The Winery Web Site Report

Why Most Winery Websites Stink

I didn't write it, but what a terrific title!

It comes from the Washington Wine Report, run by Sean P. Sullivan.  And here's the money quote:

90-95% of winery websites stink because they say little about the winery and even less about the wines. They provide largely generic information rather than specific information about who you are and what differentiates your winery.

The post also points out that most winery websites aren't up-to-date, something I've mentioned before.

The comments (36 at last count) are interesting.  Someone points out that the Washington Wine Report website ain't all that great either, which may be true, but is irrelevant to the author's point.  What prevents most wineries, regardless of size, from having an attractive, distinctive site which meets the needs of visitors?

One commenter (JJ) had this thoughtful contribution, which is worth quoting:

Many of the real small wineries simply do not have the time or money to spend on getting every last detail on their website. With web-development costs often into the triple-digits per hour, you can see how the average startup might take a bare-bones and minimally updated approach, particularly if they make more than a handful of wines. Bloggers are by design the generators of their own content, but oftentimes winery folks do not have the skills and/or means necessary to generate meaningful content, which means they’ve got to pay someone else to do it. You’ve got to sell wine in order to pay for things like a website, but without a nice website it’s harder to sell wine. It's obviously a conundrum, and I'm sure that many winemakers put off spending all of that time and money out of frustration that they have to spend so much time and money to make it happen. Perhaps it's not the savviest decision, but it's certainly a reality in the industry. 

And yet somehow, some (small) wineries *do* have nice websites.  What's their secret?  Inquiring minds want to know, so leave a comment...

PS - the person holding their nose in the picture is not Sean P. Sullivan.

Why A/B Testing Is Like Sex In High School

 

I felt a little silly about having posted yesterday about A/B testing results for wine products,  because I'm pretty sure that most wineries (since most wineries are small wineries) aren't doing A/B testing.

Number one reason?  They have no idea how to do it.  Followed closely by "no time to do it."

Serendipitously, this post from CopyBlogger showed up the same day: Why Split-Testing is Like Sex in High School.  Despite the headline, it's a nice little tutorial on split (or A/B) testing.  If your website is based on Wordpress, there's even a handy tool to help you.

In order to do A/B testing, you need some way to measure things.  So, the first step is to make sure you have some sort of analytics package installed on your website.  Google Analytics is free and more than overkill for most winery websites.

What's the first page on your website you should A/B test?  Probably the most popular page on your site, where you should be trying to lower the bounce rate.  Again, you'll need some sort of measurement tool to tell which page that is.

Got questions about A/B testing or Google Analytics?  Leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer it.

A/B Testing: A Wine Example

Many of you know about A/B testing on websites: showing one of two versions (A and B) of a given page to visitors, and seeing which one generates a better result.

The ElasticPath e-commerce blog, GetElastic (recommended), has a nice post about A/B testing for wine, complete with a real-life example of a wine product page.  The results are, to say the least, interesting (and counter-intuitive).

We'd all like to think we know best when it comes to what appeals to website visitors (and, in my experience, wineries are particularly guilty in this regard), but testing reveals the (sometimes surprising) truth about what drives visitors to take action.

If you have an A/B testing story to share, please do so in the comments.

Update: here's a link to the full case-study documenting a 41% lift in revenue per visitor.

An SEO Guide for Wineries

It looks like Snooth is doing a series entitled SEO Guide for Wineries on their blog.  The first few posts are up:

• Part 1: So You Want to SEO Your Winery's Website
• Part 2: Not All Content Is Created Equal
• Part 3: Understand the Engines
• Part 4: Express Your Authority (added 2011-07-29)
• Part 5: HTML is The Language of the Web (added 2011-08-12)
• Part 6: How Do Search Engines Read Websites? (added 2011-10-15)

I'll update this post as additional entries arrive.

Thanks to Mark Angelillo, Snooth's Chief Technical Officer, for taking on the task of demystifying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for those in the wine trade.

JAX Vineyards Web Site: A Review (of sorts)

I wrote this on 1 April 2010, but evidently never pressed the Publish button.  We apologize for the delay...

My most-excellent designer friend, Jason Reed, took the time to write me a note about the JAX Vineyards Web site:

Wow- http://jaxvineyards.com/

Wonder who designed it?

This is pretty effusive praise from Jason. which intrigued me.  So, I wrote to Kimberly Jackson, who along with her brother Trent, owns the winery and asked.  She told me that it was designed by Nicholas Masias.

I also asked Jason what he liked so much about it:

What's not to like?

1. It's very easy to figure out where to get their wines, both online and in restaurants.
2. It focuses on the bottle/label, helping you to identify the wine "in the wild".
3. They show the bottle in an "active" state- the cork is open, some of it has been drunk, there are cookies next to it - as if you've already engaged with the bottle.
4. It's memorable, and unique, and beautifully laid out. Bonehead simple, airy and open. It looks like no other wine site I'm aware of.
5. Contact information is easily found.

I mostly agree, except for #5 (you have to scroll down to the very bottom to find the contact information, which IMHO should be at the top of the page for quick reference when using the Web as a phone book).

ZMOT

I hate this phrase: Zero-Moment of Truth (ZMOT).  It's advertising-speak of the worst sort.

On the other hand, I love this quote:

When consumers hear about a product today, their first reaction is ‘Let me search online for it.’And so they go on a journey of discovery: about a product, a service, an issue, an opportunity...

which aptly summarizes the challenge facing wineries (and lots of other businesses as well) today.

Google is promoting a free 75-page ebook called, not suprisingly, The Zero Moment of Truth, which you can download as a PDF.  Chapters 1 (Changing the Rulebook), 2 (The New Mental Model), and 6 (How to Win at ZMOT) are the most useful, but it's a quick read (you can safely skip the foreword, though).

Chapter 6 offers 7 steps for "winning at ZMOT" (another cringe-worthy phrase), which I hope will entice you to take a look at the details:

1. Put Someone in Charge
2. Find Your Zero Moments
3. Answer the Questions People Are Asking
4. Optimize for ZMOT
5. Be Fast
6. Don’t Forget Video
7. Jump In!

Smart winery marketers will download a copy of this book and think deeply about how it applies to selling more of their wines.  The rest of you can proceed with business-as-usual.