If the only emails send this holiday season are sales campaigns, you’re going to get a lump of coal in your stocking this year!

And more importantly, your customers won’t be merry.

This conclusion of our Christmas in July series breaks down the four types of emails your winery needs to create and/or optimize for the holidays so you can maintain high engagement and even higher sales during this super high-volume period and beyond.

Read to the end and put into practice what you learn to keep you and your winery off the email marketing naughty list.

Welcome to the Email Maven’s blog! This is the place for Winery owners and marketing pros who want to sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails.

If you’re looking at your Q4 email marketing plan and only really thinking about what you’re going to send on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you’re going to have a lot of scrooges on your email list. Yes, you need to send sales emails—that’s the first kind we’re going to cover.

1. SALES EMAILS

These are the emails that sell, and when done well, they do what they’re intended to do.

• Be sure that your sales emails describe your offer in the context of what’s in it for your customer and/or the gift giver.
• Your sales-focused campaigns should always reinforce your holiday shipping deadlines so the sleigh arrives on time.
• Take into consideration that your customers buy wine for themselves during this period as well as for gifting. Think about how you can use key buyer motivators for both giving and receiving when structuring the content of your sales campaigns. You’re going to get better results on both fronts if you think it through from both perspectives.

If you’re only going to send one kind of sales email during Q4, guess what? It’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday; it’s your…

Holiday Wine Guide

This is one big, beautiful email that showcases the ways to give and get your wine and experiences during the holiday season.

• The Email Mavens recommend sending out your holiday wine guide multiple times from October all the way through December.
• Not necessarily to everyone—segmentation is your friend.
• Highlight different offerings in each email.
• Remind people who haven’t bought already of the opportunity to do so.
• Stay top of mind for their gifting needs both while shipping wine is still an option and after, when gift memberships or gift experiences can bridge that last-minute gap.

Alright, that’s it for sales emails. The next kind of email your Winery needs to plan during the holidays is lifestyle emails.

2. Lifestyle Emails

• Share recipes and pairing recommendations
• Email invitations to events
• Keep your customers informed of when you’re open so that you can host them and help them create more holiday merry memories
• Showcase your staff’s favorite holiday traditions

These are all ways to connect with your consumer and offer value as opposed to just “buy more now.”

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

You can do a lifestyle email once a month, just once in the quarter or every week. The frequency is less important than the consistency of delivering value. So, as long as you’re sharing pertinent information and focusing on connection and providing service to your customers, your lifestyle emails will be welcome in their inbox. You promise you’ll add me some lifestyle emails this year? Pinky promise?

The next email that you absolutely have to optimize during the holiday season is your transactional email. And actually, it’s a lot of emails.

3. Transactional Emails

Take a moment now to look at the system or transactional emails that your winery is sending and optimize those for the holiday season proactively.

Sure, you’re watching this in July, or maybe you’re catching it later, but we need you to set a reminder for when you want to start teasing holiday offers or experiences, when you’ll want to add your shipping deadlines or holiday closures.

You already know if you’ve been here for a while that transactional emails are your winery’s email marketing secret weapon. Don’t sleep on their power during the holidays when even more of them are being sent!

The fourth kind of email you want to plan ahead of time is your gap closer.

4. Gap Closers

Think of gap closers as the sprinkles on your sales-boosting sundae. These are emails focused on conversions to help close a sales gap for the month, whether it’s a flash sale or an inventory mover on a specific release or AG. These emails are geared to generate revenue. You may not always need a gap closer, but it’s the ace up your sleeve when the time comes.

Knowing what you can offer and having a postcard-style email ready to go if you need it is pretty money—literally.

BONUS: Cart Abandonment

Alright, know we told you four, but we gotta give you a bonus… ’cause we can’t help it. Here’s our bag of holiday tricks, taada!

You’re sending way more traffic to your website during the holiday season, and if you’re doing things right, you’re also getting people adding wine to their carts, which means there may be an increase in abandoned carts during the holiday season.

If you don’t already have an abandoned cart email set up, set one up just for Q4.

Yes, even if you hate the idea.
Yes, even if you think it’s off-brand.
Because if you can close just 20% of abandoned carts this holiday season, it can result in an increase of 50% in your e-commerce.

Go do the math for your winery.

1. Look up and see how many carts you have that haven’t been completed.
2. Then multiply the total number of abandoned carts by 20%.
3. Use that number and multiply it by your average online order value.

Then you will see the revenue opportunity that you’re missing out on simply by not having an abandoned cart email turned on. It’s astounding.

Do the math, create your own abandoned cart email, and start recovering those abandoned carts, even if it’s only during the holiday season.

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Alright, you’ve learned the four email types you need to consider as you head into the holiday season, plus one bonus automation that you must have enabled to truly maximize your online sales this holiday season.

Take a look at your Q4 plan and make sure you’re considering all four of these email types and card abandon it right now.

This concludes our three-part series on Christmas in July. If you missed part one and/or part two, click to read them now. We hope that you’ll read and reread all three in this series year over year, like reading your favorite Christmas story on Christmas morning. You can make it an annual July tradition!

At Email Mavens, we believe that every winery can sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails. So, this holiday season and all year long, keep pressing send on your next best email.