Want a little part of a $985 billion dollar pie?

Then you probably already plan to send an offer on Black Friday.

Today we kick off a three-part series to help you maximize your online sales during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday bonanza. Not every winery chooses to participate in the craziness, but if you do, you need to be armed with some tools to compete in a very crowded inbox.

Steal these strategies and snag your piece of those billions!

Welcome to the Email Mavens blog, the place for winery owners and marketing pros who want to sell more wine online with email marketing. You’re in the right place!

Erica used to be VERY anti-Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We had a whole post on the old Erica Walter Writes blog about opting out of it all together, especially for our winery clients who simply won’t be discounting their wine 65% to compete with whatever Amazon has going on.

HOWEVER…

This is a crucial four-day window of shopping activity. According to Statista, almost three-quarters of higher-income earners planned to shop online on Black Friday. Approximately the same proportion of higher earners also planned to make purchases on Cyber Monday.  And we already dropped the $985 billion number on you: The National Retail Federation predicts that holiday spending in 2024 will grow 2.5-3.5% YoY in 2024, reaching around $985 billion.

We don’t mind helping wineries seize a piece of that!

So here’s what we’re going to do right now to be prepared for success:

We are going to operate on an assumption that you already planned WHAT to offer for Black Friday / Cyber Monday:

• a sitewide savings or shipping offer
• a few 6-pack and case specials that will qualify for a deeper discount this weekend only

I’m hoping that you aren’t reading this thinking we are going to tell you WHAT to sell… 

What we are going to talk with you about is WHEN TO SEND and WHO TO TARGET.

CYBER WEEKEND STRATEGIES:

1. Early Access List

Starting today, if you want to, you can start to fill up an early access list. These are people who want to be at the head of the line. You can use a popup on your website to get people on the Early Access list or you can have them merely click a link in your emails to say ‘YES! Send me Black Friday first!’

The early access list should get access to your Black Friday offer within the week BEFORE Black Friday. The timing matters a little less than you actually confirming with your early access list when they’ll receive it. Tell them that Black Friday offers will open for them on a specific date and time, and you’ll see your open rates and conversion rates with this audience go bonkerpants!

2. Early Access to Wine Club

You could also skip the early access route and just give early access to your wine club members. The same send cadence thoughts apply here, but in this case you haven’t had anybody explicitly say they WANT to be first to know, so you might find the email metrics aren’t as strong as with the early access opt-in list.

3. Launch on Thanksgiving?

Now, here’s where things get tricky. Do we launch Black Friday on Thanksgiving? Do we wait until Friday morning? A soft launch of Black Friday on Thanksgiving eve can be a quite effective. We have had great success with our winery clients sending a thoughtful message of gratitude on Thanksgiving afternoon with a P.S. telling them to watch their inbox the next day for their Black Friday offer.

You do you, but you should be locked in. You don’t want to be rethinking strategy the day before you head out on Thanksgiving break. This should be locked and loaded before hand.

4. Send Strategy On Black Friday

Inboxes are going to be crowded. Consider segmenting and targeting only your most engaged customers and keeping any dormant subscribers off the distribution list for the launch of this offer. You can always release the offering to these less-engaged groups later in the weekend, but BLASTING all the people on Black Friday could have negative ramifications with your inbox placement for the engaged customers. No blasting! Thoughtful segmentation, please!

Want to be sure your message gets seen on Black Friday ? Set up two sends that day: An initial launch in the early wee smalls of the morning, and then a resend to non-openers later in the day. We wouldn’t normally send twice in one day, but this is an exception if you really want your offering to be seen. 

5. Small Business Saturday

Small Business Saturday comes on Black Friday’s heels and is a great excuse to reposition your Black Friday offer with a personal note from your winery ownership team. We think of this as a brand positioning campaign that helps your customer understand the role they get to play in your dream business… and that you’re rewarding them for their impact by giving them a special opportunity to buy a bunch of good wine at a steal.

6. Sunday Before Cyber Monday

The Sunday before Cyber Monday could be an opportunity to pulse your offer one more time, or a chance to target only clicks but didn’t buy with a reminder that some inventory is going fast. If you’re choosing not to have the same offer for Black Friday to Cyber Monday, then this could be your chance to send a last call to anybody who didn’t purchase.

7. Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday strategy is similar to your Black Friday strategy… if you think your list can handle it, we recommend send twice on that day to ensure you don’t get lost in the sea of messages. 

8. Give Your Subscribers a Heads Up

But, here’s the thing: We’re wineries, not major retailers with massive inventory and even more massive email lists. 

If you map out your send strategy, why not tell your customers about it ahead of time?

Similar to the Small Business Saturday brand campaign, send something BEFORE the craziness that tells your customers what to expect during Cyber Weekend (Cyber Five, as it is apparently being called these days). If you tell them, “Hey our email volume is going to be a little higher than normal. We want to share these exceptional savings with you, and it would mean the world to us if you would watch your inbox for our cyber weekend emails!”

This also gives customers who don’t want a thousand trillion emails to pause for a few days if they wish rather than unsubscribing! 

TAKE ACTION

Okay, so we threw a lot of ideas at you, these ideas are all concepts we have employed in some way with our wineries over the years, and new strategies are in the works for this year that we’ll probably share insights on afterwards.

The most important thing you need to do now is PLAN YOUR LAUNCH CADENCE and lock in your email segments. 

• Know when you’re sending and to which groups.
• Have some dynamic segments built to suppress web purchasers during cyber weekend so you aren’t bombarding inboxes for subscribers who already seized your offer.
• And consider communicating your schedule in advance with your top subscribers so they can plan to engage with your emails.

At Email Mavens, we believe every winery can sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns. 

Until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email.