The Winery Web Site Report

Crushpad's Bailout

What wine goes with a financial meltdown?  Bailout Wine, of course.  Buy this Napa Cabernet at $39 a bottle, and you get $2 back for every 100 points the down drops from that point until bottling on August 14, 2009.  If the Dow drops 1500 points, you'll get a $30 refund.

Of course, if the Dow drops 1500 more points, you'll need a drink.

And if you buy a case, they'll throw in a free T-shirt.

(I'd like to think they got the idea from me)

Response Time

Here's a post about how long it took some wineries to respond to an e-mail query about whether a particular bottle was ready to drink.  The wineries involved were Tobin James Cellars, Grgich Hills Estate, and Frank Family Vineyards.  Response time varied from 90 minutes to over four days.  Not a scientific test, but surely an interesting result.

(as a side note, Grgich prominently mentions their Facebook group on their home page)

Have you tested your winery's response time to e-mail queries?  You should.  In fact, it's something you should monitor on a regular basis.

How long do you think it should take to get a response to an e-mail question about drinkability?  Please leave a comment!

(PS - if you haven't already done so, please take my one-question survey)

Call for Wine

My friend Edward asked me if I knew anything about Call for Wine.  They specialize in "high-quality professional outbound telesales, exclusively for the wine industry."  I hadn't heard of them, but I found their "how we got started" story interesting:

Founder Mark Parton was lying on his couch in Chicago a few months after a Sonoma vacation, when the phone rang. Armida Winery was calling. Mark had joined their wine club during his visit and was happy to get the call.

I thought it was really nice that they called me. It sort of made me feel like I was part of the winery. Parton said during a recent interview. I also bought wine they were offering on special.

Parton, who has run telemarketing call centers for consumer direct sales of technology items, began wondering why the five other wine clubs he'd joined didn't call. Sensing an opportunity, Parton and his wife were soon packing up their car and moving to California wine country. Call for Wine, five years old this year, now has a customer list that has grown to 15 wineries. His operation has moved from the kitchen table to offices with space for 30 telesales reps.

"You can pretty much outsource everything," Edward points out.  True enough, but you want to ensure that the quality and attentiveness remain high, particularly when it involves interacting with customers.

Would you use Call for Wine?  Why or why not?  Leave your vote in the comments.

Regardless, maybe you should be thinking about how to follow up with new/current customers by phone.  Something to think about on a Sunday morning.

(PS - If you like premium Napa Cabs, take a minute and go join Edward's mailing list)

The Value of Optimizing Your Web Site

The ubiquitous Google, which has a free product called  Google Website Optimizer, just announced the four winners of the "Website Workout "contest they ran last year, with some impressive results:

For example, by changing the layout of their product page, Colonial Candle was able to increase the number of candles they sold by 20% and improve sales by $20,000 in one month.

If you happen to care about making your winery Web site a sales machine, you may want to watch this 2.5 minute Colonial Candle video:

(or, you can watch all four Website Workout videos, one about each of the winners.)

At least, click through on the announcement to see the before and after pictures of the Colonial Candle site.  It may surprise you (I say this, having looked at a lot of winery sites).

Two take-aways:  Investing time in optimizing your site conversion is worthwhile, and, your intuition about what works (or doesn't work) is probably wrong.

How do you approach testing and optimization of your winery Web site?  Share a comment.

Something To Shout About: A Checklist

If my wines were listed here or here, you can bet that I would do all of the following:

1. Create a high-quality image of the bottle with the award (suitable for the media to use)
2. Update the front page of my Web site  
3. Update the product page(s) for my award-winning wine(s) 
4. Write a post for my winery blog
5. Tweet the news to my followers on Twitter 
6. Send an e-mail to my mailing list 
7. Make sure I mention it in my next newsletter 
8. Do a press release (along with a nice bottle+award image)
9. Let my distributors, retailers, and restaurant know about it with a updated product PDF and shelf-talkers
10. Make sure that everyone in the tasting room knows about it (employees and visitors)

In every case, you have the opportunity to make a special offer to the people you are contacting.  For example, people who have already bought the wine might want to add to their cellar.

I can almost bet, though, that most of the award-winners won't do any of  these things.

Winning an award isn't just a time to feel good, it's an opportunity to advance your brand.

(Thanks to the Harney Lane blog for inspiring this post)

Your Winery Concierge

This is a very cool idea from Donati Family Vineyard: offer to facilitate travel itineraries for your wine club members for free (and others for a $40 fee).  Watch the 98-second video:

It encourages your biggest fans (i.e. your wine club members) to visit and buy wine, encourages non-club members to join and, most of all, it builds a deeper relationship between your winery and  those who use the service (and probably increases your standing in the local business community as well).

For people who would like to visit your winery (and those nearby), but don't want the hassle of trip planning, this is a no-brainer.

And the offer itself is particularly attractive, since joining the wine club is free and only obligates you to one two-bottle shipment of wine, which is probably about the same as the $40 you'd pay as a non-member for this service.

I think it's a great idea -- what do you all think?  If not for your winery alone, how about for your local association?

PS - I think that they should allow each wine club member to give this service as a free gift to one special friend. Doing so encourages them to evangelize others (and makes them look like cognoscenti).

Lazy Sunday: Next Christmas Is Coming

I was just noticing that Wine.com has "Business Gift Services" in their main navigation.  That means (among other things) that they think this is an important source of business, else why give that prominence to it?

It reminds me of one year that senior executives in my company were given a cast of Stag's Leap Cabernet for Christmas by the CEO.  It was a memorable gift, which (in my youth and naivete) I drank all too quickly.

It also reminds me how the Wall Street Journal writers Gaiter and Brecher suggest a case of mixed wine as a special holiday gift.

How many of your regular customers are CEOs or company owners?  How many of them might consider giving a case of your best wine for Christmas next year?  Particularly if you remind them next year (and maybe offer something special, like gift wrapping or personalization or a nice price or a mixed case)?

Take 5 minutes to ponder this with your Sunday coffee, and place a reminder in your datebook for next October: Christmas is Coming!

Wine.com Offers Unlimited Shipping For $50

For $50 a year, a Wine.com customer can have all the wine they buy shipped to them at no additional cost.  And there's no minimum order.

Read more about Wine.com's Steward-Ship^TM program.  Normally, Wine.com prices standard shipping at $8.95 an order, plus $1.00 a bottle, so a case would cost $21 to ship.  So customers who expect to buy more than two cases (or 5 individual bottles) a year are going to want to sign up for this offer.

Unlimited shipping is a great tactic to get people to buy more from you online.  Something you might want to consider for your own online e-commerce activities.

Lazy Sunday: That Internet Thing

It made me really happy to read the conclusions to Steve Heimoff's latest post, especially this one:

Figure out alternatives to the three-tiered system and how to market and sell direct, and not just through the old tasting room, but through the Internet. You may not understand cyberspace, but your kids or grandkids do.

I've always been a little disappointed that the customized Winery Web Site Report (which was the genesis of this blog) never got traction, but it became quite clear that an effective Web presence was not a point-of-pain for most wineries.

Maybe that's about to change.  Regardless, take five minutes with your Sunday morning hot beverage and read Mr. Heimoff's lucid post on the wine industry's unpalatable truths.

59 Percent

59 percent of small businesses do no paid search marketing.  That means that, all things being equal, 59 percent of wineries don't do it either.

For example, take a look at the paid ads that show up when you Google pinot noir (I'm pleased to see my friends at Inman Family Wines are experimenting with this method of increasing sales).  What shows up when you Google for the varietals you produce or your brand names?

Are you part of the other 41 percent?  Leave a comment!

Lazy Sunday: Selling High-Priced Wine Online

Online stores selling $9.99 shoes are different in every way from stores selling $349.99 shoes.  The same thing most likely applies to wineries selling wines in the $75-and-up price range.

Take 5 minutes of your morning coffee to read eCommerce: What If Your Product Is Not So Simple?

The bottom line is to remember that for every sale of a $75 wine online, you may be missing many more because most people don't spend $900 on a case of wine without a little bit of thought.  Don't forget to capture enough information to stay in contact and make the sale.  For all the controversy, Rockaway did  a great job of launching and selling their high-end wine.

(My favorite thing about the Rockaway site is their use of "Acquire" instead of the more mundane "Buy."  This shows excellent understanding of their target market.)

Free Shipping

Free shipping is a powerful motivator to online shoppers.  When Amazon finally rolls out its wine program, members of its Amazon Prime program will get free shipping of wine.

Are you missing out on online wine sales by not offering free shipping?  The Free Shipping eBook seeks to help merchants increase profits with free shipping.  And it's free.

(from Rich Page)

Let's Talk: Social Media for Small Business

Interested in using that "social media thing" for your winery marketing?

Microsoft is offering a free download of a 23-page e-book entitled Let's Talk: Social Media for Small Business, written by John Jantsch of the Duct Tape Marketing blog.  It covers blogging, RSS, social search, social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook), social bookmarking, and microblogging (Twitter).

Although Microsoft is offering the book to promote Microsoft Office Live Small Business, the book makes almost no mention of Microsoft, so I can recommend it without reservation.

Lazy Sunday: Social Media

This is a bit long for a Lazy Sunday post, but since not everyone is interested in social media as part of their winery marketing program (Lazy Sunday being reserved for things which some readers may find less interesting), I'm leaving it here.  It's OK to read it on Monday.

Social Media is loosely defined as media which take advantage of user participation and user-generated content (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, wikis, Tumblr, Digg, YouTube, etc., etc.).

Why Your Competitors Are Keeping Customers and Gaining New Ones Through Social Media

has interesting details about a company that cut its advertising budget by 80 percent when the company turned to social media over traditional advertising.

I must also point to Tim Elliott's ACAN Media blog (a social media approach to wine marketing), Udi Barone's BeesAndWine.com (helping wineries use MySpace), Twisted Oak's El Jefe, who Twitters more than any winery I know, and the folks at Inertia who regularly blog about social media.

Donati Family Vineyards has a social media site in addition to their main Web site, created by MyVineSpace.com (the underlying platform is Ning, a Web-based roll-your-own-social media-site service).

Of course, CellarTracker may be the best example of a popular, wine-related social media site.  If you're curious about what real people (not critics, but wine enthusiasts nonetheless) are saying about your wines, CellarTracker can be an enormous resource.  Go to the CellarTracker home page and search for your winery (e.g. Emeritus) in the search box at in the upper left corner (under the CellarTracker corkscrew logo).

(Also, see my previous post on using Twitter to track people's experiences with your wine.)

If you're interested in the use of social media to promote your winery, you may also find this list of interest: What Blogs Should You Be Reading?

What is your winery doing with social media?  Tremendous boon or waste of time?  And if you're a winery on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace, leave a comment.

A Holiday Gift For Your Fans

How about a nice calendar with either photos or label images from your wines (and, of course, a picture of the winery dog)?  Easy to make, not terribly expensive, and (done right) a chance to subtly remind your fans about your winery every single month of the year.

 

It's also an idea that a winegrowing association could take up on behalf of member wineries to promote their region.  Of course, it might help to have fewer than 12 wineries, otherwise it could get ugly.

(idea from Paperback Writer)

This Could Have Been Your Winery...

Hats off to the smart marketers at Kendall-Jackson.  They just got a bundle of free publicity for their wines (just Google kendall-jackson obama wine), all from a simple press release.

Keep your eyes open for opportunities to promote your wine in conjunction with the news!

Why Selling Wine is Hard

Seth Godin posts  Don't Sell to Bar Owners, something that, despite its odd title, has relevance to winery owners and sellingwine:

The universal lesson is this: every business has customers. In order to grow, you either need to sell more to those customers or find new customers....The biggest problem marketers make is misjudging their audience. The see the size of the market, but not its true nature: Their accessibility and eagerness. Their worldview and motivation.

You've really got to find the 1,000 True Fans of your winery, the market that is eager for what you have to sell.

Get Your Landing Page Makeover (Cheap!)

What's a Landing Page, you ask?

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

Wouldn't you like that page to work harder for you?  Well, for the price of a bottle of wine (donated to Heifer International), Roberta Rosenberg will do a Landing Page Makeover with you.

Let me know if you take her up on her offer.

(And really, unless your wine retails for $100 a bottle or more, you should probably kick in a little extra to the good folks at Heifer International.   A good critique of your site is worth at least that much, more if you actually do something with it!)

PS - she's making the same Makeover offer for marketing plans.  You've got one of those, right?

(via Copyblogger)

Wine Bloggers or Wine Evangelists?

This post (about Pepsi reaching out to marketing bloggers) raises a good question about wineries reaching out to wine bloggers:

If you're a company watching all this unfold or looking back at similar campaigns from companies like Nikon and Stormhoek, keep in mind...you'll probably get more bang for your buck (and have an easier time getting coverage) if you focus on reaching out to the people who either already love your brand or who are representative of your target audience.

Certainly wine bloggers can make people aware of your wine, but you also need to target "wine evangelists": people who love your wine and want everyone to know about it.

How do you create/identify your wine evangelists?   More about that next week...

Marketing Thought For The Day

From the [non]billable hour:

The single best marketing strategy in the world is to find your best clients and ask them, "How do I get more clients like you?"

Involve your best customers in helping you find new customers ("We'll send a free bottle of our wine to someone you recommend").  Let your best customers know that you know who they are, and are glad to have them, and respect their opinions.

I'll never forget the free coffee mug that Amazon sent me one year (back when they were young and struggling), just because I ordered a lot of books that year.

Your Winery Tribe

Seth Godin has a new { marketing, leadership } book out: Tribes (which some think may be his best book yet, and that's saying somethin').

A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

The key for wineries is that your 1,000 True Fans (and even those who aren't True Fans but still like your wines) can be a tribe.  The shared interest is already present: your wines.  You should be thinking about how to help your tribe to communicate.

Best of all for busy winery owners, it's a short book (and you can get the audio book on iTunes for 99 cents, or for free if you register for Audible.com).