Have you ever felt frustrated by a lack of response to your email campaigns?

You spend all this time building the thing, you press send, you get a couple of hits, but you’re not selling out of an entire release in one fell swoop.

If that’s the case, then why even bother sending emails?

Okay, that might be a little hyperbolic, but here’s the deal:

Pressing send once is not enough. Wineries, you are not sending enough emails.

It’s a bold statement, but I have good news for you. You don’t have to go all out, like The Gap sending three emails a day, or get hyper prolific with content creation to get more exposure for your winery.

Today, we’re going to teach you how to get one email campaign to work harder for your winery—two and a half times harder, in fact—and in the process, help you sell more wine.

Keep reading for a simple three-step process that will help you build better engagement and revenue. Stay all the way to the end because step three is the real money maker. It’s responsible for doubling e-commerce results. I know you want those numbers, so stick around!

Welcome to the Email Mavens blog, the place for winery owners and marketing professionals who want to learn to sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns. And here at Email Mavens email marketing is more than our bread and butter—it’s our jam. Maybe it is our deep love of email marketing that has us so passionate about the topic of wineries not sending enough emails, or maybe it’s our passion for seeing wineries succeed that has us evangelizing email marketing at every opportunity.

Either way, the fact is, most wineries are building an email campaign once a month, maybe once a quarter, pressing send one time, and that just isn’t enough.

We think we’re being polite by saying things one time, but the fact is, with the social media algorithms the way they are and the inbox crowding situation, your one mention of what you have going on is a whisper in a roaring sea of information for your customers.

The Rule of Seven:

A customer needs to see or hear your message at least seven times before they’re going to take action on it, and one email sent one time to everybody is far from that seven times.

If you have something of value to share with the world, you are doing the world a DISSERVICE if you just one-and-done it.

We know that you’re proud of the wine you just put in that bottle, so share it loudly from the rooftops more than one time, please.

Just from an efficiency perspective, boil it all down to just working smarter, not harder. When you think about the time and effort you spend on creating an email campaign only to send it one time, come on people, let’s get that email to work harder for you—two and a half times harder, in fact.

This is our not-legally-trademarked signature ‘Three-Send-Resend’ Strategy, and it increases the exposure of your email campaigns dramatically.

Step One: Send Your Email Campaign

Very simple, but if you’ve been watching along with the Email Mavens, and in fact, if you watched or read the previous weeks content, you already know that sending your email campaign is not batch-and-blasting, sending one email to everybody. No, you’re going to send your email campaign very targeted to three different unique audiences in your overall database: your wine club members, your purchasers who aren’t wine club members, and your lurkers—the people that haven’t spent any money with you yet. Watch the previous episode, Episode 4, if you haven’t already learned this strategy for your winery.

This is where most wineries stop. They think, “I sent my email, it’s done.” But not you. You are about to go next level because the next step in our three send resend strategy is resending your email campaign to the people who didn’t open it the first time.

Step Two: Resend to Non-Openers

Now, you’re not just going to resend it with the exact same subject line. No, you’re going to mix up this resend to non-openers by time of day and day of the week. 

1. Identify recipients: Who on your email list didn’t open the email campaign already?
2. Find a different day of the week and time of day to send that email: If you sent it on a Tuesday morning, resend on a Wednesday night or, even better, resend it on a weekend day to really mix up who you’re reaching with your message.
3. Adjust your subject line: If your first send was like “Now Available,” then mix up the hook with your next send. Maybe you have a shipping offer, so use that in the subject line: “Shipping Included on This One,” or if you already used that lever, maybe use user reviews, scores, or limited availability. If your first email’s subject line didn’t capture people’s imagination and get them excited enough to open your email, you have to mix it up.

 

Non-responder sends go to people on a different day of the week, a different time of day, and you adjust your subject line to capture the customer’s attention in a different way.

That’s it for step two. Are you ready for the next one? Because this is where that money, those inbox dollars, are coming in hot!

Step Three: Last Call for Non-Action Takers

Step three is to target the people who have not already taken action and give them a last call.

In order to do this, it is very helpful to have integrated data so that you can easily identify who purchased your product or took action on your reservation’s call to action or whatever else your email campaign was about.

If you don’t have integrated data, no excuses. What you’ll do is simply log in to your point of sale, identify those people, export them, and then import those people as a suppression list for your last call.

You don’t want to be like, “Last Call on the 2020 SRA,” to people who just bought the 2020 SRA. They’re going to be like, “Why are you sending me this?” That’s the reason we want to pull out those buyers for your last chance send.

Here’s a word of warning:

I don’t want you to think that this last call is going to annoy your customers. If you have the idea that your customers are going to think this is overkill or if you are coming from a place of scarcity, it is going to seep into your email strategy, and you might come off a little needy.

We need you to look at this last call as a customer service initiative, as a value add to your customers, because if you don’t send this email, these people may not ever get to see this wine.

You love this wine.

You’re proud of this wine.

They need this wine

They want it.

Your mindset with this last call and any adjustments you make to the creative really needs to be about service, reminding and loving up on those people, and then encouraging them to take action. There are FOMO people out there. They saw your first send and they were like, “I do want that,” but they didn’t have their wallet on them, or they were in the middle of their workday and they didn’t want their boss looking over their shoulder while they’re buying wine online.

You have to find those people and give them one more invitation to take action.

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STRATEGY HOT TAKE:

From a strategic perspective, we love to time this within a 24 to 48-hour window of when your offer might expire. But in some instances, that’s not really a relevant hook. If the wine is going to be available forever, you’re going to have to think about the timing.

Find a relevant reason to send a last call and then time that last call closely to when that relevant reason might be.

If it is an access thing, like you’re down to the last 10 cases, then say, “Last 10 cases.” If it’s a final opportunity to place your order for delivery by Memorial Day weekend, time it as close to that last cutoff as possible. Narrowing the window for your customer to take action inspires them to take action that much faster.

That’s just another little strategy hot take for you because we like to give you all the strategy hot takes. *wink*

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Earlier, we said step three is responsible for nearly doubling the e-commerce revenue. We see this time and time again. When we create a reason to send that last call, a relevant reason to send that last call, that email can oftentimes more than double the e-commerce results that we got from the first two sends. People wait till the last minute; it just is what it is. So don’t sleep on this! Don’t think it’s going to be an annoyance to your customers.

It is a customer service opportunity for you, and it is responsible for huge lifts in that revenue.

Anomalies to the Strategy

There are a few anomalies where a signature three-send resend strategy is actually not a winner:

1. One-day flash sales: Do not send your email campaign three times in a 24-hour window.
2. Newsletters: Strategically speaking, we are not a huge fans of newsletters, but we do work with wineries who like to send something on a quarterly basis that’s a bit of a roundup of different topics that touch on a lot of different aspects of their overall business. If you are one of those wineries, never fear. You can still get that newsletter to work harder for you by doing a first send, your non-responder send, and then for that last call, there may be something time-bound within your email content that you might be able to just sort of highlight to the top of your message with the last call. But it’s not a resend of your newsletter; it’s a dedicated spotlight of one thing. Don’t send your newsletter three times.
3. Seasonal or holiday-specific content: If your email content is very season or holiday specific or if you did an email campaign that was all about the love story behind your winery and it was timed to Valentine’s Day, and you sent it on Valentine’s Day, a typical out-of-the-box resend strategy is going to be irrelevant. Make sure you adjust your content and really look through it for anything that might seem off base if you don’t adjust it slightly. For example, in the Valentine’s Day example, instead of “because it’s Valentine’s Day and love is in the air,” say “because we just celebrated Valentine’s Day and we think love should be celebrated every day of the year,” or just pull out every reference to Valentine’s Day.

 

There you have it. You have learned the three steps to making one email work at least two and a half times harder for your winery.

But we say it here all the time: once you know better, you have to do better.