Test Driving Your Wine

Guy Kawasaki's recent blog post about sales makes the following recommendation (which is relevant to wineries and their Web sites):

Enable Test Drives
...Therefore, do whatever it takes to enable people to download a trial version of your software, use your web site, drive your car, eat at your restaurant, or attend your church service.

Or taste your wine.

For wineries, tasting rooms are the physical embodiment of this recommendation, as is pouring your wine at events.  Reviews and ratings of your wine by third parties are stand-ins for actual tasting by a potential customer.  Think about your wine from the perspective of someone who drinks wine, but is unfamiliar with yours.  What questions are in their minds?  Most likely: "What does this wine taste like?"  and "Will I like it?", or perhaps "Is this wine any good?" If you look at a wine review, those are the questions the reviewer is trying to address.

An important goal , perhaps the goal, of all your marketing activities is to get someone to taste your wine.  If you agree, then take a look at your winery Web site and see how well it encourages and assists someone to do just that.  In particular, take a look at those often-anemic-and-sterile words on the pages for individual wines. 

Maybe you should be telling your visitors "How to test drive our wine..." with links to (a) special "test drive" offers (375ml bottles anyone?), (b) restaurants and retailers that serve your wine, (c) how to visit the winery, and (d) upcoming events where you'll be pouring.

(Help me out here, winery readers: what sort of a "test drive" should The Winery Web Site Report offer to encourage wineries to purchase a full Report?)

(Note: Guy Kawasaki is a semi-famous "product evangelist," having gotten his start evangelizing the Macintosh computer to software developers while at Apple Computer in the 1980s.  Now he's rich, and does the venture-capital thing.)

Comments

[Josh]

The best test drive I can think of for WWR would be a small (and incomplete) list of "actionable" items to improve the winery owner/manager's website, with the promise of more if they buy the report.

For example, you rank each site in a number of categories. Simply run a sort on each category for each website studied, find out where they are weakest and rank them 1-8. Give numbers 4 and 5 for free via email, and offer suggestions on how to improve the rankings, making clear the even more improvement could be gained by buying the full report.

It would be good PR and I would think it would improve sales.