Welcome to the Email Mavens blog, the place where winery owners and marketing professionals to learn to sell more wine online with email.

Today, we’re going to break down the most important reason your winery isn’t crushing your email marketing sales goals and give you three simple ways to overcome these obstacles.

We’re going to be frank with you about why your winery’s emails don’t sell wine.

It isn’t because you lack an HTML developer, an in-house graphic designer, or the best copywriting skills. It isn’t even that your email list size is small. The biggest reason your winery isn’t crushing your sales goals is in your head.

THIS IS A MINDSET PROBLEM

To highlight the mindset issue and how it’s affecting your email marketing results, we’re going to shift gears for a moment and talk about a hypothetical tasting room opening.

✨IMAGINE…

Imagine that you’re about to open a new tasting room for your winery. You hire a hospitality manager to oversee the process and shepherd your incredible new space into a new era, sharing your wine with amazing customers and telling your story. Launch day is approaching, and you’re excited—it’s about time to make some money. So, you check in with your hospitality manager to see how things are going.

First, you want to meet the team they’ve assembled to share your story and wines with customers. You ask your hospitality manager, “Let’s meet the team.” The hospitality manager looks at you and says, “Oh, I’m going to do everything around here. I’m going to be the host, manage the reservations, pour the wine, and wash the dishes. I’m going to do it all.”

You then ask, “What days or hours do you plan to be open to host these experiences?” The hospitality manager responds, “Oh, you know, when I feel like it. Maybe when we get a really good score or if we need to move some product. Don’t worry, we’ll open up and sell it for you at a big discount.”

You press further, “Don’t you think you want to be open consistently?” The hospitality manager replies, “Oh, you know, we don’t want to be open too much because then it might look like we’re desperate to sell the wine. If we’re open consistently, our wine club members might be reminded that they’re members and they’ll cancel.”

Baffled, you dig a little deeper and share your revenue goals for this location. You say, “We’ve invested money in building this place and creating these amazing wines. What are your goals?” The hospitality manager responds, “We didn’t really set revenue goals, but when we’re open, hopefully it’s close to payday, and everyone who comes in has their wallets open and ready to spend.”

Yikes!

You push further, “What do you have in mind for the tasting experience? Are you going to do seated tastings, food pairings, tours? Tell us how you’re going to share our wines with customers.” This is where things go really badly. The hospitality manager says, “Oh, once people are here, if we’re going to do all the work of being open, we’re throwing everything at them. We’ll do the tour, the food pairing, maybe the winemaker could stop by and tell us all about their process. We’ll take a tour— I mean, while they’re here, they might as well get the full all-day experience. So we’re going to throw it all at them, not even in an intentional order.”

This is when your hospitality manager gets fired.

No winery in their right mind would open a location in this manner.

OKAY SO, BACK TO EMAIL:

When it comes to email marketing, too often we treat it like our fictitious hospitality manager.

There’s one person doing it all, probably not doing any of it well. There’s no schedule for communications—just a mad dash last minute, “Oops, it’s been a while since we emailed our list,” or “Oops, we got a great score, we should spread the word.” Last-minute effort gets last-minute results.

And revenue goals for the email channel? We have none, so there’s nothing to measure email marketing success by.

Wineries, you need to think about email marketing as its own revenue channel for your winery.

When you make the mindset shift to treat email marketing like a second tasting room for your winery, everything changes.

You staff the email marketing channel, whether by giving your in-house marketing manager tools and training, or expert support in executing the email marketing, or by outsourcing it entirely. You put someone in charge of email marketing who loves it and does it well. (Click here to figure out if in-house or outsourcing is best for you.)

You have an integrated marketing calendar that considers at least monthly emails to your subscribers and accounts for what you’re doing on social media, texts, paid ads, and at the winery. All of these can be amplified with an integrated marketing calendar that you regularly reference.

All campaigns have clear, specific goals, often tied to a revenue target, so you know what’s working and what’s not. You keep your email list clean, just like you wouldn’t leave a dirty tasting room overnight for someone else to tidy up. You look at your data, track subscribers’ interactions with your emails, and keep that loop of data informing your marketing decisions.

Beautiful things happen for your business, your bottom line, and your customers when you change your mindset about email marketing. It becomes fun to send emails because your customers love and respond to them. You’re making money, and you’ll want to do it more, getting better and better at it.

Here are three things you can do today to get on track and implement this new mindset shift:

1. Create an integrated marketing calendar:

• • Plan at least three emails on it.
  • Send one email campaign to all your subscribers at least once a month.

2. Apply the one-two punch strategy:

• • Set one goal for your email campaign.
  • Have one measurable associated with that goal.
  • This helps ensure all the content in your email guides the customer to take one specific action, eliminating confusion.

3. Get the right person doing the email marketing:

• • Whether it’s an in-house hire or marketing manager, or if you’re the person wearing all the hats, invest time and sometimes money in training to enhance your email marketing skills. This will make you more excited, knowledgeable, and confident in creating email campaigns.

You are now the master of your mind, Maven in training, young Padawan. You’ve changed the way you think of email marketing from an afterthought to its own revenue channel for your winery. You’ve implemented three simple actions: an integrated marketing calendar, the one-two strategic punch of one goal and one measurable for every campaign, and the right person in charge of your email campaigns.

With this information, you’ll create a more effective email marketing strategy and get better results. When you get results, you’ll want to do it more, which is why you’re here in the Email Maven world.

If you loved this blog post and have a winery business bestie who could use a mindset shift on their emails, please share this with them. I believe every winery has the ability to sell more wine online with an effective email marketing strategy, and our content will help you do that.

Send emails that don’t suck, make your customers happy and excited, and they’ll buy more wine. You’ll sell more wine, be happier, and so will they. It will change the world.

So go change the world, and until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email!