One of the biggest concerns as an online business owner is oversaturation – with limitless options at any consumer’s fingertips, will your products get lost in the shuffle? It’s crucial to stand out, and if you want to sell wine online, you have to find a way for your winery to reach an audience efficiently and effectively – connecting with your customers so they keep coming back.
Enter personalized marketing strategies: an individualized, psychology-driven approach to marketing that doesn’t just connect – it converts.
Ready to learn more about how you can start reaching your customers in a whole new way? Keep reading for everything you need to know.
How to Sell Wine Online Through Personalized Marketing Strategies
As a winery with an online wine store, you know the value of selling your wine online. Having an eCommerce store is the key to running a profitable business in the current digital age, and online sales offer your winery access to a whole new market of customers you never would have reached without an online store.
But here’s the thing about running an online wine shop for your winery – it’s only as powerful as the marketing tools you use to get it in front of the people that matter.
With the right strategy, your winery can reach your ideal customers with ease – and that begins with personalized marketing solutions.
Utilize Your CRM to Get to Know Your Customers
If you aren’t leaning into your CRM software, you’re missing out on a vast well of information about your customers – and losing more sales than you can imagine in the process.
Your Customer Relationship Management system, or your CRM, does the legwork for you and gets to know your customers on a deeper level than is practical for you to attempt to do manually. This software tracks all of your customer interactions – emails, online sales, and tasting room visits – so you have a powerful amount of data to work with to understand who your customers are and what they care about.
Pay Attention to Purchase History
Your customers’ purchase history is one of the most value-packed tools at your disposal when crafting personalized marketing solutions. After all, if you don’t know what your customers are buying, how can you understand what they want?
Before you begin building your strategy, take the time to understand the standard sales patterns of your customers. Which wines are your bestsellers – and which wines tend to fall by the wayside? Are there certain seasons where your wines are selling better than others? Is your website actually converting, or is most of your traffic still coming from in-person sales? All of these details matter as you begin to discover the best ways to reach your audience – and expand it.
Create Customer Segments for Targeted Campaigns
With the data you receive from your CRM, it’s time to create customer segments in order to allow you to begin truly personalizing your marketing strategy.
Simply export lists of customers from your CRM based on data points that they have in common – for example, customers who frequently buy sparkling wines or Bordeaux blends, or customers who are interested in your winery’s events. These lists can then become customer segments that you can turn to when you want to target your marketing efforts toward a specific group of people who are most likely to act on your call to action.
Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing is arguably the most powerful tool at your disposal for promoting and selling your products. This is because you have the ability to get the information directly in front of the people you want to reach without having to worry about the whims of algorithms. You can land your email in your customer’s inbox every time.
By taking the customer segments that you crafted from your CRM data, you’re able to send targeted emails that land with wine aficionados who will care about them. Say that you have a great vintage wine releasing that you want to promote – instead of just sharing about it on your website and hoping that people see it, you can announce the vintage via email to a list of customers who have purchased your vintage wines in the past.
Or, say that you’re hosting an Italian wine festival this summer at your winery. You could share it on your website and reach out to local print media, and that’s all well and good – but what if you sent an email out to all of the customers who have attended your winery’s events in the past year? Or a list of customers who came to last summer’s wine festival? Suddenly you’re not just throwing shots out into the dark – you’re sharing information with a group of people who already have a reason to care and who are likely to want to be a part of what you’re doing.
That’s the great thing about personalized marketing solutions – you’re not just blindly promoting your products or your winery and hoping at best that someone is interested and at worst that you aren’t annoying people with ads they don’t care about. You’re reaching people who would want to know – making it a win both for you and your customer alike.
Leverage Automations
We get it – there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, and taking the time to sell wine online in addition to running your physical winery location can be overwhelming.
That’s why automations can be your best friend, especially when it comes to your marketing efforts. Anything that you can take off your plate is a win, allowing you to focus on what matters: crafting good wine.
Take the time to develop email automations based off of customer behavior so that your marketing system can do the work for you. By setting a trigger, your customers can receive information or promotional materials when they take certain actions. Here are a few examples of what that can look like:
- Craft a welcome email that is sent automatically when a customer is first added to your email list welcoming them to your winery, sharing a bit about the heart behind what you do, and sharing a coupon for 10% off the first bottle of wine they buy online.
- Develop a post-purchase upselling email that encourages shoppers to make a follow-up purchase. For example, if they buy a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, maybe the next email they receive will encourage them to try a bottle of Merlot.
- Set an automation to reach out to a customer if they’ve been inactive for a set amount of time – like if they haven’t bought anything from your online wine store in the past year. You could offer a limited-time deal to encourage them to shop in the near future, bringing your winery back to the top of their mind.
- Everyone likes to feel special on their birthday, and automatic celebration emails are the perfect way to build brand loyalty with your customers and make them feel like you care. Offer a coupon to your online store, or a discount on a fine wine tasting at your local tasting room.
Develop a Social Media Community to Drive Web Traffic
Social media may not be as predictable as email marketing, but if you aren’t utilizing social media platforms as a way to sell wine online, you’re missing a huge potential audience that could be shopping from your online wine store.
While you can’t rely on social media alone for your marketing efforts, it’s a great way to build a community of people who are as passionate about fine wine as you are.
Plus, through targeted efforts, you can use social media to drive traffic where you actually want it – your eCommerce store.
Selling through social media doesn’t have to be difficult – and you don’t have to be a member of Gen Z to do it. Share your current wine list with customers, promote images of aesthetically placed wine bottles, and connect with other wineries and other sellers and lovers of alcoholic beverages.
When you have a community, you’ll have engagement.
Experiment and Learn
At the end of the day, there’s no exact formula to selling wine online. There’s no one marketing model that fits every business, and reaching buyers can take a bit of time and effort before you begin to see results rolling in to your site.
It’s all about experimenting and learning what best helps your winery to sell wine online. It’s not about what works for other wineries – it’s about discovering what connects with your customers, and most importantly, getting your wine in the hands of the people who will love it most.
Craft Personalized Marketing Strategies That Convert With OrderPort
At OrderPort, we want to help you sell wine online easily and effectively. Your customers deserve an exceptional experience – and we want to make it simple for you to develop brand fans who keep coming back.
Ready to learn more about how OrderPort can help you manage and grow your business? Contact us to begin your demo.
