Strategic Growth: Implementing 5 Key Wine Marketing Automation Tactics
Small wineries today face a daunting set of marketing challenges.
Feeling squashed by the marketing might of larger wineries and squeezed by the massive number of competitors, small wineries can benefit by using wine marketing automation tools in their workflows.
Here are five essential wine marketing automation tactics that go beyond AI.
1. Automating wine email segmentation
Email segmentation means dividing your subscriber list into smaller groups based on their interests.
Perhaps you’ve heard of email segmentation, but are wondering why it matters. Email segmentation provides a long list of benefits, including:
- Improved open rates
- Better click-through rates
- Higher conversion rates
- Better ROI
- Fewer unsubscribes
Segmenting your winery’s email audience allows you to send more relevant emails to your subscribers. Automating that process makes it, well, automatic.
Email segmentation is the most effective way to improve the health of your email marketing. It is like kale for your email marketing.
Like kale, many are afraid to put it on their plates. So here’s how you lighten the experience — with the help of automation.
Automating your winery’s email segmentation makes it possible for you to send emails that are more relevant to your winery’s subscribers.
Winery Email Marketing Automation:
What is email segmentation and why does it matter?
Email segmentation: dividing your winery's email subscribers into smaller groups based on their interests.
Email segmentation is the practice of dividing your list of email subscribers into smaller groups based on commonalities, in order to send content written specifically for those commonalities.
For example, creating a segment of locals allows you to speak to them in a different way. This group might be more interested in live music at your winery than they are in offers for discounted shipping.
By providing information which is actually useful to each of your audiences, your subscribers are far more likely to engage.
Additionally, by repeatedly providing information your subscribers find worthwhile, you gain their trust and they become more likely to open your emails in the future.
Creating email segments, as mentioned, is about determining commonalities which can be used to form smaller groups. These are generally behavioral (buying habits, visiting the tasting room, wine preferences) or demographic (age, gender, geography, and so on.)
Creating segments of your winery's email subscribers can often be done directly within your email marketing platform, or you can export your subscriber list to a spreadsheet, where subscribers can be filtered and sorted in all kinds of ways.
However, the simplest method is to automatically place new subscribers into segments based on the specific call-to-action they responded to.
Automating your winery’s email segmentation can be as simple as you want to make it. You can get started with just two steps:
- Create your segments in your email marketing platform
- Create calls-to-action on your website that point to those segments.
As with almost everything in life, there are opportunities to take it further. See how >
Get help creating your custom, page-specific calls-to-action >
Winery Email Marketing Automation:
How to set up email segmentation
Setting up email segmentation can be as simple as you want it to be. Here's how to take it further.
1. Define Segmentation Criteria: You will want to create segments that are important to your subscribers (such as what they care about, where they live, or which wines they like), and which you can provide content about.
2. CTA Placement: Content-specific CTAs placed throughout your website will be used to direct your winery's online visitors into the appropriate segments.
3. Monitor CTA Interactions: Periodically check the engagement of each of your CTAs. If your pages are getting traffic, but your CTAs are not being triggered, you might need to adjust the prominece of your CTAs, or change your segments.
4. Automate Tagging: Implement an automation tool to assign tags or labels automatically when users interact with specific CTAs. This helps categorize individuals based on their preferences.
5. Create Segmentation Rules: Establish rules within your email marketing platform to segment audiences based on the tags or labels assigned through CTA interactions.
6. Dynamic Content Integration: Utilize dynamic content features to customize future emails based on the segmented audience, delivering personalized messages that align with their interests.
7. Test and Optimize: Continuously test the effectiveness of your CTAs and segmentation strategy. Adjust criteria and CTAs as needed to enhance engagement and conversion rates.
8. Integrate with CRM: Connect your email marketing platform with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to ensure seamless data flow for a holistic understanding of your audience.
9. Set Up Triggered Campaigns: Develop automated campaigns triggered by specific CTA interactions, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups based on user behavior.
10. Monitor and Refine: Regularly review segmentation performance and refine your strategy based on evolving customer behavior and engagement patterns.
Roughly 40% of subscribers skim emails and will spend less than 10 seconds on your message. Your email content needs to be personalized, relevant, and engaging.
2. Automated email welcome sequences
New subscribers already receive a confirmation email automatically generated by your email marketing platform.
Some simple planning and automation will transform the default confirmation email into a brand-building welcome sequence.
Implementing automated segmented sequences of Welcome emails is a snap. Besides their usefulness to your winery, they are much more welcoming to your followers than generic messages confirming their address.
Email welcome sequences can be set up to be specific to each subscriber segment.
Welcome sequences typically comprise 2 or 3 emails and offer several opportunities for new subscribers to engage with your winery.
- A discount on the first order invites new subscribers to explore your web store.
- Complimentary wine tastings for completing a survey can provide valuable information about your subscribers for further segmentation — and bring customers into your tasting room.
- Offering a one-month trial of your wine club (with reduced benefits) can attract new members.
Customize your automated welcome sequences for each subscriber segment with offers relevant to each segment.
Winery Marketing Automation:
Creating automated wine email welcome sequences
Automated email welcome sequences can boost brand loyalty, help you learn about your subcribers, and actually sell wine.
It's easy to improve on the standard confirmation email which informs new subscribers their subscription is confirmed.
Since you're now using automation to separate your subscribers into segments, why not send a confirmation email which relates to their interests?
And why stop there? How about a second email which offers an additional 5% off for completing a quick survey?
Timed email sequences are well within the offerings of almost every Email Service Provider (ESP), and setting them up is easy.
In most cases, timed email sequences require nothing more than the pre-written content, setting the trigger to begin the sequence, and setting the interval for the emails.
The third email in your welcome sequence can include a specific offer for each subscriber's favorite wine (which you learned about in the survey sent in the second email).
Get help defining a wine email content strategy with audience segmentation, custom landing pages, and ongoing reporting.
3. Using automation to learn about your subscribers
If you’re like most people, when you hear the word Survey, you probably think, “Oh please, really?”
However, with the right approach, surveys (or quizzes, games, contests, test-your-knowledge — whatever you want to call them) can help you get to know your customers and learn more about what they want.
Learning more about your winery’s subscribers can easily be incorporated into your email welcome sequence using a 3rd-party tool such as ConvertFlow.
Many email service providers offer survey functionality but lack serious design and technical capabilities. A consequence of these limitations is poor user participation.
Likewise, survey providers such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform provide functionality to ask questions and collect results but still lack the chops to offer an experience that is fun, creative, and unique.
My favorite tool for creating highly functional surveys within a super user experience is ConvertFlow (convertflow.com). ConvertFlow offers a non-code solution for creating e-commerce quizzes, games, and website personalization. ConvertFlow will make you feel like you have superpowers.
ConvertFlow integrates with ESPs such as MailChimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, and more. These integrations merge user responses into corresponding subscriber profiles as tags, fields, or segments within your email service provider.
Brands that use dynamic content generate an ROI of 42:1. For reference, that’s 100% better than the 21:1 ROI for brands that don’t use dynamic content.
4. Automating wine email personalization
Using personalization in emails is nothing new; we’ve all received marketing emails that address us by name. Low-level email personalization of this kind has been standard practice for years.
Today’s email marketing capabilities take us beyond simply personalizing the To: field.
When thinking about email personalization, it’s good to focus on elevating the user experience for your subscribers — not just showing off that you have them in your database.
Birthdays, geography, wine preferences, and other details are useful for personalizing emails.
Additionally, information collected through surveys or other sources, automatically appended to subscriber profiles, can be used with conditional logic to add dynamic text to your emails.
With the right intention, email personalization will increase your subscriber engagement and brand loyalty.
Automation for wine emails:
Using dynamic content in your winery's emails
Dynamic email content is the foundation of email personalization, making your winery's emails more relevant and useful to your email subscribers.
Dynamic email content is inserted into your email message using a device called shortcodes. You've probably used the [FIRSTNAME] shortcode, or some variation of it, to add a personalized greeting in your emails.
Dynamic text can generally include any data attached to your subscribers' profiles, in the form of tags, fields, segments, and so on.
When looking for opportunities to add dynamic content to your emails, always ask yourself, "Does this use of dynamic content enhance my subscriber's experience?"
For specific intructions for how to use dynamic email content within your Email Service Provider's interface, simply consult the knowledgebase for your ESP.
5. Automation with evergreen email marketing content
Content marketing is one of the best long-term investments in marketing a business. Recent research suggests it’s three times more efficient than outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
Using evergreen content in automated email sequences allows your winery to accomplish three valuable things:
- Keep your email subscribers engaged throughout the entire year,
- Bring a steady flow of organic search traffic to your winery’s website
- Provide a cushion for your marketing to keep working even during the busiest times of the year.
Digging Deeper:
What is evergreen marketing content?
Evergreen content stays relevant at any time of year — even for several years.
Simply put, evergreen marketing content is content that doesn’t go out of date.
Unlike “Best Wines to Serve this Mother's Day”, or “10 Wines that Pair Well with Thanksgiving Turkey,” evergreen marketing emails can be sent out any time of the year, and remain relevant all year round.
Often taking the form of how-to’s, answering a question, or providing recommendations (top 10 lists, for example), evergreen content can be useful for discovering your subscribers' interests or level of knowledge.
Some examples of evergreen article topics that would be well-suited for a winery audience include:
- Why Oak Improves Wine
- How to taste wine like you know what you’re doing
- How does climate affect the flavor of wine?
- What does it mean if a year is a good vintage?
It is easy to see how people might search for these topics, and if your website provides the answer, you'll gain them as visitors.
In content marketing, Evergreen refers to content that remains relevant throughout the year.
Evergreen wine marketing content that utilizes competent keyword research can be a powerful tool for capturing organic search content.
Using tools like Google Trends or Ask the Public, you can quickly see what topics are trending amongst your audience and develop helpful content that answers their questions.
High-quality content can attract qualified organic search traffic to your winery’s website for several years.
Bradley Squires
ENGAGEMENT CATALYST
Bradley Squires, the founder of Wine Chemistry Creative, helps wineries become memorable. He thinks of this as Creating Chemistry with your customers and future customers. Bradley has provided marketing services for some of the largest (and smallest) brands in the U.S.. Notable brands include Vintrace, UCSF, Ericcson, Grgich Hills, The Nature Conservancy, and Napa Valley Vintners. He holds degrees in Oenology, Viticulture, and Wine Marketing. He doesn’t have a dog.
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