I want to share 4 things wineries should be doing with their email list, to be more successful and acquire more customers:

1: Include only one link

Every email message you send, has to have a link to your website. You can send them to any page on your site that will provide them with useful information:

• Offer page
• Promotion page
• Wine Club sign up page
• An article that you have written or somebody has written about you
• An event that you are promoting or that your brand is going to participate in
• Videos that feature experiences related to your brand

You may ask: Why send people to my website? Because it is your real estate. It’s like having your winery or your tasting room open 24/7 for people to visit, take a look and getting to know your brand.

Many have seen better results using only one call-to-action button on their email message, instead of a number of links that take them to different places. The best results are when you just select one call-to-action and you send them directly to a page. The takeaway? Instead of sending them to your homepage, try sending them directly to a page where they will take action on one part of your business.

2: Ask for feedback

You can send a survey to your email list using one of the tools that are available, like: SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, even Google Forms. This will enable you to get specific feedback on aspects of your wine club, tasting room, shipping and customer service. Receiving first-hand feedback will give you the opportunity to improve.

3: Leverage your list to advertise on social media

This is something very powerful and not many people in the wine world know about it.

Basically, you can take your email list and export it from whatever platform you are using: MailChimp, Constant Contact or any other email platform. You can then take that list and upload it to Facebook Business Manager or LinkedIn. Next, Facebook and LinkedIn will create a Custom Audience that can be used as audiences for ads.

Imagine if you want to show Facebook Ads to members of your wine club. You could send promotions (on Facebook) specifically to people on your list.

It’s easier to sell to current customers instead of trying to get new ones all the time.

Another good thing you can do with this is get past wine club members, that have cancelled to come back. You can narrow down your email list to the people that have cancelled their wine club membership and entice them to have a conversation about returning to your wine club.

Then Custom Audience list can be used to send ads via Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or LinkedIn. As mentioned, this is a really powerful tool that not many people in the wine world are using.

4: Find new customers with attributes from your existing ones

Can you imagine the effort and the financial investment it would take to find and research customers that have the same traits, the same profile sort of speak, the same persona as your current customers? Facebook (and now LinkedIn) do it for you (for free!).

Similar to what we talked about previously, you can export your list from your email platform, upload it to Facebook or LinkedIn. You will then be able to create an audience of people that are similar to your best existing customers.

Isn’t this something amazing? You can leverage the power of Facebook to find these people and then send them ads through Facebook, Instagram and even Messenger, and get more customers.

You can even get email sign-ups in a much more efficient way at a lower cost.

Bonus: Taking your email list to the next level

How can you really reap the benefits of having an email list?

Well, one important thing is hyper-segmentation. You want to segment your list. Probably doing this is easy with your email platform, be it MailChimp or any other. You can segment your list by:

• City
• Best preforming customers.
• Favorite wines.
• Last purchase date.
• Birthday or anniversary dates.
• Non-club members and club members.

The objective is to have the ability to craft and send a more personalized, targeted message. Instead of crafting one generic message, you should be creating personalized messages for these different types of segments on your list. 

Now, another thing you can do to take your email list to the next level is building up your email list using chatbots. What are chatbots? Chatbots are programs inside of Facebook Messenger that interact with people in a conversational manner. They are hot because their open rate is between 80-90%. Compared to email, which averages 20.81% open rate, chatbots promise to deliver your message to more people.

One use case for chatbots is to recover abandoned carts. Messages can serve as a reminder that they left something in their cart on your website.

This is an amazing tool that many people in different other verticals have seen improvements recovering those abandoned carts.

Another use case is providing updates on your customer’s order.

– Your order is ready to ship.

– Your order has shipped.

– Here is your tracking number.

Providing a more personalized experience by sending these customizes messages will improve customer loyalty.

Yet another use case is to provide interactive FAQs about your wine club, booking tastings or general business info: opening times, contact info, etc.

Potential customers will have the opportunity to interact with the chatbot and get more information, and it can make the experience more comfortable for many that prefer texting, instead of placing a phone call or browsing through their website.

They will also find the information they want more quickly, and that’s what everybody wants.

Have you tried any of the things that we have talked about on this article?

Let me know in the comments below.

I’ll be more than glad to help you, if you need anything on this matter of sending out better emails to your email list.

So, I hope you are very successful with this and thank you very much for reading this and watching the video!

Email marketing for a winery owner or manager can get complicated and time-consuming. I can help you sort some things out on a free call. We will talk for a few minutes about what you are doing right now and what do you want to achieve. Click the button below to schedule the free call at your convenience: