Raise your hand if you love the fresh page of a printed planner or if a dry erase calendar on your wall is as sexy as a vision board (or Ryan Gosling).
The Email Mavens love planning email marketing campaigns so much, that we do it with our clients on a quarterly basis. And we offer yearly or quarterly planning services as a one-off for wineries who want to maximize their results.
We invest this time and energy in planning because it helps our campaigns come together more efficiently, sure, but email planning also helps our clients enhance every area of their business. That’s right, planning your email marketing campaigns has the power to transform how you run your winery.
Today’s content will highlight the unexpected benefits of planning your email campaigns. Stick to the end because the last one might surprise you!
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 marketing emails.
Erica Walter, our founder and CEO, recalls the first project that she got back in 2018 was an integrated email marketing planning session with a local Walla Walla winery. And she loved that process so damn much!
Email planning helps wineries understand how campaigns can support everything else going on in the business, from the tasting room and events to membership and new releases, not to mention e-commerce. Too often, email marketing is happening in a vacuum, reactively or in some cases not at all.
But an omni-channel integrated approach is required for a winery to truly benefit from their investments in all of the channels—email, yes, but also text, social media, paid search, and the list goes on.
1. Zoom Out
The first way that planning your email campaigns will transform your winery business is that it will require you to take a regular 30,000-foot view of what your winery is doing in all the channels.
Our Email Maven planning process starts with a review phase where we really get the ideas out. We ask:
- What did we do last year in this same period?
- What worked well, and how can we build on that success in the future?
- What did we do that didn’t work, and do we want to nix it or fix it?
You can’t go where you want to go without knowing what got you where you are, so reviewing your results before you create your plan for the quarter ahead is vital.
2. No Surprises
The next way that email planning can completely transform your winery is that email planning eliminates surprises.
The next part of our email planning process is declaring your commitments and your non-negotiables.
- What do you absolutely have to do in the quarter ahead?
- New release announcements?
- Club runs?
- Events on-site or off?
These are usually on the calendar well enough in advance that your email plans should absolutely include all of the above. When you know you have to do a big club run in mid-June, you don’t plan a major sale at the same time. When you know you have an event that needs to sell at least 175 tickets to be profitable, you give yourself enough time to promote the event in the tasting room, on social media, and yes, in your email campaigns.
Planning at least a quarter out will help you ensure that your messages support all of your winery’s channels and that they’re timed with consideration to the various ways your customers interact with you.
No surprises for you; surprisingly lovely experiences for your customers.
3. Dream
Speaking of surprises, the final and perhaps most exciting way that email planning can transform your winery business is that it requires you to dream. That’s right, when you plan your emails, you absolutely should include your dreams.
- What revenue number would blow your mind?
- What do you want to try that you’ve never tried before?
- What have you seen other wineries or other businesses do that you want to create in a unique way for your winery?
Dream big, because funny enough, this is where entirely new product and experience ideas can come to life for your winery. Do not skimp on the dream phase!
Would having an email plan that transforms your winery be a dream to you? Then you are our kind of winery.
We love to support ambitious dreamers like you:
And we offer everything from email audits and account study coaching plans for in-house talent all the way to ongoing email marketing execution—you know, the full-service model.
Learn more about our services and book time to talk with us about how we can help you reach your most audacious goals.
At Email Mavens, we believe that every winery can sell more wine online by sending effective email marketing campaigns, and it would be a true pleasure and joy, and in fact a dream come true, to support you in accomplishing your goals.
Until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email.
