As we head into OND (October, November, December), it's critical to take some time to plan out your seasonal promotions. Don't leave it until the last minute to decide to offer a shipping special for Thanksgiving, a discount for Black Friday or a holiday gift pack. With tourism still limited, it's also important to spend time updating your website and planning strong digital marketing outreach. Here are important three steps that will help set you up for success with your promotions this fall.
Make sure you take the time to consciously plan your promotions. First, put together a marketing calendar for your winery for the rest of the year. Map out special offers and promotions, and make sure you plan how you’ll promote them to your list across multiple channels including email marketing and social media. If you’re using WineDirect, take advantage of proprietary tools such as One Click Offers and Carrots to increase purchases.
Make sure your website is optimized to drive sales. For example, update your homepage to highlight your online store and current promotions. You also want to promote your offers across your website and at opportune times during the buyer’s journey, for example right after someone adds an item to their cart, if you’re a WineDirect client, you can do this using Carrots. Look at this example by Oak Farm Vineyards:
On your product pages, make sure your descriptions are engaging and your photography is up to date with quality bottle and lifestyle imagery.
It’s also important to make sure your checkout process is optimized to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Good news for WineDirect clients, we recently made a number of improvements to our checkout flow to do just that. You should also configure an automated email to send to people who add items to the cart, but don’t complete the purchase.
You’ve mapped out your promotions and your website is ready to convert. Now it’s time to share your promos with your winery’s fans. Let’s start with email marketing, the best direct response tool to drive sales. For some offers, you may want to send the same message to all your subscribers. Ideally, however, you should segment your mailing list and send different versions to various groups. For example, you can target high spenders with a higher order value offer and low spenders with a lower threshold.
Other segmentation ideas include:
Don’t forget to supplement your email marketing efforts with social media. Organic (unpaid) posts are a good start, but for extra mileage you can boost your posts to reach more people, or retarget specific ads to the same segment you sent your email to.
