Why Should You Have an Email Nurture Series?
Email is a great way to connect with and re-engage with club members and customers. I see a lot of wineries and breweries who use email to send one-off campaigns every once in a while but haven't yet set up an email strategy or marketing automation to make their lives easier.
Marketing automation doesn’t have to be hard and an automated email series is one of the quickest ways to sell more wine. A little bit of time spent setting up an email series will make your business more efficient, improve customer retention, and grow sales.
One of the biggest benefits of email automations is that, if set up properly, they are constantly running. They continue to connect with the contacts that you have in your database and sell to them. And once you’ve set them up, you don’t have to do anything!
If you’re a VineSpring customer, you know that we’re big fans of MailChimp. It’s affordable, easy to get started, and the MailChimp platform has sophisticated, but easy-to-use email nurture tools. And, there’s a bonus—VineSpring integrates directly with MailChimp
There are a variety of options for marketing automation and email nurture. I’ll share more options later, but first, I want to walk through how to get started.
Getting Started
There are four basics steps to starting an email series:
Collect email addresses and contact info
Organize your contacts into Customer, Wine Club Member, and other Lead groups
Write and design the emails to be used in the automations
Measure performance and update your automations
THERE ARE A NUMBER OF WAYS THAT YOU MIGHT COLLECT AN EMAIL ADDRESS:
Through your POS or good-old-fashioned pen and paper in your tasting room
Via your eCommerce system during an online purchase
Through a form on your website
However you collect email addresses, it's important to make sure that they all end up in one central place and that the source of the email address and the status of the contact (customer, wine club member, non-customer) are assigned to the contact so that you can create lists of contacts, organized by their relationship with your business.
With some basic information, you can begin to organize your contacts and their information into segments, define your messages, and design your emails.
What kind of emails should you be sending?
There are several options when it comes to the kinds of series you can build. Here are a few of options to consider starting with:
WELCOME SERIES:
This kind of series should be sent to people who haven't bought anything yet but have asked to be updated about news and specials at your winery or brewery. According to Shopify, welcome series can see up to three times the transactions and revenue over regular email promotions.
CLUB NURTURE SERIES:
This is a series for your club members. When brands nurture customers, those customers make 47 percent larger purchases. Setting up a three or four-part wine club series provides an opportunity for you to share more about your product and your story, reward your club members, and offer a sense of exclusivity that will improve retention.
NEW CUSTOMER EMAIL SERIES:
This is a series of emails focused on nurturing customers who aren't in your club, but have made a purchase or visited your tasting room. Obviously, you'd like them to join your club so why not send them information about your business, your products, and your club? It's 10x more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to simply sell to an existing customer. By nurturing the relationships with one-time customers, you can more deeply connect with them, increase their purchases, and drive word of mouth.
What tools should you use to manage and measure all of this?
As I mentioned, I highly recommend MailChimp. The basic tool is free and as you add more contacts, you might have to upgrade into a paid subscription, but it's really affordable. MailChimp has a great automation tool that is incredibly easy to use.
The system also integrates with eCommerce and POS systems like Square and VineSpring which makes it easy to store and manage all of your contact information from a single location.
Other tools to consider are HubSpot, Keap (used to be Infusionsoft), and SharpSpring.
Would you like to learn more about how you can use VineSpring and MailChimp to grow your business? Watch the recorded webinar with VineSpring gurus Britney Yunker and Shannon Gildea: Grow Your Business with Integrated Email Marketing.
