Here’s a fun fact: I, Erica, am a pastor’s kid. Not only do I stand up and preach on the pulpit of email marketing every Friday for you here, I have actually preached sermons in a real church. I even graduated with a minor in religion (which may surprise you), but the drama minor probably won’t.
As a pastor’s kid, it’s likely ingrained in my DNA to create analogies that help lessons stick. Today, we’re going to use an analogy to teach you how creating a successful email marketing program is a lot like making wine. Keep reading to discover the parallels between the winemaking process and email marketing program development so you can make miraculous things happen in the inbox.
BONUS: Read until the end for a sneak peek of our Email Marketing Mastery course, where you can put all this inspiration into action.
Welcome to the Email Mavens blog, the place for winery owners and marketing pros who want to sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails. If there are two things we love to do, it’s creating and sending marketing emails for wineries and drinking delicious wine.
As we have learned more about the winemaking process over the last few decades, it’s astonishing how aligned each stage is with creating an effective email marketing program. When you start to understand these parallels, it can take your email marketing efforts from water-like, occasional, half-hearted batch-and-blast emails—sent reactively and jam-packed with too much information for your customers to even act on—to thoughtfully timed, perfectly cultivated campaigns that delight subscribers and help them take the next step with your business. It will also encourage them to share your story with others.
The Winemaking Process & Email Marketing Program Development
1. Planting & Harvest
Where you plant your vineyard determines the varietals you plant, the methods you use, and how and when you harvest. This process introduces a certain amount of risk and reward.
Similarly, your list-building activities in email marketing are like terroir. How you grow your email list determines the kind of subscribers you attract, the content you deliver, and how frequently you send emails. It also determines when and how you ask your subscribers to invest by buying your wine, with an inherent risk and reward.
Just like you can’t make great wine without phenomenal fruit, you can’t have a successful email marketing program without subscribers. The foundation of your program is how you grow your list.
2. Sorting & Segmentation
Winemaking involves sorting to ensure that only the best fruit moves on to the next stage.
Email marketing is no different. Segmentation is the process of ensuring that only the most engaged subscribers receive your campaigns, maximizing your chances for great results.
3. Crushing
During the crushing process, grape skins break, and their juices mingle with skins, absorbing flavor and color. This is essential for making fine wines.
In email marketing, design and strategy are what get your creative juices flowing. A distinctive visual identity and a clear strategy are critical to transforming new subscribers into long-term wine club members.
4. Fermentation & Nurturing
Fermentation transforms grape juice into wine through complex chemical reactions.
In email marketing, nurturing transforms subscribers into paying customers. The best programs include multiple triggered and automated campaigns like welcome journeys, post-purchase triggers, and cart abandonment emails.
A customer journey isn’t linear—it’s a winding road. Successful programs constantly assess these journeys, identifying key moments to provide value and nurture subscribers further.
5. Clarification
Clarification in winemaking ensures that the wine is clear and stable by removing suspended matter.
In email marketing, promotional email planning and execution ensure clarity. Planning helps your emails come together efficiently, and stable engagement and revenue will follow.
6. Bottling & Aging
Wines improve with time in the barrel and the bottle. The best wines age for several years, sometimes decades.
Similarly, the process of onboarding and retaining wine club members increases their lifetime value over time. The average wine club member stays for about 18 months, but the best stay for decades.
The Analogy: Water Into Wine
At every stage of the wine lifecycle, there’s a correlation to a winning email marketing program. So, what will you do with this analogy? Take a look at your current email marketing program and ask:
Are we investing equal attention into every stage of our program? Are we giving each the focus it needs?
- List-building
- Segmentation
- Strategy
- Design
- Nurturing
- Promotional email planning
- Execution
- Club communications
Most wineries focus on one or two stages, neglecting the others. Imagine if your winemaker only paid attention during the clarification stage, ignoring the rest of the process. The same goes for your email campaigns.
How Email Mavens Can Help
If you’re realizing that certain stages of your email marketing program need more attention, Email Mavens can help. We teach a cohort of action-takers everything they need to know to have a holistically successful email marketing program in our course, Press Send: Email Marketing Mastery for Wineries.
Press Send consists of five modules, each aligned with the stages of the winemaking process outlined in today’s content. We teach you the exact system we install for our winery clients, showing you how to make more money with your email marketing.
Enrollment is open now, JOIN US!
Once you learn this system, you can’t unlearn it. It will serve you today and for years to come.
We can make miracles happen, and it all starts when you decide to treat email marketing as a powerful revenue channel for your winery. However and whenever you choose to go all-in, know that Email Mavens believes every winery can sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails.
Until next week, press send—and keep pressing send on your next best email!
