Run a contest, using bloggers to promote it, says MarketingSherpa. And offer prizes to the bloggers who help publicize the contest.
In the example, the contest winner got a new Nintendo video game console. The blogger who referred them got an iPod shuffle, and the blogger generating the most newsletter signups got an iPod Nano.
The example above has absolutely nothing to do with selling wine, but the techniques used could work very well for a winery trying to build their mailing list. There are lots of blogs which probably target your demographic (other than wine blogs, which might see it as a conflict of interest). You might have to do a little legwork, though -- just like the folks in the example had to research "mommy bloggers" whose audience (moms) was the target demographic.
If the prize you're offering has a wine-related aspect (a fancy cork puller, a set of interesting wine books, ...), the likelihood that people entering the contest are potential customers goes way up. And your first newsletter to them should offer a deal to help encourage that potential.
(I'd recommend offering wine as a prize, but I'm sure there are 17 legal reasons why you can't...)
Do you have any list building tricks to share? Leave a comment!
PS - The article above is only free until April 1st, so print a copy of it if you find it worthwhile.
PPS - I recommend MarketingSherpa's free e-mail newsletters with case studies like the one above (subscribe here).
We've done a contest for a client (not quite like this... it was for a free draw for the actual subscriber) and we grew the email list from 1000 to over 8000 in a 2-3 month time period. So from a purely list growth perspective the contest worked great.
The problem we found was that the 7000 people who subscribed to the newsletter list were there just for the prize and not for the content. (They seldom opened the newsletter, didn't really click back, and never purchased anything). We ultimately dumped the majority of them from the list.
Not saying this happens everytime, and your idea about having bloggers refer people is more solid than just doing a free draw to the actual subscriber...
It's great to see more people start tracking and testing.
Posted by: Andrew Kamphuis | March 26, 2009 at 12:13 PM
And many states restrict giveaways anyway. You can discount a $100 wine to $0.05 with no problem but try to give away a pen and see what happens.
Posted by: Michael Brill | March 27, 2009 at 09:23 AM