The Winery Web Site Report

Building Excitement: Mary Baker comments

Mary Baker added a long and informative comment to my original post, Building Excitement, which talked about how blogging the inventory levels of her various fast-selling/limited-production wines increases sales velocity by building excitement.

As I said in an e-mail reply to Mary, another answer is just an RSS feed for "things we're running out of".  For example, the feed would be updated anytime a vintage got down to 10% remaining (or some other arbitrary level).

The best thing about doing this blog is that it puts me in touch with all the smart winery people out there who are willing to share their knowledge and experience.  Mary is smart.  Go read her comment.  And feel free to add some of your own.

Effective Winery Web Sites: Learning from Amazon.com

If you type a URL (Uniform Resource Locator - usually the address of a Web page) into your browser like

• www.amazon.com/dvd,
• www.amazon.com/music, or
• www.amazon.com/books

you are taken directly to that section of Amazon.com.  If you are a larger winery with multiple varietal programs, you might consider something similar, e.g. www.examplewinery.com/pinot or www.examplewinery.com/cabernet

This is related to a recommendation from The Winery Web Site Report to choose "reasonable" main names: if your customer makes a reasonable guess at a URL (or domain name), you gain their appreciation and general credibility (and maybe a sale) by making it work for them (using a little behind-the-scenes magic - see your Webmaster for details on "rewriting URLs", or drop me a line).

The lineage of this idea goes even farther back.  I remember sitting on a software conference panel in 1995 about designing for users, and one of the panelists offered these "Three Things to Remember When Desiging for Users," which have always stuck in my head:

1. No one wants to read the manual (keep it simple)
2. No one wants to wait (keep it responsive)
3. Everybody wants to be in control (conform to the user's expectations, not vice versa)

These same ideas apply to your winery Web site.  In general, the less "interface", the better.  The very best interfaces are nearly invisible.  On a Web site, this means that navigation should be clear, links obvious and well-named, and making it easy for the user to take action without waiting for lots of stuff to load.  And if it seems reasonable that something should work a particular way, making sure the visitor isn't disappointed (conforming to the user's expectations).

(Note from experience: making it easy for the user generally makes it hard for the programmer - hire programmers who understand this)

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.

Word of Mouth, Part II

Suppose you're a South African winery whose wine is just making its entrance into the United States.  People have already heard of your wine, and are asking where they can get it.  Here's an example of using asking those people (who probably haven't even tasted your wine) to help get distribution at a major US outlet (K&L Wine Merchants).

The point is this: blogs can be powerful tools to mobilize people on your behalf, people that would otherwise be hard to reach.  I'm sure that la Gramiere could use this same technique.

Lazy Sunday: Landing Page Redux

One of the most popular posts I've written to date is this one:  Google AdWords - how NOT to do it

(Note: I plan to write the complementary post soon.)

The main point I made in that post was that if you are sending people to your site from a Google AdWords advertisement, you really need to have a "landing page" that delivers on the promise in your ad (and that's generally not your home page), and ideally captures their e-mail address so you can have continued interaction with them.

Here are four more useful articles on landing pages for your consideration over Sunday-morning coffee:

• Ten Ways to Improve Your Landing Page (aimed at links from e-mails, not AdWords)
• Optimizing Landing Pages 2006 (experimental results + audio recording)
• 11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages
• 3 Steps to a Customizable Landing Page Plan (advanced level)

If your winery is using Google AdWords, please comment about your experiences.  Thanks!

Saturday: Word of Mouth

As you're probably well aware, word of mouth is the most powerful way of promoting your wines and winery.

A new study from Keller Fay Group on word of mouth offers some statistics about where those word of mouth exchanges take place:

• 71% in face-to-face settings
• 21% over the telephone
• 6% online (e-mail, blogs, forums, instant messaging/chat, etc..)
• ...and then there's that pesky "missing" 2% - oh, well.

The question, of course, is how to generate positive word of mouth.  When it comes to your winery Web site, the best way is to help people accomplish their goal in visiting your site, and leave with a positive impression.  Although it constitutes word of mouth, you don't want people visiting your site and telling others, "I couldn't figure out how to do what I wanted.  So I left."

The most useful questions for assessing customer experience are

• Would you experience it again?
• Would you recommend the experience to others?

They apply to your wine and your winery Web site.

RSS: It's not just for Oklahoma wineries anymore

Thomas Jones of Oklahoma Wine News has a post that is well worth reading, even if your winery isn't in Oklahoma (chances are it isn't, statistically speaking):  RSS - The Winery Marketer's Secret Weapon

If you are an Oklahoma winery marketer looking for every advantage you can get from the internet, RSS is too important to ignore. Bloglines combined with Google Alerts makes a great place to get started

Of course, keeping track of what's being said about your wines/winery isn't just a good idea for wineries in  Oklahoma.  Thomas explains how to use free tools to make it easy for any winery to create the equivalent of an online press clipping service.

(And he's also kind enough to mention this blog in the company of some bloggers that I really respect - Thanks, Thomas!)

E-Mail Generates Wine Sales

MarketingSherpa.com has a great case study about a retail wine store that doesn't sell online or ship wine (!!) using its e-mail newsletter to bring in a lot of (paying) foot traffic.  You should be able to use the same tactics to bring folks to visit your winery (or get them to buy online or over the phone and have it shipped).  After all, your winery is a lot more interesting than a retail wine shop, isn't it ?  The article is free through June 4th, so print a copy if you want to save it.

Here's another MarketingSherpa.com article of possible interest: How to Keep Your House List Open Rate Above 50%: Lessons from Winery Email Campaigns (October, 2003).  Unfortunately, this article will cost you a token $5, but given the consistently high quality of their case studies, I recommend it (I already purchased a copy for myself).

As always, I recommend MarketingSherpa's free newsletters (signup at top-center).

Doing it right: Ridge Vineyards

Last night, the 1971 Ridge Monte Bello took top honors in a re-visitation of the famous 1976 France vs. California Cabernet cage match (known in more refined circles as "the Paris tasting").

This morning, the Ridge Vineyards home page has the whole story.  It's nice to see a winery that understands that they are going to have a lot of people coming to their Web site for more information about the winning wine and made sure that those visitors weren't disappointed.

Happy National Wine Day!

By some accounts, today is the day.  It's amazing that, given holidays like National Corndog Day exist, the wine industry doesn't appear to sanction any official day.  The closest thing is Open That Special Bottle Night, promoted by the wine columists from The Wall St. Journal, Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher.

Of course, that's an just an opportunity for a sponsoring winery to claim it as their own (as Foster Farms does for corndogs).

Effective Web Sites for Beer

[Update: it appears they've already re-worked the "age verification" entry page, making a simple pair of radio buttons.  But the Back button is still broken.]

Here's an interesting story about a microbrewery going online to reach its customers.  The beer biz shares some characteristics with wine: boutique producers and behemoth conglomerates, a heavy regulatory environment, and lots of taste and image issues.

<begin rant>

The New England Brewing Web site uses Flash for its interface (not just to show pretty pictures like most wineries using Flash), which makes it more painful to use.  For example, you can't tab into the input fields of the "enter your birthday to prove you know how to subtract 21 from the current year" front page (which I must suffer through every time I hit the home page - a session cookie, please!).  And there's no attempt to capture the e-mail address of fans of their beer for further interaction.  Worst of all, the Back button is broken (a common problem for sites which use Flash-based navigation)!!!  I note that this Web site was designed by an "interactive marketing firm," and I bet it cost some money.  I only wish it were more effective.

(And even though they have a blog, they haven't bothered to fix its About page)

Don't people even *try* to use their own Web site?  Visit for yourself and add a comment.

<end rant>

There are some good things: they do tell you where you can buy their beer.  And the "Brews" page is not bad (this would be a better home page than the one they've got, IMHO), as it invites interaction and is visually bold.

So, ineffective Web sites are not just a problem for wineries.  And it all starts because the person in charge of the site isn't thinking like a visitor.

(No, this is not a teaser for The Microbrewery Web Site Report.  I've got my hands full just dealing with wineries!)

Retailing Wine Online

In the serendipitous way the Internet sometimes works, here's a great post from the REthink wine blog on retailing wine online, a followup of sorts to my post yesterday on the challenges facing anyone trying to sell wine online.

Their basic point: wineries don't do such a good job with online retailing (in the sense of enticing a visitor to buy), and they're in danger of losing profitable direct sales to wine retailers with a strong online presence and an understanding of how to retail a product.  The result?

...potentially 10% of the ENTIRE wine business and as much as 50% of the super premium wine business will go to online versions of today’s bricks and mortar leading retailers

Of course, REthink hopes to sell wineries a solution that helps them to retail their wines, but it doesn't mean that they're wrong about the need to entice people to buy.  The trick is to create a software-based system that works as well as someone in your tasting room when it comes to offering a visitor the last little nudge that results in a sale.

Selling Wine Online: SidewaysWineClub.com

This isn't exactly about effective winery Web sites, but the story behind SidewaysWineClub.com will be of interest to those of you who sell wine online.  A sample quote:

...the wine industry is unique for its brand proliferation. There are over 3,500 domestic wineries, each producing 1-36 labels after each harvest, resulting in well over 17,000 domestic wines available for sale at any one time. Of these choices, the 100 best-selling labels account for over 90% of volume.

It provides a good summary of the problems with selling wine online, e.g. the risk of the unknown, and has some ideas for marketing an "experience-based" product like wine. 

It's not clear from the article how SidewaysWineClub.com is doing financially, though.  Having done licensed software products, the cost of licensing a name (in this case, Sideways) can make the economics less favorable.

Thanks to MarketingProfs.com free newsletter (which I recommend) for the pointer.

Cork'd

Social networking has gotten a lot of buzz lately from sites like MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Friendster, and so on.  The idea is that you  probably have something in common with people who have something in common with people you already know.

Not to be outdone, the wine community now has its own social networking site: Cork'd ("The simple way to review and share wine").  Take a quick look at the Cork'd home page to get a better understanding of what this site offers.

Of course, you already have a community of fans for your wines.  Cork'd provides a tool for them to share their interest in your wines and involve others who may not be acquainted.  You might want to think about making sure that your wines are listed.  And you don't necessarily have to do it yourself - enlist a fan!

At the very least, you might want to mention Cork'd to your newsletter subscribers - some of them may think it's cool.

Lazy Sunday: Tasting for Dollars

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat (part of the NY Times organization) has an interesting article in their Business section today about how wineries in Sonoma County are beginning to charge for wine tasting.

Hanna, which has gained increased recognition because of  its award-winning Sauvignon Blanc, is about to begin charging $5 for a regular tasting, in part to offset the $20,000 (retail value?) of wine that they pour each year.

Obviously, if free tastings don't have the desired result (adequate sales to justify the practice), it's worth an examination.  I hope the Press Democrat revisits this story in a year to see what their actual experience turns out to be.  A worthwhile read.

What's the Difference Between a Blog and a Web Site?

Saturday again, so I'm allowed to post a little off the "effective winery Web site" topic.  I'd like to point you to Robert "Microsoft Blogger" Scoble's list of what separates blogs from a vanilla Web sites:

1. Ease of publishing (just type and Submit)
2. Automatically notifies search engines and aggregators of new posts ("pinging")
3. Trackbacks ("Hey, I posted about your post!")
4. Granularity of reference (you can link to an individual post)
5. RSS feed (machine-readable list of recent updates)

I kept the same order as Robert, so you can compare my explanation and nomenclature with his.  I think that #1, #2, and #5 are the most significant (historically, #2 and #3 came along later).

This is why you might want both a winery blog and a winery Web site.

Why RSS is Good for Wineries

This post from Josh at pinotblogger (AKA Capozzi Winery) shows why:

...from a producer’s perspective, the fact that there is no [RSS] feed for all reviews of a particular wine is a huge negative. It would be very useful to know instantly when someone has tasted and reviewed our wines. If it was great, I could amble on over to their tasting page and leave a little thank you and invite them up to the winery. If it was horrible I could run like greased lightning and try and find out if the bottle was corked and offer a replacement.

In other words, RSS helps you find out when people are talking about you (and lets you act on that information, as Josh does a good job describing above).  That's one of the reasons you should set up a "search feed" (a search which generates an RSS feed that updates daily) for the name of your winery at Technorati, PubSub, or Google Blog Search.

I'll bet Josh has one!

A Panel on Internet Marketing

I will be moderating a panel on Internet Marketing at the SofTECH general meeting on Wednesday, May 24th in San Rafael at 6:30 PM.  The panel will address questions related to e-mail marketing, search engine optimization, and general strategy from the moderator (me!) and the audience.

Why You Really Want Your Web Visitors To Come Back

Why should you be concerned about visitors coming back to your Web site?  Because returning visitors are eight times more likely to make an online purchase.  This data was not taken from wineries, but it seems pretty clear that getting a visitor to return (or otherwise interact with your winery) increases the chances that they will buy some wine.

This data speaks to the importance of creating a Web site that is visitor effective (a site where visitors accomplish their goal in coming to the site, and leave with a positive impression).  Both factors influence whether a visitor will return to your site.

Unfortunately, most wineries don't have a good handle on how many of their Web site visitors are repeat visitors.  Ideally, your Web site would treat repeat visitors differently that a first-time visitor, just as you would in the physical world.  After all, a repeat visit is expressing interest and trust in your winery.

Thanks to the Marketing Experiments blog for the pointer.  I recommend a free subscription to their e-newsletter, The Marketing Experiments Journal.

Direct Shipment: One Year Later

May 16th marked the first anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to level the playing field for in-state and out-of-state wineries as far as shipping to consumers.  The Santa Rosa Press Democrat examines the outcome for direct shipping thus far.  Conclusion: the effects of the ruling have been slow to manifest.

The Press Democrat article states that sales of Robert Young Estate Winery (which produces about 3,000 cases) to Texas have increased four times since the ruling, doubled in Florida and are up about 50 percent in New York.  Other small producers (Nalle, Kaz) quoted in the article are not as enthusiastic about the effects of the change.  New Vine Logistics seems to be a clear winner, as they deal with an extreme "point of pain" for wineries: shipping and compliance.

When I conceived of The Winery Web Site Report in late 2004, nearly 6 months before the ruling, I thought for sure that expected changes in direct shipment would cause wineries to take a greater interest in their Web sites.  I felt positive that they'd be interested in seeing how effective their sites were for visitors, and that they'd be keenly interested in seeing how they compared to the thousands of other US-based winery Web sites.  After all, the market was both expanding (new states to ship to) and becoming more competitive (more wineries competing for your customer's dollars).

So far, however, we haven't seen the level of interest that I expected from wineries (despite a growing list of blog and newsletter subscribers -- thank you).  Even if wineries aren't eager to purchase a Report for their winery, I'm surprised that we don't get more questions from wineries about their sites (which I always try to answer - hint, hint).  Is everybody out there fat and happy?

As always, I'm interested in your thoughts, so please add your comment.  How has the Supreme Court ruling affected you as a winery or a consumer?  What do you see for the next year?

Do Update Your Home Page Each Month?

We advocate that once a year, wineries map out a 12-month schedule of monthly home page updates, based on holidays (e.g.Valentine's Day), annual events at the winery (Bob's annual poker tournament), seasonal events (e.g. harvest/crush), planned release dates, and regional/charitable events (among other things).

The idea is that every month, there is something new for visitors to see on your home page.  If you feature a wine on your home page as well, that makes a couple of new things for visitors to see every month.  Maybe even a special deal for site visitors.

Would any of our readers like to share their current schedule and/or how they do it?  Or why they don't do it?  Please add a comment or drop me an e-mail.

(If you're at a loss for ideas, Moldavia holds its National Wine Holiday on the second Sunday in October.  May is Paso Robles Wine Month, and October is Michigan Wine Month.  By some accounts, May 25th is National Wine Day in the US.)

Glass Closures and Virtual Tasting Rooms

I had heard about glass stoppers (yet another alternative to natural cork), but I have yet to encounter one in real life, so I found this Alcoa Closure Systems International glass stopper page to be interesting.  It's also a great example of how pictures can really enhance someone's understanding (what it's like to open a bottle using one of these closures, as well as a "cutaway view").

Ever thought of doing a "How We Make Our Wine" story-in-text-and-pictures for your site?  Sort of a virtual tour of your winery?  If, so, you might also be interested in Inertia's series on how to build a (virtual) tasting room on your Web site.

The Fermentation of Tom Wark

If you've ever wondered how Tom Wark (wine marketing maven and  FERMENTATION blogger)  got into the wine business (and how you might follow him), he's written a tell-all over at Wine Sediments: 
How I got into the wine business -- and how you can

It's a great, quick read for Sunday morning.

Thanks to Mark Fisher at Uncorked for the pointer.

Google AdWord(s) of the Day

Clever:

I did a Google search for pinot noir, and this was one of the Google AdWords displayed in the right column:

If Sideways is driving sales of Pinot Noir, and you make Merlot (which the character Miles disparaged with a few choice words), this is a clever way to leverage the effect positively.

Not so clever:

Interestingly, immediately above this ad is one from La Crema (another Pinot producer, located here in Sonoma County - I drive by it every day).  When I click on that ad, I get a browser window pointed to https://store.lacrema.com/ with the error message:

Could not connect to JRun Server

Glad I'm not paying for that!  I wonder how long it has been doing this, and how much longer before K-J's marketing or IT people notice it.

Saturday: Eventful Pourings

As you know, I try to save my somewhat-offbeat ideas for the weekend.  Today being Saturday, here's another one.

There's a new online service called Eventful.  It allows a group of people to express their desire ("Demand it!") for a particular event in a particular location (for example, a performance by Yo-Yo Ma in Austin TX).  The performer gets to decide how many people constitute "critical mass" (i.e. enough people to make the trip worthwhile).  To quote their Web site:

It directly connects you with the people who want to see you the most by giving you and them the tools to create demand and make events happen.

It could also function as a way for people in some location to express their desire for a visit from your winery.  Perhaps there's a bunch of your fans in Austin, or Boise, or Pensacola.  Although this is aimed at performers (and who says pouring isn't performance?), here's the scoop from Eventful on how to get started (and real-life examples of how Wil Wheaton kicked off his "demand me" program and how he arrived at what counted as  "critical mass").

This is a nifty idea because the people who will be attending these events have already sold themselves.  It's a way for your biggest fans to identify themselves.  Chances are, they'll tell their friends, which means new potential customers (with a built-in support group).

You may now return to your cuppa.

Friday Fun: Take the Screwcap Survey

Here's the story from Jancis Robinson: Please participate in this survey on screwcaps (link to survey in article)

The survey is the brainchild of Paul Tudor in New Zealand and seeks "wine professionals or anyone who draws some income from wine. I would like to obtain as many responses as possible from people working in the wine industry, covering everyone from the cellarhand right up to the winery owner. I am equally keen to hear from people involved in the wider wine trade, such as wine distributors, wine retailers, sommeliers, bar staff, wine journalists and educators. Anyone involved in making, selling or promoting wine should answer this survey. Please forward this request to your colleagues in the industry or to any email discussion lists, newsgroups or listservs [what about blogs?!] that you may belong to."

If you fit the bill, take the survey (I did - takes about 2 minutes)

New Winery Blog: Puccioni Vineyards

I read about Puccioni Vineyards in this California Wine and Food magazine article, and so I visited their home page.  Lo and behold, a navigation item labeled "Blog", which lead me to the Puccioni Vineyards - Mule News blog, written by Glenn Proctor (who along with his wife Laurie fronts the Puccioni organization).  Glenn's been blogging since February of 2006.

Puccioni (I'm just waiting to misspell that one!) is a very small producer of old vine Zin (their sold-out 2003 release was a mere 96 cases).  I hope that their blog evolves as the winery grows (230 cases of the 2004 release will be available in June).  The first five posts are promising.

As always, we've added Puccioni to our comprehensive list of winery blogs.

Consistency Counts

We added another winery Web site to our database today, and as I was looking at it, I noticed a more-common-than-not problem.  Call it "What is the real name of this winery?"

The winery in question is named either

• Puccioni Winery (of Healdsburg, CA), or
• Puccioni Vineyards

Puccioni Winery appears in the title bar of the browser (i.e. it's in the HTML <title> tag).  Worse, the same <title> tag is used for every page on the site.  Puccioni Vineyards seems to be the "real" name of this winery, based on the Web site address, the copyright notice, the blog, and references in the copy (mostly).

Am I just being anal-retentive?

No.  The <title> tags on your pages are important to both humans (visit some pages on the Puccioni site, and then look at your "history" and you'll see how confusing it is to have every page with the same title) and search engines (which favor words appearing in the <title> tags of your pages).

It's hard enough for people to remember the name of your winery, so consistency in the way you refer to yourself is important.

Effective Winery Web Sites: May, 2006

We just sent out the May issue of our trying-hard-to-be-monthly newsletter, Effective Winery Web Sites, with 10 steps to build site traffic, a reprint of our blog post on Google AdWords, and some details about what visits and visitors mean.

Did you get it?

If you think you subscribed, but didn't receive a copy, it may be because you didn't confirm your subscription.  As responsible e-mailers, we use "double opt-in", which means that after you say you'd like to subscribe, we send you an e-mail with a link that asks you to confirm your subscription.

We currently have 26 people who are missing out on their newsletter because they subscribed but didn't respond to the "confirm your subscription" e-mail.  And even though we know the e-mail addresses of those 26 people, we're not allowed to contact them by e-mail to ask "what happened?" (since that would be an unsolicited e-mail contact,, which our newsletter service forbids).

So, if you haven't subscribed, please do.  If you'd like to see the current issue before deciding, drop me a note.  If you think you subscribed, but didn't get anything in your e-mail inbox this morning, please re-subscribe and be sure you respond to the confirmation e-mail...or just send me an e-mail.  Thanks!!

MyStateWine.com

After reading yesterday's post about Oklahoma wines, you might want to use our list to answer the question "Where does www.MyStateWine.com point? "

For example, www.OklahomaWine.com doesn't point anywhere (although someone appears to own it).  www.AlaskaWine.com is for sale, as are others.  Some enterprising wineries have claimed entire states for themselves.  It might be worth checking to see what's available for your state (our list has links to MyStateWine.com, MyStateWines.com, and MyStateWineries.com).

What about .org, .biz, and .net versions of a domain name (which are not on our list)?

In the dot-com boom, companies would register the .com, .net, and .org versions of their domain name.  The .biz top-level domain (TLD) was recently added to the mix.  A .com TLD remains strongest, as consumers aren't really aware of the others, so you'll spend additional effort trying to get them to remember (and most likely fail, human nature being what it is).

Finding Wine in Oklahoma (and your state, too)

Thomas Jones, the webmaster for Oklahoma winery Nuyaka Creek and also the blogger behind Oklahoma Wine News commented on my post Your Home Page Shouldn't Scroll (he respectfully disagreed).  We exchanged some e-mails, and I found his comments on how people search for Oklahoma wineries worth sharing (particularly for wineries in states other than the Big Four: CA, NY, OR, WA).  So, with Thomas's permission:

...opinion and observations from running NuyakaCreek.com and working with my wife's business VineByDesign.com.

Most of the visitors to NuyakaCreek.com that Google and Yahoo! send our way are NOT searching on the name of the winery. Oklahoma Winery is the keyphrase I'm looking for. We do well on the phrase in most search engines.

You see, Oklahoma wineries are not well known enough for the majority of folks to know their names and that's fine.  They can't afford Super Bowl ads or even billboards during their first few years of business, so they buy a website from my wife. 

Local folks already want to visit our winery, they just don't know we exist yet. Luckily, they are a smart, affluent bunch and they Google often. Every day, I see around 60 to 100 unique Oklahoma residents searching for Oklahoma wineries they want to visit.  They want to taste the wines made in their state. If you make yourself visible, those wine tourists will come.Those searchers are my number one priority.

Also, our site pitches to a unique niche beyond wine tourists...herbalists. My dad makes an Elderberry wine that is unique in that it is made from 100% Elderberry juice. Many folks consider the elderberry to be an extremely valuable nutritional supplement. By creating a long wordy page on the health research that has gone into that idea, our site gets more global traffic and a nice bit of affiliate money.  Try the keyword Elderberry, we've been on page one for years. By far, the product is our most requested for shipping.

Of course, that is still not allowed by the corporate boot-licking toadies that make up Oklahoma's conservative government.

Thank you, Thomas, for allowing me to share your comments (I'll leave that last one for Tom over at FERMENTATION).

After reading this post, you might want to see if your winery shows up on the first page or two of results of a Google search for YourState wineries, e.g. North Dakota wineries.

Thomas's comments also point out:

• Your customers and potential customers rely on Google (our studies show 30-50% of search-based traffic comes from Google searches)
• the importance of being clear about shipping requirements up front, and
• differentiation can really pay off (elderberry wine, in this case).  OK, so you don't grow elderberries.  But what about becoming a top-ranked site for the search phrase health benefits of red wine by providing relevant information as Thomas has done for elderberries?  Note that this phrase has no AdWords associated with it, either.

Bottom line:  if your winery is outside the Big Four states, you may want to consider emphasizing location-based phrases (like Oklahoma Wine) in your content to gain visibility among people searching for wines from your state.

Update: one of the reasons that NuyakaCreek.com ranks well for a search on Oklahoma wineries is that they have a page devoted to "Okie wineries" (and the underscore in the URL helps search ranking).  It exemplifies the "we gotta stick together" ethic of many wineries - in states outside the Big Four, obscurity is likely a bigger danger than competition.  Are you confident enough to do what Nuyaka Creek has done?  Or at least point to your local association? Note: the Oklahoma Grape Growers and Wine Makers Association has a site at www.oklahomawines.org.

(Slightly Off Topic: I want to credit Cory Doctorow, who once said that "my biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy."  I've adapted that idea here.)

PS - If you're with a winery from other than a Big Four state, please leave a comment about how you do or don't use your location as a way of promoting your wines.  I'm sure other readers will be interested.

Art or Commerce?

This case study will be of interest to wineries doing e-commerce: prominently featuring a "secure shopping" logo on your pages (including your home page) increases conversion nearly 9% (includes links to screen shots).

"But it's ugly," you say, "and doesn't integrate with my elegant image of hand-crafted artisan wines.  Besides, I'm a winery, not a pet supply store." 

Well, it's your choice to give up potential sales (art vs. commerce).  I think the appearance issues can be mitigated somewhat (anyone have a good example?).  The similarity between selling wine and pet supplies online is a bit more tenuous, but this PETCO case study offers hard data from a sophisticated A/B test, which most wineries will be unable or unwilling to do on their own Web sites (A/B testing shows different layouts [A & B] to an equal number of visitors and gauges the results). It also underscores the importance of measurement in direct marketing, as opposed to trusting conventional wisdom or personal taste.

This is another example of great information from MarketingSherpa.com.  Warning: after a week you'll have to pay for this article, so be sure to print this one out!

Wineries Are (mostly) Small Businesses

Business Week interviews John Jantsch of the Duct Tape Marketing  blog who offers the three essential things that every small business needs to do when marketing:

1. Absolutely differentiate yourself from everyone
2. Embrace technology (no, I am not making this one up)
3. Leverage satisfied customers with referrals

How is your winery doing with Mr. Jantsch's essentials?

• How are you "absolutely" differentiating your winery from all the other wineries tcompeting for your customers' "wine dollars"?
• How could technology be applied intelligently to what you're trying to accomplish in your business?  (hint: ask a technologist)
• Are you really doing all you can to get your fans talking about your winery and wines to their friends?  (hint: what's in it for them?)

I'd love to read your answers in the comments.

Lenn does 50 in 50

Lenn Thompson is tasting a wine from each of the 50 states, one state each week for 50 weeks.

He's asked for recommendations.  In the comments to the post above, you can see some for wineries/wines in Massachusetts, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and even California (!!).

I'm willing to bet that the wineries mentioned will see some additional traffic to their Web sites as a result of those comments, as will the winery chosen each week.  Hopefully, those sites will turn visitors into friends and possibly customers.

I don't know if Lenn can be bribed, but if I owned a winery I would be sending Lenn a bottle of my best (I am not advocating violating state or federal law about shipping wine to New York, of course).

Saturday

If you didn't follow all the links in this post (Winery Blogs Reviewed), please go do it now.  Pajama Market did an excellent job of reviewing 5 winery blogs and interviewing 4 of the bloggers involved (I wish I'd thought of it!)

It's Saturday, so no excuses.  Pour yourself another cup of coffee and go read.

Treemaps for Wine

A treemap is a effective way of looking at multiple products with various characteristics (sound like anything familiar?).  It's a mosaic of rectangles where the size, color, and location of each rectangle means something.  Most on-line examples are interactive (i.e. when you mouse over the rectangles you get additional information about that data point).

Here's one for the complex data flow of the stock market: SmartMoney.com's Map of the Market (go play with it now).

Why mention a geeky thing like treemaps on a blog devoted to winery Web sites?  Take a look at this treemap representing the attributes 33 different coffees: Peet's Coffee Selector.  It's powered by The Hive Group's Honeycomb software.

Coffee is the new wine, they say.  Perhaps wineries can take a page from Peet's book.  Admittedly, this type of presentation is more appropriate to wineries with a broad variety of wines.

Further reading: 

A Directory of Treemaps from Jeremy Wagstaff who wrote the Wall St. Journal Online article that started all this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114617262390737926.html (subscription required, alas).

The definitive Treemap page at the University of Maryland.

Authentic Voice

That was the essence of my answer to the question

In your experience, what is the most important marketing skill a professional must master to be effective in the years to come?

posed by  Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman of Build A Better Blog, which they chose as the best response out of 250 they received (follow the link to read my full answer). 

The best winery blogs are great examples of people displaying an authentic written voice.  It can't be faked.

I'm pleased to have won, of course (especially since Patsi and Denise chose a great prize: an iPod Nano).  But credit really belongs to Seth Godin and Philip Nix, both of whom have taught me a lot about authenticity.

Your Home Page Shouldn't Scroll

That seems pretty Draconian, doesn't it?

Unfortunately,  the home pages of (winery) Web sites are typically cluttered affairs, which require a visitor to scroll and scroll and scroll to see everything.  Even our Top Ten winery Web sites from last year suffer from this problem: only two of them fit entirely on a single screen when running Internet Explorer under Windows XP on a 1024x 768 display (Clos du Val and Huntington).

Why should your home page be limited to what will fit on a single screen?  Because clutter is the biggest problem your site visitors face.  When they arrive on your home page, there are only two things they want to know:

1. Am I in the right place?
2. Where do I go to reach my goal?

If the answers to these two questions are not readily apparent, visitors are Back the way they came. 

Home pages become cluttered because "everything is important," and you're afraid of losing visitors because you didn't tell them everything. By making everything important, however, you make it much more difficult for your visitors to find the one thing that is important to them right now.

Your home page should address the goals of the four types of visitors to winery Web sites (buyers, browsers, the trade, the media) as succinctly as possible.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't engage them or tempt them to investigate further, but in this case, less is certainly much more.

If you have a cluttered home page, here's something to try.  Pare dramtically back (to a single page screen, even).  Give your new home page two weeks.  See if (a) anyone complains (and why), and (b) what happens to your site traffic.  Then go back to your old home page and apply what you've learned.  I'd be interested in hearing the results.

(Note:  you may not want to try this if you haven't already got a basic handle on your traffic, since otherwise, you have nothing to compare with.)

Feel free to disagree or add your point of view - that's why we enabled comments in our blog (even though it means managing the occasional bit of blog spam).

Award Winning E-Mail Campaigns

I hope your winery has a robust e-mail conversation going with your friends and fans.  Regardless, here are some award-winning e-mail campaigns from a variety of industries (based on response rates - which is the first measure of any direct marketing effort).  Sadly, none of the award winners are wineries, but nonetheless there are useful lessons to be had.

Awards were given for the following categories:

#1. Best Email Opt-in Campaign
#2. Best Email Newsletter for Marketing Purposes
#3. Best Email Alert
#4. Best Ad Campaign in 3rd-party Email Newsletter
#5. Best SIG (email signature)
#6. Best Welcome letter
#7. Best Autoresponder Series
#8. Best Automated Personalized Email (trigger-driven)
#9. Best Viral Email Campaign
#10. Best Postcard-Style Campaign
#11. Best Test You Learned From
#12. Best Non-Email Opt-in Messaging

If you don't know what these represent ("What's an autoresponder, Daddy?"), I encourage you to follow the link.  The list is courtesy of MarketingSherpa.com, which is a great resource for anyone doing online marketing because of their focus on case studies and real-life examples.  You can subscribe to their free newsletters in the upper-left hand corner of the page (I do). 

Pinot producers support Hospice of Sonoma

Here's an event you should definitely consider attending:

The Hospices of Sonoma is an entirely unique Pinot Noir event, modeled after the world-renowned Hospices de Beaune auction. Each November in Beaune, the Hospices de Beaune represents the new Burgundy vintage's first exposure to the public. Similar to the Hospices de Beaune, the Hospices of Sonoma auction is the only place in the world where the public can barrel-taste and bid on the most recent vintage Pinot Noirs from over thirty-five of the world's pre-eminent producers from the Sonoma Coast, Russian River Valley and Green Valley appellations.

May 19th through 21st, $75 (auction only) to $400 (full weekend pass).  Thanks to TR Elliott for the pointer.

Update: If you are a wine blogger, please considering posting about this event to your readership.  Thank you!

Thank you, Josh!

Thank you, Tom! (wow!)

Why your winery Web site is important

(Full article at eMarketer.)

RSS: it's not just for blogs (Top 11 RSS Marketing Methods)

From the current issue of Larry Chase's Web Digest for Marketers, here are 11 ways to use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to market your business:

1. Content Syndication
2. Press Information
3. Job Listings
4. Sales Notices
5. Special Offers
6. New Product Announcements
7. Customer Care Notices
8. Affiliate Notices
9. Product Uses and Tips
10. Calendar Updates
11. Podcast and Media Distribution

Nearly all of the 11 methods are applicable to wineries (see the article for more details about each of these methods, and the benefits they offer).

RSS is a way of describing updated information.  The description is called a "feed".  People who are interested in receiving those updates (for example, product recalls, weather updates, package tracking, schedule changes, or new events) can subscribe to a feed using an RSS reader.  Your RSS reader keeps track of updates to your subscriptions, so you don't have to do anything to stay current with the feeds you're interested in.

RSS is relatively easy to generate (you can even do it by hand, although that sort of defeats the purpose).  For example, blogging software generates RSS automatically. The key to using RSS successfully in marketing is to have a tool which automatically generates the necessary RSS for you (we're working on a project for the winery community right now).

(As far as I can tell, this article will eventually disappear -- WDfM doesn't archive its newsletters -- so read it now!)

What if...

Seth Godin likes to talk about purple cows (things which are remarkable because they are so different from the status quo).  He also refers to this as "going to the edge."  Here's an edge case for you to consider:

What if your winery only sold its wines online?

Goofy, but it raises some interesting questions if you're willing to take it seriously enough to play with the idea.  How would people taste it?  What about restaurants and retailers?  What about states that don't allow direct shipping?  How could you use this "quirk" to really distinguish your wine?  How good would your wine have to be?  What about shipping costs?  Does this only work for wineries of a certain size? And so on...

Is this any different than a winery that sells only to its mailing list?  Or a winery that sells only futures?  Both of which are taken as signs of excellence and exclusivity.

Extra credit: What if your (established) winery suddenly decided to sell exclusively online?  That would certainly get noticed.  Under what circumstances could you imagine doing that?  What might be the effect?

Here endeth the provocative Monday morning questions.  You may resume drinking your coffee.  Happy May Day!