Building Excitement

This is interesting:  Mary Baker over at Dover Canyon has posted the inventory levels of some of her fastest-selling wines.

This is a great way to create a sense of "act now" (time-based fear of loss) - I'll be interested to see how it affects the "sales velocity" of these wines, and I hope Mary (a terrific blogger) will have some comments to add about her experiences.

Even though Mary is doing this using her blog, you could (with some clever programming) add this type of information to your Web pages, or let people who buy this wine choose to receive e-mail notification as supplies get short.

Of course, as Mary points out, this only works if you have fast-selling wines to begin with.

Comments

[Mary Baker]

Thank you for the mention, Mike! I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before, as it accomplishes two goals.

I send out a quasi-monthly email and when the hottest releases come out I always get a barrage of calls like, "I'm coming to Paso in July, will you still have X wine then?" The blog is a place to post the ever-chaning answer, and by directing people to the blog it accomplishes my second goal: building blog subscriptions.

I'm learning that I need to offer a range of post topics to interest readers. Some love the stories, others are only interested in the harvest/vintage reports, still others only want updates on releases, background on the wines and vineyards, and other pertinent product information.

I've been mulling over your advice about emails. I thought the prevailing wisdom was to keep it short and sweet, and offer small bites of pertinent "buy me" information. But for our tiny winery, it makes a lot more sense to exercise my voice and tell a story--or part of a story. I'm going to experiment with that and I'll let you know how it goes. I have an email list of over 2,000 names, and only 200+ blog subscribers. Let's see how many I can convert.

On another subject, I know you have talked before about doing surveys, and I have just performed my first. Intellicontact, my email service, now offers surveys and they are nicely done and easy to use. I also found on this month's email that I got a higher percentage of 'opens' by offering an activity. My first short survey was on wine clubs and special offer mailing lists. From this, I can see (if the results are representative) the % of people on my list that belong to other clubs, email lists, and receive special offers. From this I have learned that I should use my monthly emails to make a much more compelling argument for joining the Dover Canyon wine club and s.o. mailings. . .

Future surveys will alternate between silly and serious, but even the silly ones will have some demographic mining purpose, and will be fuel for my blog, and I hope, interesting for my readers.

[Mike Duffy]

What a terrific comment, Mary - thank you for sharing your experience!