As hectic as peak can be, the holiday season can be a great opportunity to boost your winery’s customer acquisition and sales. Here’s how to do it.

The following tips come from a collaborative webinar with Holly Berrigan, Chief Revenue Officer at Studio Beverage Group. You can watch the full webinar recording here.

With peak in full swing and the holidays just around the corner, wineries around the nation are scrambling to keep up with fast-paced winter sales. But, as crazy as the holiday season can be, it also offers a multitude of new opportunities for growth. During this period, wineries who craft effective seasonal sales offers can expect significant boosts in customer acquisition, click-through rates, conversion rates, customer retention, and revenue.

As a winery, the success of your winery’s offer depends on your ability to craft a promotion that resonates with your audience while also meeting the criteria of a “blowout” deal for your brand. This is achieved through three distinct steps:

• 1. The Offer: The Offer: Make your offer irresistible to your target audience.
• 2. The Content: Get that offer to your audience, fast.
• 3. The Follow-Through: Create the best post-purchase customer experience.

Here’s how to start building a successful promotional campaign for your winery.

What’s Your Offer?

When it comes to the promotional offer itself, there are a few major things to consider. First of all, will you stick with a single offer (e.g. 30% off site-wide) or will you create a staggered offer (e.g. 30% off for club members on Friday, 40% off of certain retail bottles on Saturday, etc.)? Single offers are easy to organize and manage, but staggered offers present chances for higher conversion rates, especially for wineries with many different SKUs, package deals, or other add-ons.

Then, if you choose to go with a staggered offer, does your business have the additional resources needed to plan and execute a complicated promotion? Can you set up your store to correctly reflect these offers on the back-end? Do you promote all of your offers in advance, or do you keep each offer secret until they go live to further surprise your customers? Finally, how will you follow through with post-purchase messaging?

Answering these questions before you begin asset creation is key to building a strong foundation for your promotional marketing.

Content

Now that you’ve determined what your offer is, you need to get the word out to your customers—the goal with this content marketing is to create at least seven touchpoints with your audience while using the least amount of resources. While there are a number of different ways to do this, building an omnichannel marketing strategy using the following platforms is one of the most popular and strategic ways to run your campaign.

Email

Email is, by far, the most important marketing channel for wineries. In fact, businesses see a $45 ROI for each dollar spent on email marketing.
As such, it’s important to send as many emails as possible during the holiday season. Don’t worry, it’s hard to over-email this time of year—for example, Klaviyo recommends that businesses send 12-14 emails from Thanksgiving day through Black Friday and Cyber Monday for maximum effect.

When drafting holiday emails, make sure to cover things like presale expectations, VIP access, and big announcements. Pitch activations with phrases like “Selling FAST,” “Over SOON,” or “Last Chance” to create a sense of urgency and motivate readers to continue through the sales funnel.

Finally, when building email campaigns, make sure to segment your email lists for the best results. Here are a few common segmentation guidelines:

• Engaged Customers – Customers who have opened an email within the last 90 days
• Past Holiday Purchasers – People who purchased during last year’s promotions
• VIPs – Customers who have spent over a certain dollar amount
• Window Shoppers – Those who have engaged with previous marketing material but haven’t made a purchase
• Club Members – Individuals currently in your wine club

Tailoring messaging towards each of these segments individually lets you deliver the most convincing message to each group, helping further drive sales.

Social Media

While it’s easy to get carried away with social media as an independent platform, you should remember that social works with email, not separate from it. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel—repurpose email content on social, and vice versa.

For example, if your winery is doing a bottle promo over email, highlight that bottle and the promo over your social channels as well. This omnichannel approach keeps your customers engaged across platforms while also having the added benefit of saving you time in asset production.

Affiliate / PR

While affiliate marketing and PR are two separate channels, they function best when working together. To do this, layer your outreach to maximize exposure and share your affiliate program with all publications and influencers you pitch or collaborate with (Holly highly recommends using tools like Skimlinks to streamline the process).

Paid Digital

There are two different ways to approach paid promotional material: paid social (e.g. promoted social posts) and pay-per-click (e.g. search engine marketing). Each comes with its own set of benefits.
Paid social is ideal for three things: retargeting your engaged audience via additional touchpoints, creating a look-alike (LaL) audience based on your current subscribers to target new prospects, and testing new markets or local offers.

Pay-per-click ads, on the other hand, work best to rank for key terms, ensuring that your webpage comes up first in search results within your niche.

Using a mix of both paid social (if your winery is active on Instagram/Facebook) and pay-per-click ads is a great way to expand your reach and drive more traffic to your site.

Text Message

When it comes to texts, the strategy is simple: Just shorten your email offers to one or two lines of text. But remember, texts are more than just promotional—they can help you surprise and delight customers. For example, Wineshipping’s Premium TrackingPremium Tracking function can help you automate text shipping notifications, ensuring first-time pick-up and preventing orders from being sent to the warehouse. This, in turn, increases customer satisfaction… and saves you money in the process.

Follow Through

At this point, your offer has captured the customer’s attention and they’ve made a purchase. Now, your sights should be set on building customer retention and loyalty through a curated and convenient post-purchase experience. Thankfully, Wineshipping offers a number of features designed to do just that.

Wineshipping clients have access to Premium Tracking tools, giving wineries the power to design a fully branded post-purchase experience. This technology is completely customizable and features email automations, custom tracking pages, review capture functionality, standard SMS and RedChirp integration, and more. By branding post-purchase touchpoints, wineries have seen significant spikes in engagement and sales, boosting click-through rates by 88% and conversion rates by 55%.

Wineshipping’s partnership with Via.Delivery also gives clients access to over 28,000 carrier hold locations across the U.S., offering customers the opportunity to pick up their order at their convenience with a simple scan of their ID. Besides offering pickup flexibility, pickup at a hold location ensures package security, avoids losses due to redeliveries and failed delivery attempts, and safeguards wine from adverse weather conditions.

Finally, we understand all too well that customers often change their order information after they make a purchase. In order to give wineries better control over orders, Wineshipping’s Awesome Client Portal was designed with the capability for fulfillment holds. This lets wineries choose when orders move into the fulfillment process; orders can either be released manually or auto-released after a specified hold time.

Keep Calm and Ship On

When it comes to shipping wine, we’ve got it down to a science. Here at Wineshipping, we’re passionate about providing you and your customers with the best service, offering the most innovative and comprehensive technology with unrivaled customer care.

Get in touch today and learn how Wineshipping can help you.