Is Your Winery Email Marketing Ready for the Holidays?
Black Friday is coming. If your winery’s holiday email plan starts with “We should probably figure out what we’re doing for Black Friday,” pause for a second.
Before you settle on discounts, bundles, shipping deadlines, gift sets, or how many emails you’ll send, ask a more useful question: can your email marketing program handle the holidays?
Q4 has a way of exposing the cracks you’ve been ignoring. Bad data. Messy segments. A campaign process that takes four hours. Subscribers who signed up years ago and haven’t clicked in a long time. And no clear plan for who should get what.
Here’s the five-part holiday email readiness check I’d run before sending ramps up. Fix the boring stuff now, so November and December can be about selling wine.
1. Deliverability: Can You Reach the Inbox?
The holiday rush is a lousy time to discover that your deliverability has been slipping for months. Before you increase your sending frequency, take a look under the hood.
- Is your sending domain properly authenticated?
- Are you seeing unusual bounce rates?
- Are spam complaints under control?
- Are you suppressing subscribers who clearly aren’t engaging?
- Has your sending behavior been consistent, or are you about to jump from one email a month to four a week?
Most wineries send more during the holidays. More sends through an unhealthy email program can amplify the problems. Youch.
Don’t wait until your biggest revenue emails aren’t landing to care about deliverability.
2. Audience: Do You Know Who Should Get What?
I don’t care how many segments you have. If your Klaviyo account has 47 segments with names nobody understands, we’ve already talked about you. What matters is whether you can identify the audiences you’ll need when holiday sending ramps up.
- Who’s engaged? Who can reasonably handle more frequent emails?
- Who just bought? Who probably doesn’t need another email selling the thing they bought yesterday?
- Who’s most valuable? Who might deserve early access, exclusivity, or a different offer?
- Who’s in the club? Will a public holiday promotion make membership feel more valuable, or less?
- Who’s drifting away? Is there an opportunity to bring them back?
Holiday segmentation isn’t about proving how sophisticated your email marketing is. It’s about answering three practical questions: Who should get this? Who shouldn’t? Should anybody get something different?
If those answers take a while, that’s a yellow light. Start with how to segment your winery’s email list, and take a look at pre-holiday email list cleanup before November.
3. Creative: Can You Actually Produce the Emails?
This one feels mundane until it’s November 23 and somebody’s rebuilding the footer for the ninth time.
Can your team make an email quickly? Do you have a master template that works, reusable content blocks, and buttons and styles that are already standardized? Are your layouts mobile-friendly? Is your footer information current? Do you have a process for testing links, discounts, and personalization before you send us a panicked screenshot?
Holiday season isn’t the time for every campaign to become a bespoke work of art. You need a system that makes good emails easier to produce.
Your holiday email template doesn’t need to win a design award. It needs to help someone buy wine. If you’re staring at your template and wondering what a good winery email looks like, browse these winery email templates for ideas.
4. Strategy: Do You Know What You’re Selling, to Whom, and When?
Okay. Now we can talk about the holiday calendar.
Before the frenzy starts, map your major offers, deadlines, and shipping cutoffs. Think through gifting, Thanksgiving, Cyber 5, December shopping, last-minute orders, and local pickup. Then look at the whole runway and ask whether your campaigns are fighting with each other.
“We’ll send something for Black Friday” isn’t a strategy. You need to see the season as a whole before you make decisions about timing, audiences, and offers. For more ideas, see these winery holiday email campaigns.
5. Measurement: Do You Know What Winning Looks Like?
This is the piece people skip because they’re already thinking about the next send. Before the holidays start, decide what you’ll measure. That might include revenue, conversion rate, revenue per recipient, orders, average order value, new customers, club signups, list growth, unsubscribes, or deliverability.
If your entire post-holiday analysis is “Our Black Friday email had a 48% open rate,” okay. Did it sell wine? An open rate by itself won’t answer that.
Decide now how you’ll capture what you learn. Which offer worked? Which audience responded? Which message converted? Which send led to unsubscribes? What would you repeat next year?
Otherwise, every November becomes Groundhog Day with Cabernet.
Score Your Holiday Email Readiness
Give each area a color:
- Green: We’re good.
- Yellow: This needs attention before November.
- Red: Fix this now.
Score deliverability, audience, creative, strategy, and measurement. Can you reliably reach the inbox? Can you decide who gets what? Can you build and QA campaigns efficiently? Do you know your offers, audiences, and timing? Do you know what success looks like?
If you’ve got five greens, you’re cleared for takeoff. If you’re looking at three yellows and two reds, excellent. It’s October, not November 28. That’s the point of doing this now.
Build the System Under Your Holiday Emails
If this check revealed that the problem isn’t really your holiday emails, but the email marketing system underneath them, watch the free winery email marketing masterclass. I’ll walk you through the PRESS SEND methodology we use to help wineries build email programs that strategically grow their audience, nurture customer relationships, and sell more wine.
Winery Holiday Email Readiness FAQs
What should wineries check before sending more holiday emails?
Review your domain authentication, bounce rates, spam complaints, suppression practices, and recent sending behavior. Then check whether you can identify engaged subscribers, recent buyers, valuable customers, club members, and people who may be drifting away. More frequent sends can amplify problems in an unhealthy email program, so check these areas before increasing volume.
How should wineries measure holiday email campaign success?
Decide what you’ll measure before the holiday sends begin. The post suggests looking at revenue, conversion rate, revenue per recipient, orders, average order value, new customers, club signups, list growth, unsubscribes, and deliverability. An open rate alone won’t tell you whether an email sold wine. Record which offers, audiences, and messages worked so you know what to repeat.
