Like many wineries, you've likely already focused your marketing efforts to online channels. With the right online promotions, planning and tools, you'll be able to grow your online sales. Let's look at five high-impact ways you can leverage online promotions using WineDirect's tools.
Enticing promotions drive people to your online store. Once they’re there, upselling is a great tactic to increase Average Order Value (AOV). WineDirect’s Carrot messages are a fantastic tool, displaying messages on your website to upsell customers based on the contents of their shopping cart. They help to guide customers through the checkout process, reducing calls to your winery, and increasing AOV.
WineDirect has several Quick Configure Carrots already set up for you. All you have to do is navigate to Store>Promos>Carrots and click “Quick Configure” under Carrot Properties on the right hand side. From here you can populate some useful Carrots, or simply add a Carrot to create your own.
Our research has shown that shipping incentives outperform pricing discounts. Specifically, flat rate shipping can be a very successful way to drive up AOV. Typically we see wineries offering these rates on 6 or 12 bottles. A customer that may have only bought 4 bottles will likely buy 2 more in order to qualify for $1 shipping.
The best way to set this up in WineDirect is by adjusting your shipping rates directly, that way your customers don't have to enter a promo code to access the deal. By navigating to Store>Shipping Strategy you can easily add a default shipping strategy with the minimum bottle set to coincide with your promotion.
Do you want to measure the success of a promo based on where you share it? Some wineries share one code with their email list and a different one with their social media audience. This helps you keep track of which offers are resonating best with what audience.
You can easily accomplish this by creating distinct promo codes for each audience that are each tied to the same underlying offer. Comparing promo codes performance based on the source will work nicely here as you can track sales earned from each code.
Converting new wine club members is a top priority for many wineries, but to stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to look for innovative ways to keep your existing members happy and engaged. Simply offering discounts and complimentary tastings are no longer enough. During this time when we can’t reply on in-person visits, we’ve seen wineries host exclusive virtual tastings, send highly personalized emails and even pick up the phone to call their most loyal club members.
When you craft a promotion for your club members, you’ll want to set that up a little differently. Rather than using a promo code, you can create a promotion for an entire Club Level. When your club members log in to their account on your website, they’ll automatically receive the offer.
One way to offer shipping incentives without breaking the bank is to charge a lower rate for local customers - for example, $1 - and a higher rate for out-of-staters - like $10.
The best way to accomplish charging variable shipping rates for different geographical locations is to create a brand new shipping strategy. The promotion will live within a shipping zone for the states it applies to. You will need to define how many bottles these flat rate promotions apply to and then adjust the bottle weight and corresponding shipping price for both local and out-of-state zones.
There are a lot of best practices for crafting an enticing promotion and you need to decide which ones your winery wants to explore as we all shift our focus to online sales. Our team is looking for ways we can be helpful during this challenging time, so we would love your feedback on what topics you are most interested in, and/or what formats you prefer for future resources. Just email your ideas to us at marketing@winedirect.com.
