Page 36 - Grapevine NovDec 2021

Around The Vineyard
Marketing
I f you’re like most, you have a holiday calendar
crammed full of events, sales, shipments, and
recipes ready to communicate to your mailing
list. Email marketing is a staple among wineries try- procured good, qualified leads.
ing to communicate to wine clubs, provide holiday
offers and reach new customers. Follow some of
these tips below to make sure your holiday sales
are bright.
There are three major influences on the success of
an email campaign. From most important to least,
they are List, Offer, and Creative.
List: Take some time each year in September and
October to perform some basic data hygiene.
An intern or consultant can help you here with a
well-organized couple-week project.
• Clean up duplicates and merge duplicate records
from the tasting room, wine club, website,
MailChimp, or other (sales_email_marketing)
databases. When doing so, carefully identify the
correct master record and fold all the visit history,
source, and transactional data under that master
customer record.
• Append data with addresses, emails, and phone
numbers. There are several resources to do this
simply through excel for pennies a record.
• Remove bounces and anyone who has opted out
of any communications over the course of the
year.
• Add in any stray lists – like that tasting you did
at the event in Vegas in July or the Winemaker’s
alma matter list that wants to hear about his
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HOLIDAY EMAIL
BEST PRACTICES
By: Susan DeMatei, President of
WineGlass Marketing
wines. And make sure you notate a source on all
lists so you can refer back to see what programs
• Once you have a clean list, then take some time
and segment and the time your communications
thoughtfully – don’t just send every offer and
update to everyone. Perhaps the October Wine
Club should not get the Thanksgiving sales to
email so close to their Club Shipment email alerts,
but instead a printed insert in their club ship-
ment. If you have the transactional data, you’ll
want to target email-marketing messages based
on behaviors such as past purchases, tasting note
downloads, visits to the winery, links clicked, or
other captured actions.
Offer: Only after you’re happy with your lists
should you focus on the offer. Based on your steps
above, now consider what sales message will incite
the best response to your segmented list?
• What did they respond to in the past? Did you
have any past learnings to guide you on what
resonated, or failed, previously? If not, perhaps
your database is big enough to split and test. For
instance, if you suspect that shipping offers will
be popular this season, should you give a % off
shipping, shipping included, or shipping for $1?
And at what volume: 6 bottles? A case? These are
things you can test with an email and then do a
follow-up email to the entire database of the win-
ner
• What are your goals? What wines do you need to
move, and what costs or discounts are appropri-
877-892-5332
10/26/21 3:43 PM