Wine club emails can be a double-edged sword. You know they’re a tool for engaging your members, keeping them informed of events, promotions, or shipments, and they’re a means for building your relationship. But each time you send an email, you’ve probably seen some members unsubscribing, and some members cancelling completely. We help your winery minimize these losses.

Good Email Design is Good Business

Email marketing is still the undisputed champion of marketing channels, producing far greater ROI than any other marketing activity. As a wine club manager, you probably don’t question the value of email marketing as a way to communicate with your wine club members, but do you understand the value of good design? Or, for the glass-half-empty people, do you know the cost of bad design? You may be damaging your club members’ perceptions of your winery, and how they feel about your wines by wasting their time with irrelevant sales pitches.

Do you pay attention to the specific mix of emails you’re sending to your members? Are they 100% sales / 0% relationship focused, as many wine clubs’ emails are? How much value do your club members receive by being subscribed to your emails?

You probably already love email marketing for its ability to reach your audience. But are you weakening your brand with bad design?

Your wine club’s email list needs to be thought of as being like a VIP lounge. These aren’t just people off the street — these are your winery’s closest friends. Your role as a wine club manager is to shield your members from your marketing department’s general emails, and only send them offers that respects their status as members.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Wine Club Email Marketing

Committing these sins will kill your wine club.

PRIDE. Remember, there are thousands of other wine clubs your members could join instead of yours.

ENVY. Do not envy your neighboring wineries and copy their emails. You have your own brand — use it!

GLUTTONY. An occasional special offer is plenty. Don't over-do it with weekly ``sales``

GREED. Your club members are already buying from you. Keep them happy and let them know you appreciate their loyalty.

LUST. Avoid the Wham, Bam, Thank You Ma'am, sell 'em as much as you can route, and treat your members with respect.

SLOTH. Don't be lazy - write email content that your wine club members will find interesting, informative, and reaffirming of their value to you.

WRATH. Always show your members kindness, if they don't open your emails, they're doing you a favor by communicating you need to try harder.

Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

“For the last few years, it’s been widely assumed that email would fade away because Millennials weren’t going to use it.” But it turns out that the opposite is true, according to  Ryan Phelan, VP of Marketing for Adestra in an interview with Inc. Magazine¹. Citing findings from Adestra’s recent Consumer Adoption and Usage Study of over 1,200 participants, Phelan reports that 73% of Millennials say they prefer to receive communications from a business via email. “Email continues to be a part of everyday life across all age groups, with consumers literally hanging out in their inboxes all day long.”

 

Email Marketing’s Advantage Over Social Media

One clear advantage that email has over social media is that it’s way too easy for your social media followers to scroll past your Instagram or Twitter posts, whereas your email subscribers are a little more captive of an audience. From the Adestra study, 59 percent said they would leave an email unread and return to it later, and 33 percent say they use flags in their email client to mark emails they want to read later.

However, it is still common to see wineries focusing a lot of their marketing efforts on social media, while neglecting to craft even a single email newsletter per month. This is surprising considering Instagram’s effectiveness at keeping their users on their platform, with a very low rate of clicks off to other websites (you can check this for yourself by viewing your website’s analytics data, where you can track the number of referrals your website is receiving from social media). Email campaigns in the wine industry, by contrast, often see click-through rates of 30% or more.

Need help writing your emails to your wine club members?

If one of the reasons you only send promotional or transactional emails to your club members is you don’t have the bandwidth to produce educational or entertaining email content, we’ve got you covered! We offer content writing at very affordable rates, produced by wine industry insiders. Our content is designed to keep your club members tuned in and engaged, reminding them that being a member of your wine club has value. You can get started right here with a quick click and a conversation.

If bandwidth is not the reason you haven’t been writing engaging emails to your club members, we’ve got you covered there, too, with an email content calendar. You can use it to plan your content in advance; plan a quick half-hour brainstorming session and put in as many topics as you can think of, using the prompts for calls-to-action, effective subject lines, offers, and landing pages. Go get it!

Source:

¹ https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/study-shows-email-marketing-still-popular-and-effective-with-millennials.html