Want a piece of a nearly trillion-dollar pie?
Then you probably already plan to send an offer on Black Friday. This kicks 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. Erica used to be VERY anti-Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s a whole post on the old Erica Walter Writes blog about opting out altogether, especially for 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. The National Retail Federation has clocked U.S. holiday spending near the trillion-dollar mark, and Statista polling shows roughly three-quarters of higher-income earners plan to shop online on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Your customers are in the inbox that weekend, wallet open.We don’t mind helping wineries seize a piece of that.
Here’s what we’re going to do right now to prepare. We’ll assume you’ve already planned WHAT to offer for Black Friday / Cyber Monday:- A sitewide savings or shipping offer
- A few 6-pack and case specials that qualify for a deeper discount this weekend only
Cyber Weekend Strategies
1. Early Access List
Starting now, you can fill an early access list: people who want to be at the head of the line. Use a pop-up on your website, or have subscribers simply click a link in your emails to say “YES! Send me Black Friday first!” (Here’s how to build a targeted pop-up for exactly this.) The early access list should get your Black Friday offer within the week before Black Friday. The exact timing matters less than confirming it with them: tell them the offer opens for them on a specific date and time, and you’ll see open and conversion rates go bonkerpants.2. Early Access to Wine Club
You could skip the opt-in route and just give early access to your wine club members. The same cadence thoughts apply, but in this case nobody explicitly said they WANT to be first to know, so the metrics may not be as strong as with a true early access list.3. Launch on Thanksgiving?
Here’s where things get tricky. Do you launch on Thanksgiving, or wait until Friday morning? A soft launch on Thanksgiving evening can be quite effective. We’ve had great success with winery clients sending a thoughtful message of gratitude on Thanksgiving afternoon with a P.S. telling readers to watch their inbox the next day for their Black Friday offer. You do you, but be locked in. You don’t want to be rethinking strategy the day before you head out for Thanksgiving break. This should be locked and loaded beforehand.4. Send Strategy on Black Friday
Inboxes are going to be crowded. Consider targeting only your most engaged customers and keeping dormant subscribers off the launch distribution. You can always release the offer to less-engaged groups later in the weekend, but blasting everyone on Black Friday can hurt your inbox placement with the customers who matter most. No blasting. Thoughtful segmentation, please. Want to be sure your message gets seen? Set up two sends that day: an initial launch in the wee small hours, and a resend to non-openers later in the day. We wouldn’t normally send twice in one day, but this weekend is the exception.5. Small Business Saturday
Small Business Saturday comes on Black Friday’s heels and is a great excuse to reposition your offer with a personal note from your winery’s ownership. Think of it as a brand positioning campaign that helps your customer understand the role they play in your dream business, and that you’re rewarding their impact with a special opportunity to buy very good wine at a steal.6. Sunday Before Cyber Monday
Sunday is a chance to pulse your offer one more time, or to target clicked-but-didn’t-buy subscribers with a reminder that some inventory is going fast. If your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers differ, this is your last call for offer number one.7. Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday strategy mirrors Black Friday: if your list can handle it, send twice that day so you don’t get lost in the sea of messages.8. Give Your Subscribers a Heads Up
Here’s the thing: we’re wineries, not major retailers with massive inventory and even bigger lists. If you’ve mapped 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 customers what to expect during Cyber Weekend (the Cyber Five, as it’s now called). “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 if you’d watch your inbox for our cyber weekend emails.” This also gives customers who don’t want a thousand trillion emails a reason to pause for a few days rather than unsubscribe.Take Action
We threw a lot of ideas at you. All of them are concepts we’ve employed with our wineries over the years. The most important thing to do now is plan your launch cadence and lock in your segments:- Know when you’re sending and to which groups.
- Build dynamic segments that suppress web purchasers during cyber weekend, so you aren’t bombarding subscribers who already seized your offer.
- Consider communicating your schedule in advance with your top subscribers so they can plan to engage.
Ready for the next steps? Part 2 settles Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday with our client data, and Part 3 covers the connection days: Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday.
At Email Mavens, we believe every winery can sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns. Keep pressing send on your next best email.
