The Winery Web Site Report

Virtual Wine for Real People?

You can send virtual gifts from 1-800-Flowers to your Facebook friends.  It's called virtual gifting, and as this article points out, virtual goods allow people to interact with your brand at little or no expense.

I'm sort of surprised that giving a virtual bottle of wine hasn't surfaced on some winery's Facebook fan page yet.  As you can see from the 1-800-Flowers fan page above, it's not tremendously complicated.  And it would be cool to send a very expensive bottle of wine as a virtual gift, since 12 grand is a little out of my price range.  (K&L, are you listening?)

Virtual wine gifts don't require Facebook.  Something quite similar (and possibly even better) can be done on your winery's Web site today with e-mail and a little clever design.  It's really only a more imaginative way of doing "tell a friend."  It's just that social media (like Facebook) makes us more prone to thinking about giving gifts to our friends.

What do you think?

New Winery Blogs, February 2010

It's almost April, and I just noticed that I'd forgotten to mention new winery blogs that have come to my attention.  Here are the ones that showed up last month:

• Isaak of Salem
  http://blog.isaaksofsalem.com/

• Millbrook Vineyards & Winery (Millbrook Musings)
  http://www.millbrooksmusings.blogspot.com/

• Oliver Winery
  http://oliverwinery.wordpress.com/

• ROCO Winery
  http://rocowinery.com/wp/?m=201001

• Vinos Ambiz
  http://vinosambiz.blogspot.com/

As always, please let me know of any winery blogs I've missed, so I can add them to The List.

Improve Your Winery Web Site: The Interview

Mary Baker of Central Coast Wine Blogs interviewed me on the subject of winery Web sites, turning it into a three-part series on her blog:

How to Improve Your Winery Website (Mary's own thoughts on the subject - a great read)

Improve Your Winery Website: An Interview with Mike Duffy

Top 5 Winery Website Mistakes

Five Top Things Every Winery Website Should Have

I'd be grateful if you'd take the time (just a few minutes, really) to read through the interview.  As always, your comments are welcome (and appreciated).

Hello There

If you've arrived here today via Mary Baker's Central Coast Wine Blog, welcome!

I hope you'll take a moment to look through some of my recent posts. If you find it interesting, please consider subscribing to my blog, either via e-mail or my RSS feed.

Thanks again for stopping by!

For my regular readers, here's a link to the first post in Mary's three-part interview with me.

The Millennier

What do you mean you've never read it?

If you're wondering who you'll be selling wine to when every one in your club has died off, go read Leah Hennessy's blog about marketing wine to Millennials.

That is all.

On The Value Of Omniscience...

Consider this: for every person who has purchased wine from you, you *know* what they bought:

Dear Ralph:

Remember that '97 Acme Winery Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon you bought three years ago? Now might be a good time to drink it.  Just sayin'.

Sincerely,
 The Acme Winery Team

PS - the 2009 vintage is now available, and because you bought the '97, we have a little surprise for you...

This is the tremedous power of data.  And you're the only one who has it.

Just sayin'.

The winePad

 

Want to increase the number of e-mail signups in your tasting room?

May I suggest a simple, sexy iPad application instead of those annoying little postcards?  

I can guarantee that anyone who visits your tasting room will want to pick up and play with the iPad.  Why not capitalize on that?

Plus, some of that Apple mojo rubs off on you by association.  (Do wine drinkers use PCs or Macs?)

(I was just reading that Apple reportedly sold 120,000 iPads on the first day they were available for pre-order.)

PS - if you'd like such an application for your winery, please contact me ASAP.

Your Credit Is Waiting

Here's an interesting way to encourage repeat orders.  Rather than offering a discount, offer a credit.

An added bonus of the credit idea is you are not reducing the perceived value of your products by reducing the price. Rather, you are selling at full price (and full value) and giving the customer virtual dollars to spend. Sales are boring, and “come back and we’ll give you 10% off something” is overdone and not that exciting.

There's even a sample e-mail for you to copy.

Like I said yesterday, maybe all you need is One Good List.

One Good List

At the end of the day, maybe all you need is your customer's e-mail address.

Which makes it even more important to encourage your winery visitors to sign up (read the comment thread).

A day or two after I wrote the two sentences above, I saw this comment over at Steve Heimoff's blog:

It is really shocking to me the number of wineries that make no effort to collect email addresses from tasting room visitors and, further, even those that do seldom use them! I was recently visiting a high end ($50-100/bottle) Sonoma County winery; purchased a couple of bottles, but no one even asked for an email address! Wouldn’t they like to sell me more wine? Are there really so many customers in this price range that they can afford this attitude?

Steve referenced the comment above in this post (item 3, "Wineries are starting to fall like dominoes"), and I was so amazed by it that I took the time to look up the original comment from Diane Thompson.

Winery Social Media Question of the Day

If someone visits your winery and checks into FourSquare or Gowalla, or even just tweets about being there, do you know about it right away?  What chances to be awesome (and talked about) are you missing out on?

Here are some more ideas on How to Use Surprise to Generate Word-of-Mouth.

Text Messaging, or SMS and Your Winery

This is a great quick read on ways in which businesses can make effective use of text messaging (also known as SMS, for Short Message Service): Are You Utilizing Text Messaging?

Regardless of whether you're currently making use of texting as a winery marketing tool, take a look.

And remember, Twitter = broadcast text messaging, i.e. a single text goes to lots of people ("followers" in Twitter parlance).

Lazy Sunday: Wine For Dummies?

I was surprised to see how many wine-related titles there are on this list of all the For Dummies books (in order of popularity): 

• Wine For Dummies *
• Wine All-in-One For Dummies
• French Wine for Dummies *
• Italian Wine for Dummies *
• California Wine For Dummies *
• White Wine for Dummies *
• Canadian Wine for Dummies

The "All-in-One" combines all of the starred titles in one book.  Reflecting the growth of interest in certain wine regions,  Australian & New Zealand Wine For Dummies will be released on March 18, 2010.

(Just to put wine books in perspective, the best-selling For Dummies book has an Amazon sales rank of 413.  Wine For Dummies is ranked 13,943rd.)

In contrast, the Complete Idiot's Guide series has only a couple of titles related to wine:

• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine Basics, 2nd Edition
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Winery

I've purchased the latter title, and will review it in a few days with respect what it says about a startup winery's online presence.  It appears, however, you must be a complete idiot, and not merely a dummy, to start a winery. <grin>