Email: The Biggest ROI for Wineries

You're busy - there are a million things to do today on top of selling your wine. So, where do you focus? Where should you spend time to get the biggest bang for your buck - or in your case, ROI?

It's simple. If you're going to focus on selling more wine, focus on one email - this should be the email sent to your first time purchasers.

There's no magic - but there are a ton of stats that back this up. Of all the emails you can send, the email that targets customers who have only bought once is the most effective by far. With an average open rate of 59.2%, it outperforms any other emails you send.

Let's take a step back. Looking at general emails - the open rate is about 28.9%. These are your newsletters, club emails and events. This is a decent open rate vs. comparable industry averages.

Going deeper, if you send highly targeted emails that are very personalised, the open rate jumps from 28.9% to 40.5%. Meaning that emails that speak to their recipients outperform the mass newsletters or promotional emails sent. Consumers want to be treated as a person with individual needs, not as a group of people who might be interested in similar things. Highly targeted email examples would be a birthday message, club anniversary, thanks for tasting with us, or rate the wine you just bought.

From these personalised emails - the best performing one is the targeted email sent to first time purchasers. The purchase could be from the cellar door, website, farmer's market or anywhere you sell. Consumers will open this email 59.2% of the time - or in another way to look at it, 6 out of 10 people will open this email.

These people bought from you and like your wine, and there a huge opportunity to turn them into repeat purchasers. First, make sure the cellar door staff are capturing email addresses for every purchase - in the cellar door, via phone, or at an event. Ringing in wine without any customer information stops the relationship. Wineries in the top 20% of DTC performers are paying their staff anywhere from $0.50 to $1.00 per email every time their staff collects an email. These wineries understand the value of turning that consumer into someone that will buy again and again.

These are the top 4 things to say in a 'first time purchaser' email:

1. Thank them for their visit and/or initial purchase.

2. Recognise that they are a first time buyer.

3. Solicit feedback.

4. Give incentives to buy more.

Below is a good example of a first time purchaser email. It definitely hits all four points.