If you only send one email campaign in December, make it your Holiday Gift Guide.
“Are you telling us we only need to send one email this month?”
Not exactly. We’re here to tell you how to leverage your holiday gift guide throughout the month of December. One email, sent four different times, getting you results EVERY time.
In case it isn’t obvious, we love a well-executed holiday gift guide, and it isn’t too late to put one together for your winery. The goal of your holiday guide is to inform your customers of all the wonderful ways your winery can make their lives better throughout the holiday season. Whether it be simplified gift-giving or elevated entertaining, tell the story of your winery’s festive offerings through your holiday guide.
Here are the ingredients of a winning holiday gift guide:
- Include order deadlines for holiday delivery
- Feature individual products and collections for giving and hosting
- Offer last-minute, no-ship gift options
- And finally, every holiday gift guide should include a lifestyle element to add value, regardless of the customer’s desire to purchase
Now that you have all the winning ingredients, we’re going to show you how this one email can be sent four different times in December.
Week 1
Most holiday parties take place earlier in the month, so share entertaining tips and holiday party etiquette, signature recipes, or hostess gifts and serving essentials early in December.
Week 2
Shift to broader gift categories towards the middle of December. This is a great opportunity to shine the spotlight on how you simplify your customers’ gift-giving.
Do you offer gifts at a variety of price points? Position your re-sent Holiday Gift Guide with a simple navigation to “Gifts under $99,” “Gifts under $199,” and so on, above the fold.
Do you include a personal message with gifts, or offer festive wrapping? Don’t be shy, tell your customers! Include images of the card or the beautiful gift box emblazoned with your logo, so they can feel confident that the gift will impress.
Week 3
As Christmas draws closer, position any last-minute selections (gift cards, gift memberships, or experiences). You could also encourage your customers to treat themselves to great wines as a reward for a season well-gifted. Selling to businesses too? This is prime corporate gifting territory.
Week 4
Two options here: reposition the entire holiday gift guide after Christmas with “better late than never” messaging. A gift so good they won’t care it showed up a few days after the holiday.
Inevitably during the week of Christmas somebody is going to give you a gift and you’re going to feel like a jerk for not buying them a gift as well. Good thing YOUR WINERY’s gift guide swooped into the inbox with some awesome last-minute, still-available, stunning sets to share!
This is also an opportunity to bring up New Year’s Eve celebrations and starting the year ahead armed with the very best wines.
See what we just did? We made one email relevant four different ways. And we made your work work that much harder for you.
One additional pro tip
Create long-form and short-form content snippets for each featured topic in your holiday gift guide email, making it easy for you to move things around in your template as the month goes by.
This strategy can also double as awesome social media support. Each short-form content snippet can be the caption for its accompanying featured image, making posting to the ‘gram (or wherever else you hang out online) a breeze.
Take Action
Here’s what you’re going to do with what you know now:
- Create a simple-to-read shipping deadline table or graphic for your holiday gift guide email. Consider different ways to communicate urgency in a relevant, on-brand way throughout the month. (Honest urgency only: the deadline email is one of the nine holiday campaigns every winery should send.)
- Take a look at your holiday gift guide content strategy and make sure you have long and short-form content prepared for each topic. This simplifies your resend strategy and doubles as social media content.
- Build your 4 emails! If you already built a holiday gift guide, clone it in your email service provider and start moving content around following the playbook we just shared.
One email, four ways, a whole month of relevant and value-driven content for your subscribers. Boom!
Want more like this?
Subscribe to the weekly Email Party for resources and step-by-step instructions, and if the “work smarter” philosophy speaks to you, that’s the whole point of Mavens On Demand: templates, coaching, and a team who’s already built the email you’re about to send.
At Email Mavens we believe that every winery can sell more wine online by sending better marketing emails, and sometimes that means working a little smarter, not necessarily harder. Let one holiday gift guide email work for you all month long, and keep pressing send on your next best email.
