The Winery Web Site Report

Lazy Sunday: Why Seth Godin Is Not On Twitter

Starting at the 4 minute, 17 second mark of this video interview:

You may want to watch the whole 7 minutes or so, or visit Seth's blog.

The Decline Of The Home Page

  

Gerry McGovern writes:

More and more customers are going straight to specific pages on your website, rather than the homepage.

Read the rest here.

And before you decide whether you agree with him, check the statistics for your site.  You should know which page on your winery Web site is most popular (here's why).

Split-Testing E-Mail Layouts

 

I'm just going to quote the e-mail I got from Anne Holland's Which Test Won?:

Can you guess which newsletter template got nearly 12% more clickthroughs? The changes are subtle, but they definitely made an impact. 

Let's face it, 95% of marketers probably don't bother to test their email templates ever ... even though email contributes significantly to the bottom line (especially considering its low cost.) This makes me nuts! 

Testing your email template is fairly quick, easy, and cheap. I hope this week's test inspires a few marketers to consider doing it. OK, my little rant is over.

Go, take the test, and be sure to sign up for her weekly newsletter/reminder.  It's fun (and educational) to see if you can pick the winner each week, and I'm sure it will give you some ideas for improving pages on your winery Web site.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

 

Do you know what percentage of visitors to your site put something in their shopping cart, but fail to complete the transaction, i.e. abandon their cart?

If you do, then a big hurray for you!  Take a look at How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment: 10 No-Brainers.  It's a great summary of things you should be doing to help customers complete their purchase.  I particularly like the last one about e-mail followup.

As for the rest of you: are you really serious about this whole wine e-commerce thing?  

Even if you're more focused on your tasting room sales, the same rule applies: you can't improve sales without somehow measuring the process.  How many people come into your tasting room?  How many buy something?  What does that correlate with?  How can we improve our numbers?

Tasting room abandonment, anyone?

Lazy Sunday: Lifehacker Does Wine

My pal Dave Goodman passed along this post from Lifehacker with a nifty Excel spreadsheet for rating wines.

And who could resist a bath mat made out of used corks!

Lifehacker ("tips and downloads for getting things done") is a blog worth following, even if it's not about wine most of the time.  Take a browse with your Sunday cup of coffee.  I'd be surprised if you don't find something worth the time.

New Winery Blogs, March 2010

Another month has passed, and there are new winery blogs to report:

• Alma Sol Winery
  http://www.almasolwinery.com/

• Morrison Family Winery
  http://morrisonwines.wordpress.com/

• RoxyAnn Winery
  http://myfriendsatroxyann.wordpress.com/

• Warwick Wine Estate
  http://blog.warwickwine.com/

As always, they've been added to my comprehensive list of winery blogs.  Please let me know of ones I've missed.

"My God, it's full of wineries!"

 

The US is full of wineries. According to Wines & Vines, there are now 6,589 US wineries (based on my experience with The Winery Web Site Report, probably half of them have Web sites).

76% make less than 5,000 cases a year (41% make less than a thousand).

How do you intend to stand out from the other 6,588 wineries?  You're all selling, in one form or another, fermented grape juice.

What's your unique, engaging story?

PS - the original quote was "My God, it's full of stars!"

Pay Attention To Your Permalinks

 

Lots of people use WordPress as a content management system (CMS).  It's a great tool, has an active user community, and it's free.

You can use it to run your blog or your whole Web site.  You can use it as a free hosted service at WordPress.com (with some limitations), or run the software yourself (many Web hosts offer it pre-installed as part of a hosting package).  One thing, though, is you still kinda need to read the manual if you want to maximize its value as a tool for marketing your winery and wines.

I was reminded of this while looking at Wine Industry Insight.  The "permalink" (URL) of a post at wineindustryinsight.com looks like this:

 http://wineindustryinsight.com/?p=10476

This is the default, and its format is a dead giveaway that WordPress is in use.

A better format for this permalink, one which could increase the search engine ranking for this post, might be something like:

 http://wineindustryinsight.com/2010/04/07/wine-industry-news.html

since search engines tend to pay attention to keywords in a URL.

Fortunately, WordPress allows you to control how your permalinks will appear.

One thing to watch out for: if you change the permalinks for existing posts, you need to create permanent redirects (HTTP 301s) for the old URLs if you want to preserve the current search engine rank/information about those pages.

This is why it's important to set up your permalinks correctly from the get-go.

Conspicuous Consumption

A thought-provoking essay on luxury goods from Seth Godin.

It might not be a better price than what you could buy at Target, but the very fact that you can pay for an artisan to create it, an artist to design it, a talented worker to bring it to life--that act makes a powerful statement about what you can afford and what's important to you.

Worth your time to read, particular for "artisanal" winemakers and marketers.

Breakthrough Customer Service In Your Tasting Room

I've never been to Everything Wine, a retail wine superstore in British Columbia, but this blog post from Fast Company is worth a read, as is this MarketingProfs post which directed me to the FC post and is better organized.

Three years ago, after retiring as President of Diageo, Paul purchased two small retail wine stores, and turned them two into wine super stores. He’s now planning on opening a third store at the end of July.

If you have a tasting room at your winery, it's well worth a read.

In the comments on the FC post, one person places "value the customer" as the primary rule.  Another embraces "value the employee."  What do you think?

American Wine Blog Awards

Nominations are now open at wineblogawards.com.

If you think The Winery Web Site Report meets the specified criteria, I would appreciate your nomination for Best Single Subject Wine Blog (it probably also fits in the Best Industry/Business Wine Blog category, but I was intimidated by the blogs already in the nominations).

As they say, it's an honor just to be nominated.  I'm totally realistic about my chances of winning.

Regardless of whether you decide to nominate this blog, please take a moment to look at the categories and participate!

Inside A Wine Scam

I'm playing working with my brand-new iPad (remember my post about iPads for winery tasting rooms?) today, so I'm going to re-direct you to this well-written and interesting series from Mary Baker at Central Coast Wine Blogs as she takes us through the mechanics of an actual wine scam:

• Introduction: Inside a Wine Scam
• Part I: How the Wine Scam Works
• Part II: The 'John Nelson' Letters
• Part III: "It ain't TV, lady."
• Part IV: Who's in Your Wallet?
• Part V: The Worm Turns
• A Final Note About Money Orders

I learned a lot from her posts, and I certainly admire Mary's detective abilities.  She's done a real service to all the small businesses (not just wineries) targeted by these scammers.

And yes, Virigina, there really is an Alfalfa County in the state of Oklahoma.  You can't make this stuff up.

Now go read it (and pass it along to your local winery association members).

Lazy Sunday: Bricks to Wine

I would think that winning this contest would be a walk in the park for people who sell fermented grape juice for a living.

And if you won, think of the free publicity!  Especially if you're these guys.

(I saw the contest a couple days ago, but it took Steve Heimoff's post to see the connection to the winery business.)

Dilbert On Your Winery Web Site

Today's strip made me chuckle (click to embiggen):