Tips, strategies, and examples you can use to get more subscribers and sell more wine direct-to-consumer.

Attracting Subscribers The value of a single email address

How one winery increased its subscribers 500%

3 basic strategies to get more subscribers

Creating an effective “thank you” page

How to Craft the Perfect Welcome Email 8 tips for an effective welcome message

5 Obvious Strategies to Get More Subscribers Use a popup for 5x as many signups

Offer valuable content and resources for download

Allow subscription via blog comments

Sold out product notifications

Use Hellobar to display a call-to-action

Bonus Tips & Resources

Every single email address has value attached to it.

Every email address you collect is worth something. Of course it has a monetary value, but we shouldn’t reduce something as valuable as this to just a dollar figure. Email is a deeply personal way to adopt people into your inner circle – or the other way around. Getting into someone’s inbox is a privilege, and something we control. Any good marketer will tell you “the money’s in the list” and when it comes to selling wine to consumers, this statement is particularly true. When you get a new customer, you’re getting a possible brand advocate, someone who will share your product with friends, and hopefully come back for years to come.

When it comes down to marketing costs, email is the

cheapest way to promote your brand. It’s also the easiest

and most effective. Services like MailChimp, Aweber, and

Constant Contact offer excellent platforms to manage

your campaigns. A good list will convert 40-50% of

your subscribers at least once over the course of a

year. In fact, email marketing has the highest ROI of any

digital marketing channel.

Does email appear as a top source of revenue in your Google Analytics ecommerce report? It should be at or near the top. Over the past two years I’ve examined data from countless wineries, and the most successful ones excel at email marketing. In order to see the highest ROI on email marketing, you need to constantly be growing your list of subscribers. This is one area that 90% of wineries struggle to capitalize on. Luckily, it doesn’t take much to collect emails from hungry consumers who visit your site.

1. Make it obvious. Make the call-to-action plainly visible

by creating a graphic, adding it above the fold, and

ensure it appears on every page of the site.

2. Make it easy. Only require their name and email.

Nothing else.

3. Incentivize subscribers. Create a one-time discount

promo code to incentivize users and attract more

signups. Include a short message that clearly spelled out

the benefits of subscribing, and emphasized the one-

time promotion they would receive.

BONUS: Build a focused “thank you” page

In the example above, we implemented these three simple changes and saw dramatic results. The line above tracks visits to the newsletter signup page for their website, and has grown 500% since making these edits.

The first thing you need to do is create an effective call to action. Which line of text sounds more appealing?

Join our mailing list.

OR

Become part of our inner circle and get email-exclusive offers, invitations to special events, and the latest news about our

winery. We swear on our oldest bottle of Reserve Cabernet, we won’t spam you.

Your website offers an experience for a new visitor, and you need to figure

out ways to nudge them down the funnel, migrating them from a casual

website visitor to a loyal customer. By using simple and direct prompts to

join your mailing list, you can shepherd a lot more people into the top of

the funnel. Your mailing list call-to-action should appear near the top of

your website, and on every single page. It should be enticing, visually

appealing, and informative.

Visit a couple winery websites, and you’ll notice a few common traits.

Most of calls-to-action appear below the fold, often at the very bottom of the website.

Very few offer any sort of insight into why a visitor would even care to signup.

Most signup forms require too much information from the user. Unless you’re doing very targeted geographical offers and sending daily horoscopes, there’s no need to collect their address, date of birth, and other personal information. At this stage, you need only their name and email. Once they become a customer, you’ll get all the rest of their personal details.

DO NOT require users to

fill out this much

information.

DO require only their name

and email address.

Most wineries display extreme caution and predjudice against offering discounts. They feel like it diminishes their brand’s worth, and in a sense that’s true if they do it too much. I believe a brand risks this when they work with sites like Wine.Woot and Lot18 pushing heavy discounts. They risk deflating their perceived value, and training customers to expect those kind of savings.

A good many wineries also turn their nose at the idea of offering an explicit discount for new mailing list signups. But all it took in this example was a single use, $10 off coupon to dramatically build their subscribers. Consider this – the average wine order is valued around $250, and the lifetime value of a customer is often many times that. Does paying $10 for a new customer sound like such a bad thing? I didn’t think so.

Your incentive doesn’t have to be monetary either. Offer them a resource like an ebook guide to your wine region, and email-exclusive content. Keep them up to date with winery events, news, and upcoming release dates. Between basic incentives like those and larger ones like ebooks and guides, you can find plenty of ideas.

So you got someone to subscribe to your newsletter, and

you gave them a small incentive. Now what? In most

cases, this is what you’ll get:

This is a wasted opportunity. You just gave someone a $10

coupon, right? Now give them the desire to use it. If

someone’s this interested in your brand, why not offer up

some of your favorite wines, or present them with a

chance to buy a magnum of one of your club-only wines?

This should not be the end of your visitor’s journey.

Actually, it should be far from it.

T-Vine does a great job presenting new subscribers with an immediate nudge encouraging further interaction from the new subscriber.

The welcome email is your first chance to engage a new subscriber. Don’t blow it!

When someone signs up for your email list, two things

should happen. First, they should land on a “thank you”

page that directs them back into your website. After that,

your new subscriber should get a friendly welcome email.

Now, most email systems will generate an automated

“thank you for subscribing” email, but you want to add

your own touch to make it really effective. This is your

first time hitting their inbox, and the welcome email bring

more substance than a simple “thanks for signing up”

message does.

There’s nothing here that entices me to head back to the William Hill site, and it’s very impersonal and stale. Who is “consumerrelations” anyway? If they value me as a loyal customer, why not show me a little more love by giving out a one-time discount, or sharing more information about what makes them so deserving of my supposed loyalty?

Shown here is the first of

a series of emails that new

subscribers receive after

opting into Sterling

Vineyards’ mailing list.

Click “Members” then “Email Documents” and select “Automated system emails”. Then edit the “Mailing List Subscribe” email.

Notice how Sterling includes the first name of the

subscriber in there, along with a friendly “thank you”

message. It’s a lot less robotic sounding than the William

Hill one version.

They clearly state what the new subscriber will receive in

future emails – “Over the next few days, we’ll be

introducing you to each unique aspect of our winery. Watch

your inbox for promotional offers, invitations to our

exclusive events, the latest news about our Napa Valley

wines and tips about entertaining and enjoying wine.”

But just a little bit. New subscribers will see Sterling’s most

popular wines along the right-side of the email, which adds

a subtle selling point without hitting you over the head with

a “BUY OUR WINES” sort of message.

Although this example from Sterling doesn’t include a

discount or offer, the second or third email in their

welcome series does. When someone subscribes to your

newsletter, they’re at a peak time of interest, and now is the

best time to capitalize on their interest by offering them

something of value. It’s very common to see a one-time

discount, or free wine tasting invitation, but you could also

offer them a free tourist guide or ebook for example.

Meet the winemaker. New subscribers probably aren’t that

familiar with your company, so why not introduce them to

some of the important faces behind the company?

Consumers want to learn about a brand, and this is the

perfect sort of thing to share with new faces.

Wine quick tips. By sharing basic information and tips like

this, you can impart knowledge upon your reader. Hopefully

it’s useful enough so they’ll share that tidbit with friends,

and will always remember where they learned it.

In the Sterling Vineyards example, they also provide a short

reminder about the discounts that wine club members

enjoy. If someone is considering buying your wine, and isn’t

yet a club member, they might be more tempted to join

after reading this.

You should always include a small call-to-action that

encourages readers to connect with your Facebook, Twitter,

and other social networks. Share examples of what you

posted recently, and encourage the new subscriber to

follow you on Facebook to stay up-to-date with the latest

news and announcements.

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Think beyond your normal signup form and use these strategies to dramatically increase your subscriber base.

This is far and away the best strategy to use if you want to get 5x or more subscribers over your normal signup form. The problem is, popups bring a lot of controversy with them, and most website owners’ knee-jerk response it to say “NO WAY” if I suggest using one for list building. And that’s understandable. We associate website popups as an intrusive and annoying obstacle that usually appears on crummy, low-quality sites. But when you consider the context of a popup, it becomes clear that they don’t need to be intrusive, or annoying. The key to using these effectively is to display messaging that’s highly relevant to the visitor, and to restrict the popup from appearing on every return visit.

Here’s a screenshot showing how two popups are performing on one of my ecommerce sites. The “Save 10%” popup converts 6.68% of visitors. Most sites are lucky to convert 1% of visitors into subscribers. Why do popups perform so well? It’s easy really – they force visitors to make a choice. If you craft a relevant and sincere message to go with it, your visitors won’t mind. Most of these tools offer plenty of settings to adjust when and how often the popup displays. For example, you can set a cookie interval that will restrict the popup from appearing for repeat visitors. That helps cut down the annoyance factor big time.

Recommended solutions:

Pippity - This is a powerful plugin that you can use on any site to build subscribers using custom-made popups. It is one of the best out there, and

All-in-one Subscription Pop – This fairly basic popup script integrates with MailChimp, Vertical Response, and other major email marketing solutions. It has useful features to display the popup at different times, with delays

AWeber – One of the most successful email marketing solutions provides an easy way to design your own subscriber popup. Of course you must be a subscriber to use it. I recommend reading their blog post (linked below) for a great summary of how effective it can be.

I often turn to LaCrema for a lot of examples, because they generate a lot of great content. Their blog features lots of great recipes, like this green been casserole, which get tons of shares across social media networks.

Here’s a thought – What if they bundled 20 of these recipes together, and offer it at the end of each recipe article as a downloadable item? In return you offer up your email and they get the automated response welcome email with download link to the recipe collection.

If someone takes the time to leave a comment on your blog, they’re probably engaged enough to consider subscribing to future updates. By offering a small prompt near the bottom of your blog posts, you can easily snag a few more subscribers. I use a plugin called Mailchimp Comment Opt-in on this site, and there are others like it, such as the AWeber comment optin, and WP-Leads.

If you have a limited supply of a product with high demand, like a wine for example, you’ll eventually sell out completely. If a customer looks at that page, a wonders when it might be available next, why not prompt them to signup to be notified?

Add signup box to be notified

when product is available.

If you’re not a fan of the popup, but want something that can be almost as effective, consider the Hellobar tool. Developed by online marketing superstar Neil Patel, it offers an unobtrusive way to capture your reader’s attention and direct them to a landing page. You can put whatever you want inside the bar, even a slim signup form if you want.

Extra tips and strategies to further your email marketing efforts.

Content is King. Segmentation is Queen.

Varietal preferences (Special offer on Reds)

Locals (Come to our next event)

Order history (We’ve missed you)

Club join date (One year anniversary together)

Credit card set to expire (Update your profile)

Use split testing to send slightly different versions of an email to one half of your list.

Cart discount vs. free shipping

Subject lines

Placement of call to action buttons

Using company name vs. personal name in “from” line

Their email offered 25% off their 2009 Zinfandel, with 50% off

to wine club members. However, both the link from the email

and the site itself offered 50% off to EVERYONE.

A/B Testing

7 myths about email marketing

How A/B split testing works

A/B split testing

Subject line testing scenarios

Exposure

Winerymailinglists.com

Wineberserkers.com

Templates

Themeforest email templates

Copywriting

37 tips for writing emails that get opened, read, and clicked

Subject line strategies to increase open rates

The Perfect Subject Line

Services

Try a cart abandonment campaign

free for 30 days

Email marketing audit

http://www.litmus.com

http://www.aweber.com

Formatting

Premailer. The preflight check for

HTML emails

Data/Analytics

Email marketing dashboard for

Google Analytics

Landing Pages

The anatomy of a high converting

landing page