One of the best ways to send more effective marketing emails for your winery is to have a segmentation strategy. It’s marketing 101: right message, right person, right time. But if you are just “batch and blasting” your email campaigns, you’re definitely not going to be executing the right message to everybody. 

You need to segment your list and send relevant information to the right people. When you start to peel back the layers of this process, it can feel overwhelming. Many of the wineries I talk to are unsure of where to start, aren’t confident in their data, or aren’t sure how to navigate their tools to make the right segments to begin with.

That’s why I’m writing this blog post! Here comes Erica Walter on her mighty steed of segmentation knowledge, ready to slay the dragon that is tech overwhelm.

Here’s how to get started with segmenting your email list if you’re a winery. 

Starter Strategy:

Every winery (and honestly, every business) should segment their email list into three main buckets that align with where a customer is at in their journey with the brand. 

‘Club Members’ is the first bucket you need. Your wine club members are the most valuable people on your email list because they have given you their credit card information and given you permission to charge it on a regular basis. WE LOVE WINE CLUB! Every time you send an email to this group, you should honor and recognize their status. Refer to their club benefits. Remind them how much you appreciate them. Call them by name.

If your email list doesn’t already have a segment or audience called “WINE CLUB” I want you to make sure this is the very first segmentation step you take.

The next audience or segment you need to ensure that you create and regularly update is your Purchasers. These are the people who have given you money in exchange for your wines or experiences but aren’t a member of your wine club (yet). Ideally this is set up as a segment that automatically updates as people buy your wines (made possible using the tools inside of your winery’s point of sale system integrating with your email service provider, through offerings like the VinTools integration between WineDirect and MailChimp and the Digimatic integration between Commerce7 and MailChimp or Klaviyo). If you don’t have systems that automatically talk to each other, you’ll need to set this up by pulling a list of buyers before your email sends and uploading it to your email service provider. It’s labor intensive, but it is worth it. 

Your purchasers need to know how to buy more, how to buy again, and how to make buying automatic (a-hem, membership!). If you don’t acknowledge that they have purchased from you before as an anchor to get them to that next step, your messaging simply won’t be as compelling.

Okay you’ve got the two most important segments handled: wine club members, and buyers who aren’t members (yet). The last segment you want to be sure you have set up, I affectionately have dubbed “lurkers” (a throwback to the old Gary Vaynerchuk “Wine Library TV” days). These are people who you have absolutely no evidence to suggest they have purchased from you. Maybe you have an email address and nothing else associated with their record. They’re an opt-in from the website with no account in your winery’s CRM system. 

The reason you need to talk to lurkers differently than everybody else is that your lurkers have to be convinced to buy from you for the first time. It’s a totally different sell than asking somebody to buy again, and it’s certainly a leap to expect a lurker to jump right into membership. If you aren’t regularly looking at the lurker segment and identifying messages to send them that encourage their FIRST purchase, that audience is going to take longer to convert to a Purchaser (if they ever do). They may even unsubscribe faster because you are messaging things that don’t matter to them.

Now, there are a thousand trillion other ways you could slice and dice your email list. In fact, within each of these main segments are a bunch of additional segments that would be valuable to set up and manage. But I don’t want you to get into the weeds on that yet. I want you to have these foundations in place as a starting point. Get traction with messaging your offers and experiences with these groups in different ways. Start to see how they respond differently to your wine offerings, your membership drives, your event ticket sales. 

As you start to get that traction, you’ll gain confidence not only that the time you’ve invested in managing these audiences is paying off, but also in your ability to navigate the data that makes those segments (and all the possible micro segments within them!). From there, you can start adding additional strategies and tactics to send even MORE relevant emails in the future. It’s a truly beautiful thing.

If you’re a winery using Commerce7, there’s a fantastic integration called Digimatic that you must use. I’m not even joking when I tell you I used to dream about something like this existing. Digimatic syncs your customer and order data with your MailChimp or Klaviyo email service provider, making all the things I’ve written about in this blog post and a gajillion other things possible. I love Digimatic so much that I produced an entire bootcamp to teach wineries how to utilize its power! This free bootcamp consists of three simple exercises, dripped into your inbox over the course of three days, with live support provided via a private Facebook group hosted by yours truly. Bodie Paden, the developer who created Digimatic, will even pop in from time to time to see what’s up. To join Bootcamp, simply opt in at the page I’ve created and linked to below.