Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Are you ready to go? Are you joining me today? Do you need love?
[00:00:07] Welcome, my lovely marketers.
[00:00:11] I had originally not planned on recording this episode with a tiny fur baby in my lap, but she decided that she was settling in. And here we go. Hopefully the focus won't be off for the rest of the episode. What I had planned on talking about today was websites and sustainability and greenwashing. But I received so many comments and emails after last week that instead we're shifting gears and we're going to talk about email marketing. And specifically, I want to talk about the top mistakes that I see wine brands make with their emails and how you can avoid them. So let's get into it. All right? Number one, I see a lot of brands today still prioritizing social media over emails. Social media, as we've seen with the dumpster fire that is Twitter and many publishing platforms such as Medium we're looking at you are quick to change their offerings, their benefits, their features, their subscribability.
[00:01:07] Your email list is your asset. You own it. It allows you to speak directly to your customers and fans. You control access, timing, format, audience, and it's not going anywhere. Email has consistently been the top most performer in your marketing game. Even better, assuming that you're on the up and up, which I'm going to trust that all of you are, your email recipients gave you permission to talk to them. They've opened the door for you to start the conversation, and as long as you can keep it delightful, entertaining or relevant, they'll keep listening. Plus, to be fair, we all just like email better. At by Forest, we have this ongoing mantra, social is for sharing, email is for asking. According to a 2023 survey by Statista, 73% of respondents said that they prefer to receive promotional content through email, and only 15% said that they prefer social media. A 2022 study by DMA found that 77% of marketers had seen an increase in email engagement over their past twelve months, and a 2021 McKinsey report found that email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media at generating leads in the current climate of shitty social media practices. I implore you, email first, social media second next. Don't get too hung up on segmentation. No marketer is going to tell you this, because segmentation, alongside a b testing, are the supposed holy grails of email marketing. But for the average winery who's struggling to just get emails out the door consistently, it's quite difficult to engage in extreme, granular segmentation. The ones that you probably need to be paying attention to are club versus non club, locals versus non locals, and high lifetime value customers.
[00:03:00] Put automations to work for you. Automations are wonderful. They're infinite in variety. They can be completely overwhelming. But I recommend that you use them to streamline communications that you would be doing otherwise, or to mirror what you're already doing in your physical spaces. Start with a welcome email or a welcome series. Whatever floats your boat. It can be as heavy handed or as gentle as you wish.
[00:03:27] Maybe.
[00:03:29] There she goes. Maybe add in an abandoned cart email. But I say maybe because not all audiences love them. We found that american audiences are very accustomed to receiving abandoned cart emails, and in many cases they even wait for that abandoned cart email to arrive in anticipation of some kind of discount. European and australasian audiences tend to find abandoned cart emails a little intrusive and off putting. So judge based on your own audience.
[00:03:59] Definitely add in a reactivation email for people who have either not opened several recent emails or have not been in the tasting room in a while, or haven't made an online purchase in months. A list is only as good as your engaged readers. If they aren't into you, let them go, unsubscribe them and stop paying for their records. Custom fonts now I get this. You've paid a lot of money for that branding. You've been told that consistent brand recognition is based on consistent visual identity. The problem is that you can't control what that email looks like or what those custom fonts look like when it arrives in your audience's inbox. You need to stick to system fonts, and I know that this is going to be controversial. You need to stick to system fonts so that when you are designing the email, you can see exactly what your audience is going to see. Good presentation beats out visual identity every single time. Pack shots are not hero images. All right, so bottle shots are great for product pages and indeed they can be really good for product listing within an email, but they aren't great for catching the reader's eye and encouraging them to keep reading. Lead with photos of happy people engaging with your brand or your offering. If you can't make that happen, you can use photo editing software to turn your boring bottle shot into something fun and seasonal. Which leads us to the inimitable gift. To gif or not to gift, that is the question. I've seen. Gifts have tremendous success in emails. I love them. But you need to be aware of a few things if you want to use gifts in your emails. One specific to wine ownership and attribution. A lot of publicly available wine gifts have been created by brands for their own promotion. Don't accidentally end up using one of those.
[00:06:00] File size gifts can be huge file sizes. Imagine trying to open that in your inbox on dodgy Wifi or with roaming data. Use compression, remove every other frame, reduce the color palette or shorten and loop. Try to keep your GIF under five megabytes, at worst, at worst and 1 stock photos sometimes you just got to do it, sometimes we have to do it. Sometimes you just don't have the picture that you need, but the email has to go out again. Watch for bottles from other brands or bottles that look nothing like yours. A great hint is when in doubt, stick with glassware, but also watch the glassware. If you and your audience aren't drinking out of cute little fridge bistro glasses or your grandma's crystal, don't use stock photos that feature those glasses.
[00:06:54] And one more thing about images and glassware, and this is for all uses, not just email. Keep aside a set of glasses that is only ever used for photography. There's nothing worse than having gorgeous images marred by fingerprints all over the glasses or the bottles. And no, you cannot photoshop those away. Image only emails Allah Dreamweaver 2005 so image only emails. You'll recognize them in your inbox because they don't resize responsively. They look beautiful, but they're not very functional. Relying solely on images to convey your message is detrimental. Not only do these emails pose deliverability issues, but spam filters often flag them. They risk alienating subscribers who have images disabled or slow Internet connections, and mobile issues will struggle with image loading or resizing issues. A blend of text and images with crucial information conveyed in that text is a more reliable and accessible approach to your email marketing. Don't forget your mobile styling. A significant portion of emails nowadays are being open on mobile devices. It's imperative to ensure that your emails are mobile friendly. This includes a responsive design, ensuring that text is legible with appropriate font sizes, and that images and buttons are sized in space for easy interaction on touch screens. Don't forget about accessibility in emails. Accessibility is easy to overlook in emails, but it's essential to ensure that your emails are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This can be achieved through clear, straightforward language, alt text for your images, and a logical, easy to follow structure. Remember to test in dark mode and I will admit that this is one that has caught me out before. Some design elements may not translate well and that might impact the readability and overall user experience email marketing requires ongoing attention. Merely setting up campaigns without reviewing their performance can lead to missed opportunities for optimization and growth. It's essential that you track your metrics like open rates, click through rates and revenue generation to understand what's working and what's not working for your audiences. Ignoring the analytics and not reviewing the results of your email campaigns can lead to repeated mistakes and missed opportunities. Regular reviews of campaign performance against set objectives can help tweaking strategies for better outcomes. Whoo. A biggie. Ignoring spam laws, including GDPR if you buy a list, you rent a list, or you mislead readers with an inaccurate subject line. Here is what can happen, and I have seen this happen. Email service providers monitor the rate at which emails are marked as spam. A high spam complaint rate can lead to your emails being filtered into the spam or junk folders instead of the inbox, drastically impacting your email deliverability rate. If that situation worsens, your whole domain or ip address can be blacklisted by email service providers, meaning your emails won't be delivered at all, regardless of the recipient. Your email marketing platform can suspend or terminate your account if they find that you're violating their terms of service or the spam complaint rate is exceptionally high. I'm not sure how many people know this, but GDPR applies even if you're a us business, and especially for a global industry like wine. A business that targets individuals in the EU for offering goods or services even if it's free or monitoring their behavior, falls under the scope of GDPR. Monitoring activities such as tracking through cookies or other technologies, behavioral advertising, geolocation, market surveys, and so on performed by a non eu business can be subject to GDPR. A-U-S. Business that has no establishment in the EU but sells goods or services to consumers in the EU will fall under the scope of GDPR in the US, and it's important to note that the law extends to any resident of the EU, irrespective of citizenship.
[00:11:04] Bonus round what about SMS? What you can do what you can't do here's what you need to know so SMS, or text marketing is legal, but is heavily regulated by laws and guidelines to ensure consumer protection and privacy. Here are the primary legal frameworks and considerations surrounding SMS marketing in the states. TCPA the Telephone Consumer Protection act the TCPA mandates that businesses must obtain explicit written consent from individuals before sending promotional text messages. Individuals must have the option to opt in to receive text messages, and this consent should be easy to provide, like through a text response or online form. Equally, every SMS marketing message should include an easy and clear opt out mechanism allowing those recipients to stop receiving messages at any point in time. The content of the messages need to be clear and the purpose of the message should be transparent to recipients. The frequency and timing of the text messages should adhere to acceptable standards so that you're not intrusive or annoying, and you need to make certain that the numbers you're texting are not listed in the national do not call registry. Now, to make matters worse, because it's wine and nothing's ever the same from state to state. In addition to federal laws, there may also be state laws governing sms marketing. I recommend that every client, before undertaking text marketing, familiarize yourself and adhere to those statespecific regulations. And then even more specifically, it's also necessary to comply with the guidelines set by mobile carriers, as noncompliance can lead to message blocking or other penalties there we go. We've covered a lot of ground today. I hope you've all been taking notes, because what stands between a wine brand that could and a wine brand that did is often a well oiled, spam, law abiding, customer loving email marketing machine. And while you're at it, don't forget to, like, subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss out on any future nuggets of wine marketing wisdom. Until next time, keep those emails flowing, test, learn and iterate. And pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Bye.
