Wineries: What is the Goal of Your Email?
Welcome to another edition of the WineMarketer.com newsletter.
Have a Purpose
In my research of email marketing practices for wineries I receive 10 to 20 emails per day from the various winery lists I am subscribed to. I look for the best and the worst examples of email marketing.
After reading thousands of emails I have a pretty good sense of email marketing practices in the industry. I have the impression that many wineries don’t consider what the purpose of their emails might be.
Email is an interruption medium. Meaning, email comes to you. You don’t go searching for it. Because it comes to you, it shows up in your inbox a) when you are doing something else and “Bing-You’ve got mail!” OR b) you head into your inbox to see what’s up. At that moment, wine is not the thing you are thinking about.
So an email has to get your attention, stop you from doing what you are doing, and then get you to do something else (like order wine for instance.)
How to Give Your Email a Purpose
When you write your email, you have to plan — “what is the action you want the reader to take?” You have choices. Don’t just send them to your home page and expect them to figure out how to ‘order their allocation.’ Many won’t.
One error I see in many winery emails is there is no clear call to action. No clear link to send me to a product page, or an order page or a buy now button. Email readers, like web surfers need a bit of a nudge to get them to do what you would like them to do. So you have to tell them.
“Click on this link to order your allocation to the 2005 release.”
A less appealing link might be.
www.YourWineryName.com
And trust me I have seen many emails where that is what the only clickable link in the email. I have seen many emails that have 5 or more sections in a newsletter format. These often include a section with a wine release, vineyard notes, a recipe, and an update on an event – all in the same email. You may even be tempted to include links for each of these.
This can spell trouble since it’s difficult for a reader to stop and do ALL of those things. Often, they will either set the email aside (to be read later, which they never do) or they click on one or two links and then lose interest and go on to something else. This can really dilute your efforts to increase direct to consumer sales using email.
I’d recommend that you sit down and plan out your next 3 or 4 emails. Make them short and have them focus on one topic for each email. Then make the call to action very clear and send the reader to the exact page you want them to be on. You’ll find that more people will read your emails and then visit the page on your website you intend them to visit.
Ideally that will be an order page—which means you’ll sell more wine!
To a great year,
Mitch Tarr, CEO - ZinMarketing, Inc.
Mitch Tarr is an email marketing guru and the CEO of ZinMarketing Inc. a winery marketing agency dedicated to helping wineries profit from the proper use of email marketing. Mitch has honed his Internet marketing skills over the past 10 years in some of the most competitive online industries there are. He brings these skills to the wine industry through his articles, reports, ezine, and website - ZinMarketing.com.
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