Be Honest, How Long Does It Take You to Create and Send an Email Campaign?
A. 1 hour
B. 2 to 3 hours
C. I get so frustrated I don’t finish.
If you have dope templates and systems in place already, you might be in camp A at about an hour.
If you’re doing email on your own or on the fly, you might be in camp B at two to three hours.
If email marketing is a job you inherited and it takes time to figure everything out, you may be in camp C. You spend time digging up the Mailchimp login, orienting yourself on the platform, and end up taking much longer.
Scenario for Camp C: You slam your laptop shut, pour yourself a glass of wine, and quit until Monday. Maybe forever. At least 4 hours have been wasted.
When we poll students and masterclass attendees, most answers fall into Camps B and C. This means a minimum of 2 hours is going into just one email campaign. Then, you send it once to everybody, push send, and pray results come in… and sometimes they don’t.
It doesn’t have to be like this!
What If the Time You Spend on Your Email Campaigns Could Work for You All Year Long?
Good news, my friends: that’s what today’s content is about. Keep reading to learn the secret to email marketing success in just 20 minutes a day. When it comes to email marketing success, we like it automatic.
Marketing emails fall into two main buckets:
- Push and Pray: You push send and then pray that your customers actually spend their money.
- Automated Nurture Emails: Emails automatically sent based on customer behavior and data.
Too many wineries focus all their energy and enthusiasm on the first bucket and totally overlook the revenue opportunities that lie in their email list if they would only care to spend a little bit of time uncovering it.
Industry research has ranked automation among the most effective email strategies for years, right alongside personalization and segmentation, and across our client accounts automated flows consistently out-convert one-off campaigns.
Not only do automated emails generate revenue themselves, but they also make every single one of your push and pray emails more effective. When a customer is acknowledged along their unique journey with your winery, they’re far more likely to respond to your promotional emails when the time is right.
Let’s say you’re convinced automated emails are where it’s at, and you want to start automating some email campaigns. Hooray! But how do you get started?
It All Starts With Your Customer’s Journey With Your Winery
There are five email campaigns that we want you to automate or optimize that are going to perfectly align with steps in your customer’s journey towards becoming a long-time raving fan (also known as a wine club member). This is the starter set. For the full map of every automation a winery can run, see the ultimate automated email roadmap for wineries. This post is about getting the first five live in five weeks.
1. Welcome
The first email you have to automate is your winery’s welcome email.
We have an entire post dedicated to how to get started and exactly what your welcome email has to say to inspire action and give your customers the best first impression: how to write a winery welcome email that converts.
2. Post-Purchase
After receiving a welcome email, the next step in your customer’s journey is actually buying wine from you. So, naturally, the next email to optimize is the email that your customers receive after they make a purchase.
For most wineries, this is a transactional email sent from your point-of-sale system, like the transactional email from Commerce7 or the purchase confirmation from OrderPort. Often, these emails are left out-of-the-box and are ugly with a misaligned logo and an unbranded grid of the wine and price.
This email is your opportunity to reinforce your brand, overcome buyer’s remorse, and get your customer excited about the purchase they just made. (More on why these get opened more than anything else you send: transactional emails for wineries.)
3. Cart Abandonment
Most online carts get abandoned. Recover even a modest share of them and it shows up as a meaningful lift in ecommerce revenue, because these are people who already picked the wine and reached for their card.
So, clearly the next email to automate is a cart abandonment email.
If you are a Commerce7 winery using either Mailchimp or Klaviyo, you can get my step-by-step instructions on how to turn on cart abandonment for your winery. Opt in to the free Digimatic Starter’s Bootcamp. It’s video three in the series, so you have to stick around for three, but it’s so worth it!
4. Wine Club Invitation
Once somebody has purchased from you a couple of times, the next obvious step in their experience with your winery is to become a wine club member.
And we love wine club members! They’re the best. The vast majority of new wine club signups still happen in non-digital sources, almost exclusively the tasting room. Yet wine club members outspend everyone else. As Rob McMillan put it in the Silicon Valley Bank 2023 Direct to Consumer Survey, “Moving forward, tracking and driving growth in club memberships outside of the tasting room should be a goal of all wineries with clubs.”
If most of your club signups are happening in the tasting room and you need to grow it in a digital source, email can be a driver for that.
You are going to automate a post-purchase invitation to wine club membership for your winery. Here’s how transactional emails drive wine club signups.
It works when you target a very high-value online buyer with a club opportunity, and those people convert without you even having to host them again. It’s money. Literal money to the bottom line.
So, automate that post-purchase invitation to club membership!
5. Member Onboarding
Now that you’re growing your wine club both in the tasting room and online, the next email to automate is the email that your club members receive after they join.
Unfortunately, the inbox experience for wine club members after they join a club is nothing like the experience they have with you in person in the tasting room. The first wine club I ever signed up for: I left with my allocation, a whole case of wine, branded sunglasses for me and all four of my friends, cowbells going off, fanfare all around! But from an inbox perspective, I got an OrderPort confirmation email and then nothing until my next allocation.
This is what a lot of wineries are doing to their wine club members. Not on purpose, you just don’t know. But now you know.
Your wine club membership onboarding emails should:
- Get your customer logged into their online account
- Reorient them
- Restate the benefits they get as a member, and
- Encourage them to take advantage of those benefits right away.
Do your wine club members get a flat rate shipping incentive? Tell them to use it. Their benefits kick in right away. If they get complimentary tastings at the winery, remind them of this benefit. When people are aware of and know exactly how to take advantage of the benefits of your membership, it reduces attrition. When they know what they get, they don’t want to lose it. This program alone can generate an increase in your club members buying outside of the allocation and reduce attrition. So, don’t forget it!
Go automate and optimize your member onboarding emails.
Where the 20 Minutes a Day Comes From
Now you know the emails that you need to automate or optimize. But you might be wondering… where did that whole 20 minutes a day thing come from?
Think about the time it takes for you to create an email. Look at your calendar and put two hours every week for the next five weeks to knock down each of these email dominoes.
- Week one: your welcome email.
- Week two: your purchase confirmation.
- Week three: cart abandonment.
- Week four: post-purchase nurture to membership.
- Week five: membership onboarding.
Two hours every week to knock out all those automations.
Do the math. It evens out to about 20 minutes a day. And guess what? Those emails will be working for your business in the background forever.
I believe that every winery can generate more e-commerce revenue by executing a more effective email marketing strategy. Now you have the roadmap to do it on autopilot.
Want the Five Built for You?
If two hours a week isn’t happening, that’s exactly what Email Essentials is: we build your welcome, post-purchase, cart recovery, club invitation, and onboarding automations in your platform, done right the first time. The post-purchase club invitation is in the package because we believe so much in the importance of this programming.
Until then, keep pressing send on your next best email.
Winery Email Automation FAQs
Which email should a winery automate first?
The welcome email. It’s the most opened message you’ll ever send and it sets the tone for everything after. Week one of the plan is the welcome, and nothing else gets built until it’s live.
How long does it take to set up winery email automations?
About two hours per automation if you focus on one a week. Five weeks gets welcome, post-purchase, cart recovery, club invitation, and member onboarding running. That’s the “20 minutes a day.”
Do I need Klaviyo to automate winery emails?
No. Klaviyo and Mailchimp both handle all five. What you do need is your point of sale connected to your email platform so purchase data can trigger the flows. For Commerce7 wineries, Digimatic is the connector.
What’s the difference between this plan and the automated email roadmap?
The roadmap is the full map of every automation a winery can run. This is the starter set: the five that follow the customer journey from subscriber to club member, and a week-by-week schedule to get them built.
