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Use personalization to drive profitability this holiday season

By  Kari Roach
November 4, 2022

The holiday season is an ideal time to increase your winery’s sales. WineDirect’s 2021 Impact Report says “Online Sales are peaking based on holidays. The top holidays are, as expected, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, followed by the run-up to the year-end holidays”. But it also gives you the perfect opportunity to build relationships with customers—both old and new—through magical marketing campaigns. We’re here to tell you the importance of marketing personalization within your holiday marketing, and why it requires strategy and relevancy.

“Personalization matters more than ever, with COVID-19 and the surge in digital behaviors raising the bar. Three-quarters of consumers switched to a new store, product, or buying method during the pandemic.” – McKinsey & Company

The holiday season starts with Black Friday (November 25) and Cyber Monday (November 28), and while it’s important not to miss any marketing opportunities, it is also imperative not to rush into your seasonal promotions without a clear strategy for holiday planning. As DTC wine sales continue to increase, preparation is arguably the most important stage of your marketing campaign.

5 tips to inject personalization

Adding a personal touch is key to a successful holiday marketing campaign. To get you started, we’ve put together 5 tips and tricks we think you need to know:

1. Adjust your messaging to context

Take the time to tailor your messaging to specifically serve value to the intended recipients. Sending an email announcing the release of your new Chardonnay may not be a right to a customer who has only ever purchased red wine from you. “67% of consumers think it’s important for brands to automatically adjust content based on the current context.” In fact – it may even tip the scales against your favor - “When brands don't adjust accordingly, 42% of consumers will "get annoyed" that content isn’t personalized.”- Adobe

Tip: Send curated promotions to first-time customers, repeat buyers, and club members via email using WineDirect’s Promo Builder tool.

2. Understand consumer expectations

Expedited by the surge in digital shopping since 2020, consumers’ expectations have advanced and marketers can’t expect the same tactics to work as a few years ago. Consumers are smarter and assume more from brands than ever before. In fact, “92% of marketers say customers and prospects expect a personalized customer experience—up from 85% in 2019.”- HubSpot

Tip: Use WineDirect’s Club & Contact dashboards to track memberships by location, keep up with anniversaries, and gather personal details about club members. Then, turn these valuable insights into perfectly curated, timely promotions that coincide with anniversaries, birthdays, and other special occasions. Offering exclusive promotions to existing customers is a great way to entice them improve loyalty and boost customer lifetime value. WineDirect's powerful List Builder tool can help you segment your customer list into categories. This will give you more insight into your customer database to create more impactful messages, resulting in greater campaign success.

3. Consider using live user profiles

While consumers respond well to having their shopping experience curated for them, they also don’t mind putting in a bit of work to help optimize—if it’s easy to do. They do this by sharing and maintaining their information and preferences. 74% of consumers would find “living profiles” valuable if they could use them to curate the experiences, offers, and products they receive and build a loyal customer base.

Tip: Encourage your existing consumers to utilize their Member Area on your website to manage their information and review purchase history, making it easy to repeat purchases in the future. Having this information up to date makes the checkout process frictionless—meaning more conversions for you.

4. Provide personalized recommendations

Your winery may not have the same () manpower as companies like Netflix, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take notes from their successful strategies. Take personalized recommendations as an example: “The Netflix system filters over 3,000+ titles using 1,300 recommendation clusters all based on an individual user's preferences. It is robust and it pays off considering that 80% of Netflix viewer activity is a direct result of personal recommendations.”- Invisibly

Tip: Create personalized one-click offers to share with targeted customer lists over email, then use carrots on your e-commerce site to encourage customers to add similar products to their cart or complete a promo while they shop.

5. Meet consumers where they are

Communication, shopping, and browsing are all a part of a consumer’s daily routine with their handheld devices. This takes up a big part of peoples’ days: “Americans spend an average screen time of 5.4 hours on their mobile phones daily.” - TechJury. Your best chance to engage with a consumer is to meet them where they already are and are anticipating your message, such as using social media “82% of consumers primarily engage with marketing content on smartphones”- HubSpot. By incorporating social media into your marketing strategy, you can effectively reach and engage with your customers on the platforms they are already using.

Tip: Use WineDirect’s Marketing Text Messages to send timely updates, special offers, and exclusive promotions to customers who’ve opted into SMS communications.

It’s clear that consumer expectations have changed when it comes to marketing, so it's critical to take a look at your tactics to ensure they are keeping up—especially as it relates to the upcoming holiday season. Wineries that use WineDirect already have an abundance of opportunities to leverage personalization and we hope that these tips help inspire ways to harness your holiday sales potential. One way to do this is by leveraging location data from mobile devices to send localized promotions. By using address information on existing customer profiles or geodata from mobile devices, wineries can target local customers with hyper-personalized offerings and drive traffic to their stores.

WEBINAR: MAXIMIZING HOLIDAY SALES; THE DATA TELLS US WHEN, AND HOW

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