Hint: If your business isn’t doing these things, you’re missing out on a lot of potential sales
Syncing Ecommerce and Email Systems
This is one of the most fundamental pieces involved in doing successful email marketing. Yet it’s also something that so many small- and midsize-wineries fail to implement.
Here’s why it’s critical that businesses connect their ecommerce with their email platform:
- When your ecommerce and email systems aren’t integrated you can’t accurately or easily track exactly how many sales occurred. Whether as a direct result of your email marketing campaign or not.
- Without sales data to work from, email marketing managers can’t select audiences based on important filters. Who purchased more than x$ in their lifetime, purchased something in the last year, but not within the last three months, or has never purchased? Etcetera, etcetera.
Having these filters available from within an email platform allows marketers to run more effective campaigns. By tweaking content to fit different audiences, as well as much more accurately track the exact sales each campaign they run, you know what your email marketing generates.
Automated Email Series or Sequences
Automated email sequences can significantly boost a business’s revenue, by working in the background to generate sales.
Among other things, automated email sequences can:
- Turn new subscribers into customers at the moment in time they are most likely to purchase from a business
- Get more residual sales from those who are already purchasing (via campaigns triggered by customers’ buying activities)
- Turn abandoned carts into purchases
Welcome Series
One of the most basic and essential automated email marketing sequences that every business should have in place is a Welcome Email series.
Just like it’s important to say ‘hello’ or ‘welcome’ and make eye contact with a customer when they enter your business, it’s important to send them a Welcome email when they join your email list.
It’s good manners and a good way to start an online relationship with your potential customers. Automated Welcome emails are also great sales tools.
With an almost three times higher open rate than average emails, Welcome emails reach your new customers or subscribers at the moment in time when they are most ready to interact with your brand. The general rule with Welcome emails is to send between 3-5 emails to new subscribers. Include content that is specifically designed to engage them, in the right way, before they start receiving your regular email marketing campaigns.
Personalized and Segmented Campaigns
This may seem so obvious that we don’t need to point it out, but it is crucial for a business to address emails to their subscribers, using their first names.
We’ve seen many wineries send out impersonal emails that they haven’t addressed to anyone. They just include advertisements or sales pitches, with no intro or conversational aspect. This is poor practice when it comes to communicating with customers and potential customers.
It is also equally important to send emails that have been designed for the audience or segment.
We’ve seen many wineries send the same email marketing campaigns to their wine club and non wine club members. They write the email copy to be focused completely on their club members and try to push everyone else to join their wine club to get the discount they offer (thereby making everyone else feel like chopped liver).
It is far more effective to send a campaign that is specifically targeted to each audience.
In addition, the frequency with which you send campaigns should also be dictated by your audience.
Generally speaking, it doesn’t make sense to send every campaign to people who rarely open or engage with your emails. Equally, it doesn’t make sense to only send an email every couple of weeks, to your hyper-engaged customers.
Create customized campaigns for specific segments of an audience, to enhance overall open rates, engagement, and sales as well as to increase retention and reduce attrition.
Content Mix
This one seems to be really hard for wineries (and businesses in general) to grasp. Why would a business send emails that don’t actively promote a product or actively ‘sell’?
Marketing professionals try very hard to communicate to businesses because we know how important it is and we see the results and growth that are possible. That is, when businesses get this right. What is boils down to is this:
When a business communicates with their subscribers or customers in a way that comes off as too transactional (sales, sales, sales), it hurts that business’s relationship with those customers.
People don’t want to feel like a business sees them as dollar signs, or like they are constantly being sold to. They want to feel like they have a kind of relationship or connection with that business.
Mix it up!
Share recipes, winemaker videos, recently published blog posts, or food pairing ideas with subscribers in between email sales promotions.
When done well, the right content mix leads to:
- overall higher open and engagement rates
- higher overall sales to a larger number of people more often throughout the year
- fewer unsubscribes.
Remarketing Campaigns to Reach Contacts Who Don’t Open Emails
Most wine industry businesses are reaching 25% or less of the people on their email list. In fact, they sell to an even smaller % of those people, via email marketing. This means that they aren’t selling to 70% or more of their subscribers.
Remarketing campaigns help businesses reach more of the people who know and like your brand, but aren’t purchasing or engaging via email.
Facebook is one of the best and easiest channels on which to run a remarketing campaign. The return on investment with remarketing campaigns (campaigns that market to a business’s own contact lists) in the wine industry is incredibly high.
We regularly use remarketing campaigns to support and enhance the email marketing campaigns we run for clients. Within a month or two of working with a business (tweaking campaign formats and content, offer structure, landing pages, and running Facebook remarketing campaigns), we’re normally able to achieve as much as two- or three-times as many sales per campaign as they were receiving previously.
Remarketing campaigns have contributed significantly to these results.
