Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything

This is one of a series of posts on wine email marketing:

• Responsive Lists are Better
• Double Check with Double Opt-In
• Paranoid ISPs
• Personalize, Everything
• Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics

Have a customized Thank You / Subscription Confirmed page

Most companies just have something like “Thank you for subscribing”.

Instead, immediately “pounce” on this consumer interest and encourage sales with an offer – perhaps a time-limited coupon. Show a popular wine brand and/or a super exclusive one with an Add to Cart Button right beside it.

Always personalize your emails – both ways

People are much more likely to response to real people not computers

• your From field should be name@YourStore.com not do-not-reply@YourStore.com
• your email should start with Dear (or Hi, Hey, Howdy) first-name, easily done through email marketing software

Have a Text Plan B

Send out html emails by all means. However keep them simple and make sure you have text as well as images. The classic email mistake is a fancy image-only email as it will never be shown to people who block images in their email Inbox (e.g. gmail users). It’ll be a blank email – not the best way to get response…

Also html emails can come out poorly formatted with silly backgrounds that show no text.

My preference is to use text for B2B emails, and limit html in B2C (to just shots and your logo). You then refer people to a web page to see a perfectly formatted landing page on your website.

Regularly send out emails

An email is an attempt at maintaining and building a customer relationship. If you don’t regularly say or offer something interesting then that relationship will just wane away. If you’re good at writing (or podcasts or videos) then once a week is great, otherwise no less than once a month. The rule of thumb is to not expect any action until you’ve contacted someone 7 times.

Send a little bit of content a lot, rather than a long email a little

People hate long emails (and posts, I better finish this one soon ). You also want one message per email. So take each idea and send it out separately in a few paragraphs, if not just one.

This promo one week, that tasting the next, a new release on the third sort of thing.

Too frequent

I get Gary Vaynerchuk emails everyday and I don’t mind, because I find his content entertaining and informative. I’ll be honest – I only open up some of the videos though and just delete the rest.

Some lists send me emails I read just once and immediately unsubscribe – the content was just plain boring or irrelevant. So how often depends on your skill and the interest of the recipient. Like I said once a week seems about right.

What else would you add?