Imagine a world where you were getting a handful of new wine club signups online every single day.

That world exists!

I’ve seen it, and we’re going to show you that world in today’s case study. Get ready, because you’re about to step into a new reality where your winery generates club signups on the website on autopilot.

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.

We’re going to take you back to the spring of 2022. We worked with a boutique Napa wine brand to elevate their email marketing automations through our starter package, Email Essentials.

One component of Email Essentials is the transactional email facelift, where we audit and optimize every single one of the emails that your winery point of sale delivers automatically based on customer actions or activities. We’re talking password forgot, order confirmation, shipment confirmation, club sign-up, card declined—the list goes on.

It really goes on. There are a ton of transactional emails that are being sent behind the scenes that most wineries don’t even look at. For Commerce 7 wineries, at the time of this blog going live, there are almost 30; for WineDirect, that number is over 20. Not looking at these emails or leaving them out-of-the-box and generic is a huge missed opportunity for wine brands. Transactional emails have higher open rates, click-through rates, and are saved and referred back to again and again. Shipment confirmation emails alone are reported to have a 149% open rate. Do you know what that means?! That means they’re not only getting opened, they’re being opened repeatedly.

Okay, so rant over.

Back to our case study.

Part of our project was taking a look at the transactional email template and ensuring that it was in alignment with the winery’s overall brand: Same colors, logos, and the font treatments were all basics here.

We also reviewed and rewrote all of the transactional emails being sent out of Commerce 7.

Transactional emails can be sent to a customer regardless of their marketing email status because they’re a byproduct of the financial agreement your customer has with your winery.

Transactional emails include things like your receipt, your wine club shipment notifications—all that stuff.

Sexy, I know.

But what most people don’t know is that these emails can include a very small amount of marketing-focused secondary communications.

So back to this project.

We’re reviewing the transactional email template, we’re rewriting all of those transactional emails, and we’re identifying the marketing-focused secondaries for all of the transactional emails that this winery was already sending to their customers based on their actions and transactions with the winery.

One area of opportunity for the brand was their newly launched subscription wine club. They wanted to increase signups online because, let’s face it, our tasting room teams aren’t perfect, and they don’t always present the membership opportunity, especially since this brand had traditionally been an allocation-only model. So their team hadn’t identified the right angle to even present this new subscription to their customers.

One of the marketing-focused secondaries that we created was a simple subscription wine club banner, which was incorporated into the email that accompanied a non-club transaction.

The client reported only receiving a handful of online subscription wine club signups every month before we implemented these changes.

After 90 days of our transactional email facelift being live, we were experiencing a handful of new subscription wine club signups EVERY SINGLE DAY!

We also increased traffic to their blog, their visit page, and their shop pages from some of the other transactional emails, such as the new account creation or booked reservation communications.

You may be wondering, are these results typical?

Can my winery start getting more club signups and website traffic just from my system and transactional emails?

Baby, the answer is… yes!

We’ve installed Email Essentials for wineries on Commerce 7, WineDirect, even AMS and eSeller. Activating and optimizing your transactional emails increases your brand value in the eyes of the consumer because the look and feel of these important communications reflect the care that you put into every other aspect of your winery and your experience.

They increase website traffic to key areas of your website and, when done well, they convert repeat purchases, additional sales, and booked visits.

Remember at the beginning of this page when you imagined a world where you were getting online wine club signups basically without lifting a finger?

You can live in that world by optimizing just a handful of emails that your winery is already sending on autopilot.

Here’s what you’re going to do with what you know now:

1. Take a look at your transactional emails and identify a few that would make sense for you to include a membership plug as a secondary. We recommend post-purchase emails since the customer’s already proven that they like your wine because they bought your wine.
2. Design a marketing banner that links to your wine club landing page on your website.
3. Then include that banner in the transactional emails you identified in step one.
4. Add some link tracking to that banner so that you can easily identify in Google Analytics when a new membership sign-up is generated from transactional emails as opposed to organic search or a marketing campaign.
5. Then track your results and refine, refine, refine.

We want to see you win with all your email campaigns, even the less sexy ones that might not get paid that much attention to.

If you want results like this for your winery, we would love to work with you! Click here to learn how our starter package can give you the head start on email marketing mastery that your winery deserves.

The Email Mavens won’t rest until every winery has access to the tools and resources to send marketing emails that sell and that don’t suck.

Be a part of the movement by subscribing to our weekly Email Party, our YouTube channel, and by sharing the Email Mavens with your winery business bestie.

And until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email.