Small wineries are pressed for time and money. Always. It’s simply the way the industry is. You have to wear many hats to make a winery work.
Follow these three steps and you’ll have a winning wine marketing email (and you’ll sell some wine at the same time).
And the best part. You can do this in 30 minutes or less.
Create an Offer.
This is really the starting point of any good marketing campaign. What do you want the reader to do at the end of the email. Let’s say you create a 6 bottle flight of your wines at a special price, or you offer $1 shipping, or you release some library wine. Start here. Make sure you are clear on what you are going to offer.
Write Out the Offer in a Word Doc (or text editor)
Now you know what you plan on offering write a short (100 words tops) email to describe the offer and why someone would be interested in it. If you have limited supply, say so. If you have a high rating say so. If your tasting notes are mouthwatering use them.
Then at the end of the email make the offer and create a link for the reader to get from the email to go straight to the offer. Don’t make the mistake of sending them to your home page and hoping they will figure it out. They won’t.
Send This this Message Out During The Week.*
Set this message up in your email software* and format it so it is really clean and simple. Don’t use any fancy templates. Set it up as if you were writing me an email personally and telling me about this great offer. Schedule the message to go out during the day and not right when you are writing it.
Bonus Step: Send a reminder one week later.
At the same time you set up the first message, create a copy of it and in the subject line, simply add in the word ‘Reminder-‘ and set it to go out 5 to 7 days later.
This is based on an old, very successful, direct mail tactic that will generally get you 40 to 60% of the results of the first message.
*You’ll need to have a system like Aweber, iContact, Vertical Response, or Constant Contact to do this efficiently. Don’t try this with your regular email software like Microsoft Outlook.