In my work, I find myself in lots of tasting rooms in wineries everywhere.  I wouldn’t be taking much of a risk by saying that not every one is working hard to build their email list based on what I’ve seen.

Here’s a pretty good example of a signup form.  You should do two things.

1.  Get one.

2.  Make sure your staff knows to ask to have visitors fill them in.

Good email marketing for wineries.

One of the more controversial email marketing tactics has been the use of the infamous pop up window.  The pop up has spawned whole companies whose job is to stop those pesky windows from ruining what would otherwise be an uniterrupted read on the web.

However, as a tool for building your email list, I have seen the use of a pop up window increase the rate of new subscribers as much as ten times.  Yup, ten times.  Instead of 10 new emails per day, that’s 100 new emails per day.

For winery website marketing, after reviewing well over 1,000 sites, I have only seen one use a pop up.  They did it well.  It was NOT intrusive or annoying and I bet it works like a charm for them.

Here is what the pop up looked like in their case.  It’s the overlay on the top left of the image.

Congratulations to the San Antonio Winery for doing it right.  You’re 1 in 1,000!

Email marketing is often a bit of mystery on how to get it done well.  I thought it would help if I wrote some guiding principles to help you step back from your email campaigns and try to make some improvements.

Generally email marketing is part art and part science.  The art part is the thinking that goes into planning your mailing and you should spend some time doing this planning step before you ever send your emails out.

You’ll find that this planning will get you better overall results when you look at your statistics and order rates and keep these five principles in mind.

1.  Make the reader’s decision to open your email easy.  When you consider your reader and think about making it easy for them to decide to open your email you get more people reading.  Your reader may be on their iPhone or at their desk or at home with a refreshment.  Don’t make them guess who the email is from what what it is about.

2.  Be clear in your content.   Often I see emails which are 5 pages long with so much information in it that your reader may not know what to do with it.  If it is too much information, your reader may read for awhile and just lose interest.  At that point, you’ve lost them.  They’ll just move on to another email.  Give them something they can read and understand–and do it quick!  They’re busy too.

3.  Be clear in your format.  If your email is too fancy, and relies too heavily on design you may actually lose your reader.  Simple and clean is the best format.  If you like images, use them sparingly.  If you have a designer, let them know that you want the design to support the message you are trying to get across.  Often a single column is best.

4.  Ask for a specific action.  If you want them to order some wine, ask. If you want them to RSVP to an event, ask.  If you want them to visit you site, ask.  If you want them to read your blog, ask.  It also is way better if you only ask for one thing–don’t ask for six and expect them to choose something.

5.  Make it personable.  Email has been one of the best marketing mediums over the years simply because it IS personal.  From me to you.  Everything you do that makes the email less personable minimizes the effect.

If you do these five simple things, you’ll discover that your emails get opened more often, your links get clicked on more often, and your brand is enhanced.  And it does make a difference.  I’ve seen a single email sell a single case of wine and done properly sell six cases of wine. That’s as good a reason as any to do this well.

One mistake I see quite often is that companies will keep a single list for their newsletter or monthly updates and send their email campaigns to that list.

Really though, list segmentation is a skill that has been practiced in the direct marketing world for quite some time.

In fact, list segmentation is one of the key factors that can make or break a direct email campaign.
In the world of email marketing list segmentation seems to be something that is only practiced by companies with larger lists and the resources to make it happen.

But list segmentation is not as hard as you may think.

First, you have to have an idea what it is about your list that can be segmented easily.   Here is a basic example.

You may offer a newsletter or a free report to encourage web visitors to sign up on your website.  These people may be a prospect for you but they have yet to buy anything from you.

At the same time you are making sales every day and have a very solid customer list.  It just doesn’t make sense to send the same information to each of these lists in the ‘hope’ that the goodwill will help your business somehow.

The way to approach this segmentation is to take a look at your list of non-customers.  What type of offer or try-to-buy promotion would help them to take that first step of getting them to become a customer of yours?

You should then be testing and making offers like this to your non-customer list frequently in order to motivate them to taking that first step.

By doing this you’ll notice that you will suddenly be getting more new customers.  Who here wants more new customers?

Next we take a look at your customer list itself. I would suggest taking it to the next level and segmenting this list also.

You’ll want to take your customer list and separate it into two groups.  Customers, and your BEST customers.  Your best customers are the ones that buy from you frequently or often or repeatedly.

They are the ones you want to protect and nurture because they are the ones that probably generate the most revenue for you as well.

Now as you prepare to send email to these two groups, you’ll have a bit better focus.  First, you can try to discover what makes someone become one of your BEST customers.  Then you can create offers and packages that will help take the step from being just a customer to becoming on of your BEST.

And the group that is your BEST.  How can you reward them and keep them that way?  Email is a great medium for customer retention.

You can see then that by taking your one big list and breaking it down into three simple segments you’ll be able to focus your emails messages to have a specific purpose.  This will help you succeed in using email marketing successfully.

In 2000, over 7 years ago, email marketing was pretty simple. You got someone’s email address and you sent them an email.

Logic tells you that if you could do this one time then doing it 1000 times was way better. Some felt that doing this 10 million times was even better still.

Unfortunately, the result is the ongoing problem of SPAM. We hate getting spam and we never send it.

But we have to deal with it. And we think our customers want to hear from us and they want to hear from us using one of the most popular internet applications of all time-email.

So what is the best way to send email to your customers?

When I mean best, I mean what is the most cost effective, efficient, and effective way to send email to your customers?

One way is to keep a list in your email system. I’ve seen a distribution list kept in hotmail, aol, yahoo and others. The challenge with this is when you have more than a few hundred names. Suddenly you find restrictions is sending email (scratch effective) and it takes time to add and subtract names from the list (so much for efficient) You can’t argue with the price though.

Another popular method is to use Microsoft Outlook to keep a contact list then do a mail merge with your list to send an email. The advantage of doing it this way is the sending of the email is pretty efficient and Outlook sends the email so that your ISP mail providers sees the messages one at a time and won’t reject your mail-within certain limits. Again, if you get too big your ISM may reject your mail and your emails don’t get delivered. You still have the issue of maintain the list. This takes time. Time you should be doing something else.

Many people will keep their mailing list in a Contact Relationship Manager (CRM). CRM’s are great for keeping your print mail list and phone list. Or your customer list.

But they aren’t built for sending emails to large lists.

And here is why. In recent years, as spam levels have continued to grow and spam filtering methods have tried to keep up, the challenge has shifted from the method of getting the email out, to ensuring your email is actually delivered.

You’ll need to be paying full attention to deliverability. If you don’t you may send an email to your customers and not even know that Yahoo or MSN have filtered your email and sent it straight to the junk folder. Or even worse they simply hold your email and it doesn’t get through at all.

On top of that, many email systems have buttons that allow the recipient to mark an email as spam. And today, most any email that isn’t welcome gets marked as spam.

You’ll have two possible solutions that will make your job easier.

One, use an email marketing solution. These software packages have evolved to the level that collecting and maintaining lists is easy. Even if you have thousands of names on your list. Our favorite is www.aweber.com.

This software automatically looks after your list maintenance and has relationships with the major ISPs so that your email gets delivered and not viewed as spam.

Two, use an email marketing service. That’s what we do. We set up your system and handle the tedious work of email marketing. That allows us to collaborate on the important things and get the best results possible.

There is no question that having a long list of email addresses in your newsletter list should be a top goal of any direct to consumer marketing initiative.
I’ve noticed one mistake that is common on most winery websites.   That is, they don’t make much of an effort to invite people to sign up for their newsletter list.
You may not know it but making it easy for your website visitors to do something can have a 2, 4, or 10 times effect.
Many winery websites feel that if they have a contact page or a dedicated newsletter signup page that may be enough to get people to join the list.  The assumption is that if they want to join up badly enough, they’ll find a way.  If you make it super easy for them to sign up, it stands to reason that more of them will do so.  Signing up for a newsletter is more of an impulse—and as such is a bit more unpredictable as to when that impulse will strike.  One thing is for certain, if you don’t sign them up on this visit, you probably won’t see them again on your website.
Right now you might be collecting 1 newsletter signup per day—works out to 365 new subscribers per year–all done automatically by your software.  However ,if you were to increase that number to 10 per day, (which I have done) you are talking about 3,650 per year.  It doesn’t take too long before you have a formidable list to send out offers to join your club, buy your wine, or visit your tasting room.
Here are three things you can immediately do to accelerate your subscriber list growth.
1.    Put a signup form on your home page.  Many wineries don’t offer a chance to sign up for the newsletter on the home page.  And by sign up, I mean place a form requesting First Name and Email Address right on the page.  More people will take you up on your offer because it is convenient for them.  Most of your traffic is through your home page anyway isn’t it?
2.    Put a “Newsletter Signup” link in your navigation bar.  In addition to having a signup form on the home page, put a link in your navigation bars to a signup page.  Make sure this link is one every page in your site.  Just because your visitor didn’t sign up on your home page doesn’t mean they won’t if they are somewhere else in your site reading about your wine.
3.    Add in a hover ad.  A hover ad is a box that appears on your screen at some point between 5 and 60 seconds after a visitor arrives on your webpage.  Many people don’t like to use a hover ad on their site and in fact I have only seen one after reviewing over 1,000 winery websites.  The argument is that the hover ad annoys visitors and sends the wrong impression.  In actual fact this effect is so small as not to exist.  But I have seen hover ads increase signups by a factor of 10 times!

Finally, it doesn’t hurt to make more of an effort than to say “Newsletter”.  One of the strongest offers I saw on a website stated “Please Join Our Mailing List – Receive a $25 Coupon!”   You can be sure that small incentive encouraged more people to join the list (and generated a few extra orders too!)

So take some time to evaluate your website and ensure you are building your list as aggressively as possible.

Why?  Because the subject line is one thing you can control that will get more people to read your emails.  And more readers means more sales.

Stop sending emails that read:  (these are actual emails I just received)

-  October Newsletter

-  News from … < winery name >

-  October Events

-  Harvest Update

You need to put some effort into making the subject line interesting enough that I will open your email above the others in my inbox.

Try something like this:  (these are actual emails also)

-  Save 40% on Zinfandel and Pinot Noir

-  1 cent shipping ends tomorrow!

-  Caymus’ Neighbor, $49 + Free Shipping

-  Best Chardonnay we’ve ever released.

Do these look any different?  They should.  They are aimed directly at the reader and offering some additional motivation to open and read the email.

That will get you better results.  Getting more people to open and read your email is the first step to turbo-charging your direct email campaign.