it not just an opportunity but rather a necessity for survival in the marketplace. The right move now, in my opinion, is not to wait for the new software tools, but to implement some or all of the above practices in order to start increasing revenue, and generating data now which can ultimately be used to grab a head start on your competitors when the new tools are available.
Thanks for reading! If you agree or disagree with any of the above, or if you have any ideas to add, please let me know!