Vin65 Blog

Bridging Marketing Channels - Converting Tasting Room Visitors into Profitable Mailing List Members

One of the powerful things a winery can do with tasting room traffic is convert them from casual visitors to members of your winery's mailing list.

Tasting room traffic tends to reflect passing customers who are on the "tour" and once they leave your tasting room they are gone. If you are lucky enough to stand out in their mind there is still a good chance that they will forget your website address, and they won’t take the effort to track down your wine.

Converting tasting room traffic to members of your winery's mailing list offers great marketing opportunities that you can tap into for sales year around and for years to come.

I especially like the Ceja Vineyards tasting room sign up form because it doubles as a postcard as well. If the visitor doesn't get around to filling it out in the tasting room they can always put it in the mail later. I might also suggest prepaying the postage to make the sign up process even easier, and maybe have check boxes as to what they are interested in so you can market to segmented lists, another strategy to customize your mailing list communications. You could also enhance the sign up form a little by putting a photo of the tasting room staff or have a photo of the wine bottle on one side to strengthen emotional attachment.

These types of tools and strategies are so easy to execute on the office color printer. You would expect that every winery would have some mechanism to transform their most fleeting customers into more engaged, profitable customers, yet so often we find tasting rooms just don't execute on these tools at all.

Make it your goal this year to do simple things like this. It will make a difference to the bottom line in the long run.

Feb 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM

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The Anatomy of a Great Wine Page

Great web pages don't just happen, they require a lot of thought and planning.  What makes the page below great are five specific things.

1) Great Photography

I won't debate bottle vs label images, but every great wine page needs great photography.

People make assumptions about your wine based on how it looks. It doesn't take a professional photographer to notice a picture looks cheap, home made, and poorly done.

High resolution, high quality images will increase your perceived brand value, and high quality photos will increase sales conversion.

PS. I feel bottle shots are better than label shots.

2) Consumer Ratings and Reviews

Consumer ratings and reviews are universally acknowledged as having a significant impact on e-commerce. Study after study has linked consumer review to increased sales.

Your customers want to not only know what professionals think of your wine, they want to know what average people think of your wine.

3) Product Detail (Lots of It)

You may not be methodical (and I prefer to skim rather than read) but a large part of the population is methodical. They prefer to read in detail about your wine, how it was made, all of the content, etc. They make informed decisions and favor a logical approach in data presentation.

Also your search engine marketing team will appreciate extra detail.

4) Social Media Widgets

The return on investment is still out on adding social media widgets (such as tweet this, share this, and other social media widgets) to your page, but we believe that social media does have a positive return.

While there are an overwhelming amount of social widgets we feel that you should at least have facebook and twitter on each product page (If you're one of our clients, ask us about our new social media bar which includes these widgets for every wine page).

5) Ecommerce

Last but not least is the entire ecommerce piece on your wine page that plays an important part. Pricing and incentives should be clear. The 'add to cart' button should have high contrast. If you have a 'quantity' field it should be pre-populated.

We prefer to put the 'Add to Cart' button near the top of the page. This is to accommodate both people who prefer to make faster decisions, and people who are more methodical.

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What do you feel belongs on your wine pages? 

Feb 10, 2010 at 8:45 AM

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