By Brandon Harvie, Product Marketing Coordinator at WineDirect
Just as the direct-to-consumer(DtC) wine industry is constantly evolving, so should the marketing strategies for your winery. Whether you are a small, family-owned winery or a massive multiple-brand enterprise, every winery needs to review how they are highlighting their business.
Marketing can be an exciting part of running a DtC wine shipping business, as it lets you be creative and uniquely highlight your brand. But before jumping into a fresh marketing strategy, it’s important to figure out your goals. Are you looking for more sales? More traffic to your website? Expanding awareness of your brand? Choosing your goals will help you decide which marketing strategy is the best fit for your business.
Following are four of the top marketing strategies to consider looking into.
Email Marketing
While more than 319.6 billion emails are sent daily, email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies for any business to promote your products, speak with your customers and reach your business goals. This is because it brings in the results and delivers the best marketing return on investment (ROI).
Here are some tips to help you master your email marketing initiatives:
- Use an email marketing program: Make your life easier by automating your emails, creating lists, and using easy email-creating tools. Some of the top tools include Mailchimp, WineDirect and Klaviyo.
- Personalize your messages: Instead of sending generic emails to everyone on your list, use customer data to create a personalized message. Instead of “Dear valued customer,” it’s much more impactful to use “Dear John.”
- Send mobile-friendly emails: More and more people are checking their emails on their phones. In 2012, 27% of all marketing emails were opened on a mobile device. In 2022, it’s as high as 61%.
Loyalty Points
Who doesn’t love a good loyalty program? Loyalty programs offer rewards, discounts and other special incentives to attract and keep customers. These programs encourage repeat business, offering people a reward for brand loyalty. Typically, the more often a customer shops—and the more they spend—the greater the reward. You can think of something like Starbucks Stars or Amazon Prime. These widely known programs offer incentives for customers to keep coming back and using them.
Here are some of the significant benefits of a well-thought-out loyalty program:
- Increase customer engagement: Loyalty programs create the ability to connect with customers on a deeper level.
- Increase average order value and repeat purchases: A fantastic way to increase revenue without getting new customers, which is much more costly.
- Combat market competition: Differentiate from the competition and offer a unique selling proposition.
- Boost retention and lifetime value (LTV): When you can give customers reasons to keep coming back—and give them a wonderful experience when they get there—you are increasing retention and thus increasing LTV.
Search Engine Optimization
Due to how technical it can be, search engine optimization (SEO) is an often-overlooked marketing strategy, which is essential for any website to rank high in organic Google searches. But SEO work can be a fun and rewarding experience. But what is SEO? It is essentially the practice of using content principles and technical improvements to improve your online traffic and rankings on search engine result pages.
Here are some straightforward ways to start improving your SEO:
- Create a top-notch user experience: Users value an enjoyable experience and easy navigation, but it also helps Google’s crawlers scan your content and decide your ranking. Look at dead links, error pages and messy site structure.
- Write for humans first: It is critical to remember when creating content that your primary audience is other humans! Optimize for your real-life readers; you don’t want them to struggle to understand your material.
- Build relevant links: Link building involves another website linking to yours in an article or blog post. This helps build your domain authority and improves the chances of people clicking through to your website if it appears on other reliable domains.
Reviews
Reviews are an easily forgotten marketing strategy but are just as essential for wineries as for customers. When you look at going to a restaurant or making a big purchase, there is a good chance you will check out customer reviews to see what others think. Reviews set up stronger relationships with potential customers and allow companies to charge a premium price for their products. Studies have shown that customers will pay 22% more for some products if the company has a good reputation.
Spotlighting reviews will help create a positive shopping experience for your customers. Here are some of the top benefits that come with focusing on customer reviews:
- Provide social proof: Giving potential customers confidence in your business is vital for any winery. Positive reviews reassure shoppers that they can trust your brand and products. Up to 84% of consumers noted that reviews were critical in their purchasing decisions.
- Build trust: DtC shippers can build strong trust and credibility by having steady positive reviews. If potential customers know that other people had positive experiences with you, they’re more likely to trust you.
- Influence purchasing decisions: Customers often compare products or services during the buying process and usually choose the ones with more positive reviews.
These marketing strategies are just the beginning of what you can do. There is no one size fits all marketing approach for DtC shippers. Continually reviewing and evolving your plan will make you stand out from the rest. It helps to keep track of your marketing efforts to follow the most successful methods. See what works and what doesn’t and capitalize on what fits your business.
WineDirect provides everything your winery needs to start, manage, and grow your direct-to-consumer (DtC) business. WineDirect is a platinum-certified Sovos ShipCompliant partner—one of the 60+ integrated partners that makes Sovos ShipCompliant a central hub of the direct-to-consumer and three-tier beverage alcohol ecosystem.