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© 2023, Wine Chemistry Creative. Digital Wine Marketing, Sonoma California 95476

Selling wine online in the
competitive world of wine ecommerce

Understand your visitors, optimize your
wine ecommerce, and sell more wine

Selling wine online involves a thousand different variables which can increase (or decrease) your wine ecommerce success.

Successfully selling wine direct from your website means leading your audiences from a social post or Google search to your website, overcoming their doubts, and ultimately to making a purchase .

It is natural to assume someone visiting your winery’s website knows how to click the button labelled “Purchase” and from there, to simply select the wines they like best, but online wine shoppers sometimes need more guidance.

Overcome the challenges of selling wine online

The ability to sell wine direct to consumers from your winery’s website has brought a world of opportunities for small wineries. But it has also brought some challenges.

For the average wine consumer, it can be difficult to discern, from just a label or a variety name, what’s in the bottle.

But you can help your website’s visitors overcome this challenge and become customers.

 

Selling wine direct to consumers online requires educating your sites visitors about your wines.
This is how it can feel for your website’s visitors trying to buy wine online. Are detailed tasting notes the answer?

Digging Deeper:

Do tasting notes sell wine?

The challenge: convincing your website's visitors they want to buy your wine, using just words and images. Are tasting notes the answer?

Convincing your winery's website visitors to purchase wines they’ve never tasted before based on a photo and a price can be a tough sell.

Some wineries provide technical details such as which grape varieties were used, alcohol level, pH, acidity, oak program, and even the clones and the elevation of the vineyard. But unless you’re in the industry or someone who takes their drinking very seriously, these details don’t provide much insight.

Many wineries go a step further by providing tasting notes — you've seen them, often with very flowery and obscure descriptors. The problem with this is that the vast majority of U.S. wine drinkers don’t know how to translate commonly accepted wine descriptors into something they’ve experienced on the palate.

That is not to say that tasting notes are not helpful in selling more wine online. The trick is to combine your wine tasting notes with as many other cues as possible, including your wine positioning, website imagery, customer journey (how they found you) and more.

In the tasting room or a wine store, visitors have the option of asking questions about a wine. But to sell wine online, we must turn to user experience design to do the job for us.

Give your website’s visitors a positive user experience

In the tasting room, we lavish our guests with wine country hospitality. Online, we must lavish our guests with user experience.

What does this mean? It means we design your website and write your content to give your visitors the confidence they need to buy wine direct from your site.

For a wine ecommerce website to engage visitors at the same level as a tasting room, the user experience needs to be designed with specific users in mind.

That is, your winery’s website must be responsive to each audience visiting the site, cater to their intent and their wine knowledge, and present relevant offers.

POP QUIZ!
Which has the potential to deliver the most visitors to your website: Social or Search?
Check answer >

Q
Search engine optimization is your winery's best chance for bringing new traffic to your website.

Search engine optimization is responsible for 10x more traffic than organic social media. Current data from BrightEdge shows organic traffic from social media has been flat since 2014, and is responsible for no more than 5% of all traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization is your winery’s best chance for bringing new traffic to your website. Learn more about SEO for your winery >

Move beyond simple brochure-ware

Something wineries do exceedingly well is welcoming website visitors with amazing photography. A long table pictured within an old barn, or carefree winery visitors pictured holding glasses of wine, strolling amongst rows of vines, are immediately inviting. 

But to sell wine online your website must go beyond simple brochure-ware and cater to each visitor’s user intent. 

Websites which capture specific user intent, informed by the means of arriving at the site, are able to funnel users accordingly and increase wine sales.

There are times when user intent can’t be known simply by how a user arrives at your website. For example, when a user arrives at your site by Googling your winery’s name. In these situations, we use UX design to match your users with their intent.

Focusing on the user like this helps to create chemistry with your visitors by providing a positive experience aimed at meeting the users’ needs.

Wine e-commerce user intent icon

Give your website's visitors a positive experience, helping to satisfy their user intent

Help users understand your wines

Increase online wine sales by helping your visitors understand your wines

Winery ecommerce icon

Direct visitors to your winery ecommerce page at the best point in their journey

How to market wine online

To market wine online requires understanding your customers and meeting them on their terms.

Your unique vision for your wines and your passionate approach is what people love about your winery. Selling your wines online to people that aren’t with you on site means presenting these qualities in a way that matches what each visitor is looking for.

If minerality and finish is what your audience needs to hear about to make a decision about your wines, then that’s what we talk about.

If those terms are unfamiliar to your audience, we don’t try to educate them — we provide them with the information they’re looking for.

This is where we are able to put winery keyword research to good use.

Linking those wine keywords to very specific landing pages, we can filter and sort your website visitors and communicate with them in a way that is most relevant to them.

Get some background on the online wine-buying journey.

There’s always room for doing things better, and we treat this as a way to explore, experiment, learn about your audience, and make incremental improvements.

The people who buy your wines online either know what they’re getting,
or they’re willing to take a risk.
The people who don’t buy your wines online don’t want to take that risk.

Sell wine online with the right offers at the right time

Convincing visitors to buy wine direct from your website has a lot to do with being there to match your users’ expectations.

Before you show a bottle shot and a price, you need to make your visitors thirsty for your wines by giving them the content they need and the right offers at the right time.

Get your winery set up with everything you need to improve your winery’s ability to sell wine direct from your website: wine keyword research, defined user pathways, landing pages, super-converty calls-to-action, effective site structure and more.

Digging Deeper:

Using landing pages to sell wine online

Understanding how landing pages can help a winery sell more wine

We should begin by clarifying what a landing page is. A landing page is any page on your website that visitors land on from an external source, such as a search engine, email link, link from another site, or a URL typed directly into the browser.

If your winery website is optimized to target specific keywords, the search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) will direct users who search those keywords to whatever page on your website is most relevant to each search. For example, if you have a page about low-intervention winemaking on your website, users who type that phrase into the Google search window will be directed to that specific page (in other words, not to your homepage).

How can we use landing pages to sell more wine online? By selecting keywords that help us understand a website visitor’s intent, such as learning about your wine styles, or responding to an offer for a discount, we can get a sense of what matters to them, and display the appropriate content (via a landing page).

This forms the basis of creating audience segments and user funnels on your website, separating your audience into, for example, locals and out-of-towners, experts and novices, and so on.

Each of these groups are still directed to the store where they can purchase wine, but they have an opportunity to have the questions answered and their objections assailed first.

Digging Deeper:

The online wine-buying journey

The online wine-buying journey and what it means for your winery

You know from your own experiences buying wine online that the process is a journey with many milestones along the way.

Wine purchase milestones — gaining awareness, gathering information, consideration, making a buying decision,  brand loyalty, and even repeat purchases — all need to be considered and optimized.

An owner of a winery e-commerce store must understand the different needs that exist at each point in the journey, and proactively address questions, concerns, and objections that will inevitably arise in the mind of the potential customer.

Neglecting these needs, failing to address them proactively, creates doubt for your would-be customers, which can be difficult for them to overcome.

If your wine ecommerce numbers are disappointing, there are actual measurable changes you can make to improve your winery’s online wine sales.

*We will provide a detailed proposal for your approval before starting.

Select the package you’re interested in. We’ll contact you to discuss your specific needs.

Select Package

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Book a free 30-minute consultation

Not sure what the best approach is for your winery ecommerce? Set up a free 30-minute consultation to ask any questions you can think of. It will be well worth your time.