It’s Erica’s birthday!

Well, not today, but it will be next week. Okay, you’re here to learn to sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns. What does Erica’s birthday have to with that?

Today, we are going to share three ways that you can make your wines so synonymous with customers’ life celebrations that they become REQUIRED.

Welcome to the Email Maven’s blog, the place for winery owners and marketing pros who want to sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns. Our founder, CEO and Queen Email Maven is Erica Walter, and she loves her birthday. She loves her birthday so much that she basically stakes claim to the entire month of April to celebrate it. So you get it, she loves her birthday. We love birthdays in general, and we also love birthday emails.

Here’s why you should love them too. In their birthday email research, Experian found that birthday emails are worth all the hype.

Birthday emails:

• generate 481% higher transaction rates
• have 30-42% higher revenue per email
• receive 179% higher unique click-through rates
• and get 53% higher open rates than other promotional emails

With stats like that, you better believe there’s all kinds of content on the internet—videos, blog posts and other stuff—about just general birthday campaigns. But what we couldn’t find is anything that would help a winery like you take advantage of this opportunity to celebrate with your customers.

So what we’re going to share with you today are…

Three things you need to do to make your winery synonymous with that birthday hype. 🥳

You ready to do this?

1. You got to get that D.O.B., baby.

You have to have a birthday on file and associated with the email address in order to be able to send a relevant birthday campaign. But good news, we’re selling a regulated substance up in here. We have to get the date of birth as a part of the transaction to prove that they are of legal age to consume the goodness. But beware the dreaded 11/19/60 birthday. If you or your team have made it a practice to just plug in a generic date of birth when you’re going through the transaction, stop now. Get a real date of birth. We know it might feel weird to ask, but you could literally just say, “Hey, we love celebrating key milestones with you and would love to make sure we have an actual birthday on file so we can send you a little something something on your special day.”

2. Automate your birthday email.

According to Campaign Monitor, 55% of birthday emails are sent on the date of birth, with roughly 25-30% going two to three weeks in advance. Do not, pretty please, just batch birthday exporting everyone with a birthday in April and sending it in a monthly batch. Use the information that your wine club members and your purchasers have given you to send a birthday greeting on their birthday, so it actually feels relevant to your customer.

You want to go next level?

Use the Email Maven’s strategy and trigger your birthday email to go a couple of weeks in advance of the birthday, letting them know, “Hey, we know your special day is right around the corner. You can have your cake and drink your favorite wine with it too.”

Listen, if you know that someone’s going to have to have their wine shipped to them in order to get it in time for their birthday, give them the nice benefit of that two weeks’ notice. Give them an offer to use either on shipping or a special promo on their favorites and let them take advantage of the birthday offer so that their wine has ample time to arrive in time for the celebration. Nobody likes a late birthday present.

If your customer is close enough to your winery that they could come in and celebrate their birthday with you, all the better!

Remember what we said earlier about making your wine synonymous with their life celebrations. There is nothing they’re going to remember more than an amazing next-level experience at the winery with their friends on their birthday. Plus, they bring all their friends in to spend their money. We love this. This is next-level strategy, and you can use it too.

3. Offer something unique to celebrate.

Now, this is going to be one of the only times we actually recommend you offer a pricing incentive of some kind. If discounting is not part of your winery’s overall strategy, then get creative. Offer access to something special from the library or a curated winemaker’s favorites bundle, and if they live close to the winery, invite them in for a special experience that they would only get on their birthday that’s seasonally appropriate.

Now that you know better, it’s time to do better.

• Start capturing real birthday information for your customers so that you can celebrate their milestones.
• Automate a birthday campaign with a reminder either a couple of weeks in advance so that they can get their wine in time for their special day, or on their birthday with a one-week incentive.
• Make sure that what you offer your customers as a birthday gift is actually really exciting and delightful, so that your wines become synonymous with their life celebrations.

If you loved this content, if this content made you say, “Woohoo!” We would be delighted if you would please subscribe to the Email Maven YouTube channel and ring the bell to be notified every time a new episode is live.

And if you like to party, make sure that you are subscribed to our email party every Friday (sign up with your email in the footer on this page). We’re dropping knowledge bombs and step-by-step tutorials to help you not just watch this YouTube channel but do this YouTube channel.

Get some action, baby.

Like a fine wine, we are only getting better with time, and so will your birthday emails.

Set it, don’t forget it, automate it, and then keep pressing send on your next best email.

Let’s do this. Woohoo!