GUEST BLOG POST featuring Melissa Leiter, a member of the DTC Consultant Network and owner of New Vines Marketing.
9 EASY Marketing Tricks To Sell More Wine
When it comes to marketing your winery, knowing where to start is typically the hardest part. There are so many modern ways of communicating with your target audience, it’s hard to understand what will be successful for you and where you should focus your efforts.
Coming up with a comprehensive, well-rounded marketing plan is essential to the success of your winery, but so is actually running your winery! Which is most likely what you’re spending most of your time doing, as you should be.
Creating marketing strategies are great, but if you can’t keep up with them, it’s a pointless endeavor. Before creating any marketing strategy, I always suggest knowing how much time you have to dedicate to marketing, how much time your staff has and if you have any additional budget you can invest.
I’ve outlined some low hanging fruit marketing tactics that you and your team can easily try today to help you generate more tasting room traffic and more sales.
Here are 9 easy marketing tricks to sell more wine you can try today:
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to convert visitors into buying customers. In fact, according to this comprehensive 16-page report from Benchmark Email, email marketing returns $43.62 for every dollar invested.
Whether customers have bought from you once, or are just visiting your website to learn more, by always trying to capture their email address, you can continue to create campaigns and offers to email to them to keep them coming back and/or buying more wine.
The key to remember is that without an email marketing list to send offers, invites, etc. to, there is no point in running a comprehensive email marketing program.
- Segment your email marketing list. First and foremost, segment your email marketing lists. Creating different lists for different customer types is the best way to send targeted, engaging emails. For example, you could have lists for wine club members, website sign ups, tasting room sign ups, etc. The more lists you have the more targeted you can get with your messaging and the more unique your offer to these customers can become.
- Add a place for customers to sign up for your mailing list on receipts. Don’t hand a tasting room customer their receipt without getting another way to continue to communicate with them, aka their email address. A lot of POS programs now include this option, but if yours does not, come up with another way to grab an email address. Whether it’s by giving them a card to fill out before you hand them their receipt or an exclusive offer by signing up. Training your tasting room staff on how to grab emails is a must.
- Send a follow up email to new subscribers giving them a discount code for their first order. After someone signs up for your email newsletter online, you can automatically have scheduled emails to be sent out offering them a discount code for their next order.
- Add a pop up to your website to collect email addresses. There are many simple and cheap (often free) programs out there, like Privy, that can help you do this. While many find pop-ups annoying, Privy allows you to set rules, such as delays or the “exit intent” rule. This is a great way to potentially convince those who haven’t been to your tasting room yet to stop by with an offer. For example, you could create a pop-up that offers a two for one tasting when they sign up for your mailing list.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC
Optimizing your website for SEO (search engine optimization) may seem like a terrifying project, and it certainly can be. But it doesn’t have to be. While I would suggest eventually building out a comprehensive SEO strategy for your website, there are a few things you can start doing RIGHT NOW to get more traffic. Here are two marketing tricks to try:
- Post your upcoming wine event on other free event listing websites. This is one that not a lot of people think to do or take the time to do. But this is a great way to get in front of new audiences that otherwise may never have heard of you. Look for area websites,
- Use Google Search Console. Google Search Console (previously Webmasters Tools) is a great way to see what keywords you’re currently ranking for and how people are finding your website. This is a great way to get you ready for an SEO strategy!
SOCIAL MEDIA
- Find an Instagram influencer and offer to send them a bottle of wine in an exchange for a post. If you have an instagram account, you’ve most likely seen this before and you can do it too! Scroll through your Instagram feed and look for those who frequently suggest wine or talk about wine. Find someone who has a good following of wine lovers and reach out to them. Often, they are very interested in doing sponsored posts for bottles of wine or a small fee.
- Create a Snapchat filter for your tasting room. For those of you with a large millennial tasting crowd, I would highly suggest in getting a custom Snapchat filter, even just for your busy season or certain events. This is a very cost effective way to raise brand awareness.
- Advertise a Facebook post. Facebook’s targeting options can get very granular, use that to your advantage! If you have a special event coming up you can easily market to your surrounding area for a very low cost by promoting a post that links to the event sign-up page.
Like I said before, starting or expanding a comprehensive marketing program for your winery can be overwhelming. While I think it’s important to create and execute well thought through marketing strategies, these are all easy options you could try out within the next few weeks to see if you can’t gain a little more traction.
As always, don’t forget to track, measure and analyze!
Have more questions on any of these tactics?! Shoot me an email, I’d love to talk through them with you. Also, be sure to register for my Introductory Webinar taking place on Tuesday, May 23rd at 10:00 – 10:30 PST. Sandra Hess will be interviewing me in this free webinar in which I will share a few case studies and examples of success. To register, complete the form below and online meeting details will be sent by email.
-Melissa Leiter