Social Media for Wineries – Tips & Strategies to Grow Your Business

One of the last industries to fully embrace internet-based technologies and social media platforms is the wine industry, which has many small or non-existent social media profiles, as well as a lack of savvy integrated digital marketing strategies.

When it comes to interacting with customers, wineries can no longer afford to ignore the power of social media platforms, both from an organic and paid perspective. Wineries have a priceless opportunity to build direct relationships with their customers, a connection that these same customers desire, thanks to this new platform – without competing on shelves for attention among hundreds of other brands.

Great social media marketing can help wineries to reach and engage a larger audience and build their brand, as well as increase sales. More than just a product, today’s customers want stories and interaction.

Even though wine writers still have some sway in the wine world, that influence is waning with fewer people reading traditional print media. One of the top reasons people buy wine is because they were referred to it by someone they trust. Consumers can make and receive wine recommendations from their social networks via social media.

When it comes to social media, it’s important to remember that engaging with customers via social media is not the same as making online sales. In your interactions with strangers, you’re not selling anything; you’re simply chatting and forming relationships.

Relationships on social media, like any other, take time to develop. To see an effect on sales, it will take six to 12 months. Build trust and credibility (social currency) by allowing yourself time to grow your network. Be a trusted source by responding quickly to messages. There are some great alcohol brands and distilleries, such as Lark Distillery, who are nailing their social media and it’s paying off.

It is possible for wineries to build a social media presence with a variety of options. We don’t recommend that you go out and learn them all at once and start marketing your brand on many platforms – as with any business, pick one or two platforms where you know your audience is, and focus on those, ensuring your content matches the platform; don’t just post sales-related content. Remember to be sure to maintain a regular and consistent schedule; posting regularly, responding to messages and comments as well as interacting with others online. Short- and long-term gains can both be expected.

Since wine is such an important part of everyday life, it’s no surprise that people are so enthusiastic about it. Wine and wineries hold emotional and personal significance for these individuals. People’s enthusiasm for wine can be seen in the thriving online community of wine blogs, podcasts, and social media pages.

However, it’s difficult for wineries to stand out on social media and cut through the competition. They post on social media because their competition is, and they lack a strategy of their own to focus on. However, if you know “why” you’re doing something, you’ll get better results.

Social Media for Wineries – Objectives and Purposes

Listed below are five reasons why wineries should be active on social media.

To Raise Brand Awareness & Recognition

Step one of the marketing funnel appears to be straightforward. Because social media is a place where a lot of people are active, you’ll have a better chance of attracting new customers. Consumers are more likely to buy wine from a brand they already know and like. With the help of social media, you can quickly and easily establish your company’s brand online. Every time a follower scrolls through their feeds, your winery can stay at the top of their followers’ minds by posting about the vineyard flowering or new vintage releases on social media. Regularity when it comes to posting helps to increase awareness and recognition.

According to recent data from Sprout Social’s annual Index, 75 percent of consumers plan to spend more money with brands they follow on social media.

The goal is to cultivate and expand a loyal following of brand ambassadors, and even an audience interested in your brand and products even if they haven’t purchased yet.

To Increase Customer Satisfaction, Conversions & Retention

Wineries can use social media to better serve their customers by using it well. You’re only a few clicks away from a direct conversation with your fans. Good customer service is important in building a good reputation, regardless of the issue at hand: hours of operation, cost of tastings, or wedding inquiries.

Isn’t it interesting to know that 57% of consumers are more likely to stick with a brand that has a lot of human interaction or fast response rate? There are many ways to engage customers, but one of the most important is to make them feel like they’re talking to a real person when they interact with your company.

A two-way conversation between a business and its customers encourages other customers to want to engage in the same way. Your company’s chances of being mentioned on social media and in comments skyrocket. As a result, they become advocates for your winery and help spread the word about it.

Customer service, on the other hand, can act as a focus group; if people are asking the same questions over and over again, this can help generate new ideas for content. With Facebook’s ability to incorporated automated messenger replies, it makes it easier than ever to address, answer or direct consumer enquiries and increase customer satisfaction.

To Increase the Results of Paid Social Media

An organic social media campaign is a great way to establish your winery’s personality and voice, as well as to build relationships and involve customers in your product. Yet, the best way to reach new customers and increase sales for your winery is through paid social media advertising hands down. To be effective, organic and paid social media strategies must be coordinated. All of the clients paid social we manage here at Pink Lemonade Social, we ensure our paid social strategies not only align to organic social strategies, but also to content marketing and email marketing strategies. Integrated marketing = success.

It’s unlikely that a user who sees your paid ad and clicks on your profile sees much in the way of organic social activity. Instead for paid social, the complexity of campaign funnels helps lead to capture a colder audience, nurture them, and help increase conversions. It’s safe to say that social media is the best marketing tool for wineries because it can help spread the word and build a strong following of loyal customers, with paid social complementing the efforts to find a similar audience and convert them.

Social Media for Wineries – Tips & Strategies To increase Sales and Awareness

Here are five winery social media strategies that will help to transform your company for the better.

Incorporate More Video Content

Adding video to your posts is not only a fun way to spice things up but video content is the most consumed content online. While historically Instagram was primarily used for photo sharing, and this will continue to be the case in feeds, posting videos on occasion is a smarter move. Why do you think stories and reels were developed?

There is a lot of material that could be documented in videos about your winery, winemaking and the wine itself, which would be ideal for this. Don’t just republish your own material! Take a look on Instagram, search hashtags and scroll through content from individual users (not other brands) and get inspiration from other content creators. There are so many great video content creators on Instagram from bloggers to every day users, and by having a look at what content works will help you form a better content strategy.

As a side note, don’t expect your customers to do all the hard work for your social media output. Adding a call to action for your guests can be a fun way to interact with your audience and encourage them to create content related to your brand. Make it easy for people to share images of your wines or the winery’s events on social media by encouraging tagging and the use of hashtags.

Become an Expert as Well as an Advocate in Your Field

If you’re going to be a successful winery, you need to be able to live the product you’re producing. You need to be able to provide more than just the product to your customers.

When it comes to wine, you need to be the go-to person on the subject. Don’t just make the creation, be the creation. It’s one thing to know the art, but it’s another to be able to teach it or inspire others without missing a beat.

As a result, your winery will become known as the “go-to” resource in its field, and you will no longer be considered a mere commodity. Serve as a guide for your customers as they pursue their passion for wine, help them to discover how wine can integrate into their lives.

Make suggestions for food and wine pairings to go along with your wines. Recommend wines for gatherings and gifts. Now that customers know what to expect in terms of flavours and foods they enjoy, this concept has the potential to increase sales.

Be Approachable

Social media is the most convenient way for guests to get in touch with you, with more and more people going straight to social media to contact a brand, instead of via email or phone. In many cases, social media is the only option.

As much as possible, respond to both positive and negative feedback. Inquiries and comments should be welcome and responded to in a timely fashion. As mentioned early, incorporating the use of automated responses in Facebook Messenger can help you to easily navigate customers. It’s critical that visitors understand how much you value their interactions because they can post the same exchanges themselves.

In less than five minutes, you can make an enormous difference to a guest’s experience. In order for them to feel more connected to the winery, they want their voices to be heard. This improves the winery’s reputation and strengthens the public’s confidence in it.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, social media is the key to your success. The world is becoming increasingly dependent on technology’s ability to connect each of us.  As a result, it’s not enough to simply use social media; you must do so in an appropriate and effective manner. Your winery’s strength can be enhanced by using social media with a well-formed strategy, and you can make the best possible experience for your guests. Social media for wineries should be an integral part of any wine brand’s marketing strategy. Organic and paid methods both have the potential to raise brand awareness and expand a business’s customer base and sales.

Have any questions about how social media can help your business? Get in touch today (we respond quickly :P)! We also love a good chat over a glass of wine!

The Complete Guide to Email Automation / Email Flows and How it Can Help You Grow Your Business

What is Email Automation?

Email marketing automation refers to the use of email software to automate repetitive tasks related to email marketing. Email automation, also known as email flows, automates the process of sending and receiving emails for you based on a set of triggers and flows. It allows you to send out emails in bulk, track who opens them and who clicks on links, and more. Have you ever shopped online and not finished your purchase and the next day received an email with a discount code? That’s email automation at work. Check out the guide below on the best email automation tools and the top email flows for your business.

Why is Email Marketing Important?

For online retailers, and many businesses alike, email marketing automation is a powerful way to keep customers coming back for more. It’s difficult to know which automated email campaigns are worth testing and prioritizing and the best method is to deploy a few different email flows, and monitor and optimise your automations over time.

Adopting email marketing has a lot of benefits and it has the highest return on investment (ROI) of the most common digital channels. Email marketing and automations also help your business be less reliant on a steady stream of new customers if you use email to encourage repeat purchases. Email marketing also aids in the development of a company’s brand and the acquisition of more loyal, high-value customers. Almost every online business can benefit from implementing automated email campaigns. Just remember, recent data shows that more than half of people open email on their smartphones, so it’s critical to make your emails mobile-friendly. In order to ensure a positive and consistent user experience across all devices, many email service providers perform this testing automatically. When you design your emails, you also have the option to view the mobile-friendly design to ensure that your email efforts are effective.

Email Automation Tools & Services

We all know that a good email can be a powerful tool for any company. It’s a way to connect with your customers and prospects, and it can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

However, if you’re like most people, you probably don’t have the time to send out personalized emails to every customer or prospect. Fortunately, there are many email automation tools and services available that can help you create automated emails with just a little bit of effort on your part. Whilst MailChimp is a well-known email marketing platform, there are other user-friendly platforms with better functionality and features such as Omnisend, or our recommended platform Klaviyo. Klaviyo has a free pricing structure for small businesses with up to 250 contacts, but even if you’re an eCommerce business paying up to $300 or $400 a month – this platform makes that money back and then some. As an example, one of Pink Lemonade Social’s client who pays $350 a month for 18,000 email contacts, generates on average $26,000 from email automation and flows A MONTH – that’s without the additional revenue from sending normal campaign emails.

How to Use Email Automation for Your Business & Best Practices

Email automation is a powerful tool for business owners to use in their customer relations, marketing, and sales strategies. It can be used to automate simple email tasks, like sending out newsletters or promotional messages, even SMS campaigns. The goal of email automation is to make your company’s tasks easier and more efficient.

There are many best practices for email automation including:
– Send emails at the right time and frequency: Make sure your emails are not sent too early in the morning, as people might still be asleep and this could result in the recipient deleting it without reading it. Similarly, do not send them too late at night as this might result in an increased chance of being marked as spam. Avoid days where people are less likely to convert, and avoid sending emails too frequently, this will result in higher spam or unsubscribe rates.
– Keep your messages short and concise: Emails with long paragraphs are more likely to be deleted before being read. Try to keep them under 100 words so you have a higher chance of getting read
– Use visuals to capture, engage and entice your audience
– incorporate personalization (customer’s name etc.) for greater open and click rates

Tips to Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns with Email Automation

The first step in creating an effective email marketing campaign is deciding what your goal is. Do you want more sales? More leads? More engagement on social media? Once you have decided on a goal, it’s time to create your email marketing automation campaign. Email flows are broken up by three parts: triggers, time delays and your email. Your emails are usually broken up into three parts: subject line, body copy/design, and call-to-action. The subject line should grab the reader’s attention and entice them to click to open and read on. The body copy should provide information about the product or service being offered and include a call-to-action.

Post-Purchase Flow

Apparently, sending a follow-up email within minutes of a customer’s purchase is quite effective. Whether you choose to alter your receipt email or create a separate email altogether, after a sale, thank your customer for their business and be ready to answer any questions they may have. A customer who has just made a purchase on your site is likely to be more receptive to additional purchases if you can make them feel like they’re getting good value for their money. It’s possible to include a thank you email, a discount, a request for a review, links to social media and an email with a future discount code in your post-purchase email chain.

Win-back/Re-Engagement Flow

Subscribers may stop opening or clicking your emails after a while if you don’t do anything about it. Using an automated email campaign to re-engage, or “win-back,” customers can rekindle their passions. Nearly half of users who receive these emails open and interact with subsequent ones, according recent data. Win-back flows also demonstrate to Google and other email service providers that your emails are in demand and not spam. A lot of unengaged subscribers means that your emails are more likely to end up in the Promotions or Spam folders, respectively. Win-back flows are also useful methods to filter out an unengaged audience to clean from your database, thereby lowering your monthly costs for email software, and ensuring you don’t leave unengaged customers with a negative sentiment.

There are a few important factors to keep in mind when implementing a re-engagement or win-back automated email campaign:

• Remember what you have learned from other campaigns and flows results, content and user-interactions
• Make an incredible deal to pique their interest
• Notify your subscribers that they will be deleted or removed from your list soon
• Inactive subscribers should have their subscriptions terminated

VIP or Upsell/Cross-Sell Flow

Creating a VIP flow is a way to show your most loyal customers how much you appreciate them. In addition to boosting sales, personalised emails and recognition can turn your most engaged customers into brand advocates. VIP customers can be identified in a variety of ways, including by the number of orders they’ve placed over time, their average order value, their lifetime revenue, and the amount of money they’ve spent with your company. Offering special deals and promotions to your VIP customers is a great way to show them how much you value their business. As part of this process, you should also send out referral emails in order to secure referrals from your ideal customers.

According to data on customer loyalty, repeat customers account for nearly a quarter of revenue despite only constituting 11% of the total customer base. It is much easier to create an automated email campaign aimed at keeping your current customers happy than it is to find new ones.

Upselling and cross-selling your products and services via automated flows can increase the amount of money your customers spend with you. The goal of upselling and cross-selling is to get your customers to buy more expensive products or new products to complement recent purchases. Through automation and triggers, you can increase the relevance of your offer. Upselling and cross-selling are best done immediately after a purchase or when a customer reaches an important milestone.

Start Using Email Automation Today and Get More Leads & Sales

As more and more businesses are using email automation to increase their sales, there are some who still hesitate to try it out. The fear is that they will not be able to follow up with the customers or that the customers will unsubscribe from their emails.

But email automation is not about sending out automated messages without any human contact. It is about automating some of your tasks so you can spend more time on other important things like campaign emails, customer service and sales.

If you need more advice on email automation or email marketing, get in touch today and we can help to answer any questions you have!