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Marketing

The Results Are In!

The Annual Email Benchmark Report

By: Susan DeMatei
E ach December, WineGlass Marketing smoke taint damage to the 2020 vintage for a

larger group. The media descended, and report-
releases email benchmarks for the wine
industry. We do this because having a bar
stay away from a Northern California that was
to evaluate email performance has always been a ers were everywhere convincing consumers to
challenge within the wine ecosystem. Benchmarks in flames, leaving wineries the practical duty of
are widely available for broad categories such as reporting the actual impact to their mailing lists.
“Retail” or “Food and Grocery,” but finding some-
thing to compare a Wine Club email to is histori- • The fire of different views on how to handle the
cally as accurate as predicting what would happen virus and inequality in our country was fanned
next in 2020. brighter in the fall with a very contentious
national election. September and October saw
2020 will forever have an asterisk next to it, not- media ads and email boxes jammed packed, so
ing numerous external forces outside of our control there was very little else on anyone’s mind.
which affected our marketing and response rates.
When looking at the calendar, there are many force • Finally, in Q4, there was no letting up with
majeure events worth noticing that likely prevented another wave of Coronavirus underway with
our customers from responding typically: several states considering going back to strict
stay-at-home guidelines. Some expect the most
• We had an initial Shelter-in-Place order closing significant online holiday shopping season yet,
tasting rooms and restaurants in mid-March. but that will uncover itself in time.
The government asked us to work at home and
limit our time outside, so eCommerce delivery Throughout all of this year, our customers have
options filled the void. Our media consumption endured. They have accepted their club shipments
changed as we searched for connections, and and opened our emails, and God bless them, they
we became glued to CNN and obsessed with have ordered wine.
Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Business suf-
fered, and by the end of Spring, our unemploy-
ment rate was in the double digits.

• Tensions rose with the temperatures as several
racial injustices made headline news culminat-
ing in the death of George Floyd on May 25.
This horrible tragedy unleashed weeks of riots
and demonstrations throughout the summer
months. Some states relaxed their grip on the
Shelter-In-Place orders, albeit cautiously, which
resulted in a flurry of changing rules. Forced to
interpret the rules, wineries tried to convince A lot of wine, actually. Early in the year, Wine
customers to visit again. Intelligence reported initial growth in wine con-
sumption frequency due to the shift to at-home
• And then came the fires. Not one but two occasions more than compensated for the loss of
waves in August and September devastated on-premise occasions. Thus, making our emails
western states, including California. The fires more critical than ever.
destroyed a few wineries but caused extensive
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