How to Market One Bottle Three Ways for Fall and Winter Sales

Celebrations call for wine, and with the flurry of the upcoming season, you can take advantage of the excitement, without doubling down on effort.

The average American adult makes an incredible 35,000 decisions every day.

Do you identify with the chaos of all those choices? As a business owner or decision-maker, you are constantly evaluating ways to elevate your brand. Meanwhile, your customers are dealing with the same overwhelming avalanche of information when they head online to make a purchase.

The fall and winter seasons add an extra layer of fluster to the mix. In the wine world, October, November and December - also known as OND - mean harvest, wine club shipments and numerous holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkuh, Christmas and New Year’s Eve!). It’s a crucial time of the year for your business and a moneymaker opportunity when it comes to customer buying habits.

One way to make this season come together is to streamline your marketing to take advantage of the excitement, without doubling down on effort.

Here’s an idea: take one bottle and visually present it three ways. This approach keeps you organized and efficient, and relieves the dreaded feeling of being empty-handed during this ideal selling season. It works for all products, across your full portfolio, and it elevates your brand to the top.

One Bottle, Three Ways

In the array below it becomes easy to see how one bottle shot can be used year around with an evergreen effect, while lifestyle images are relevant and evocative for a particular season.

Portray your brand as timely and fresh with super minimal effort. A few moments of planning at the beginning of the season will outfit your bottles for the final quarter of the year. The peace of mind of being prepared frees you up to focus on other tasks, meanwhile your images work non-stop for you.

Lifestyle images help your customers view your wines and gift sets as ideal for their celebrations and gift-giving occasions. There are a number of ways to incorporate this imagery into your marketing efforts.

For example, create a One Click Offer using WineDirect's promotional tools. These offers allow your customers to click on an image in a marketing email - or even on social media - that takes them directly to the checkout page with a pre-filled shopping cart. Fewer clicks for them, more online sales for you!

You can also target customers with up-sell and cross-sell tools through WineDirect's platform. With well chosen promos, you can entice customers to spend a little more with each transaction.

Here are some examples of how to make this work for your portfolio:

• Put your wine in context of big spending days with a trio of attention-getting visuals for Black Friday, Giving Tuesday, and Cyber Monday. On Black Friday, make your wine the respite after a long day of shopping. Cyber Monday means your wine is right there by the computer, top of mind when shoppers hit purchase now. On Giving Tuesday, show your wine as an element of your brand’s charitable efforts, or as a symbol that brings family and friends together during the giving season.

• Consider all the meals and snacks that are elemental during the fall and winter seasons, show your wine on the table with perfect pairings that suggest how to partner your releases with the fall harvest season, Thanksgiving meals, and winter holiday feasts.

• Suggest that your wine is the perfect gift, from hostess tokens to premium holiday treasures, by conveying your bottles in several settings. Convince your customers that the winter holidays aren’t the only time to present your wine as the ultimate in generosity and good taste — fall needs presents, too!

• Make your wine the out-and-about star of cozy fall and winter travels. Put your wine exactly where your customers aspire to be without having to chase the fall foliage and winter’s snowmen.

• Use color to connect the season, showing your wine in various settings with a shade theme that can be used together or separately.

Make it Happen

The first step is getting a flawless bottle shot, using the latest 3D technology by Outshinery. Consider it like casting your actor (your wine) and then welcoming them to a performance-ready stage (the lifestyle scene). We need to get that star flawlessly ready first!

The results can not only be used to craft festive lifestyle images, but employed right away for ecommerce to improve your email marketing efforts and winery website, wine club communications, print materials and much more. (For more on bottle shots, check out Wine Lifestyle Photography and Bottle Shots: What Options are There? and High-quality Bottle Shots: an investment that pays off.)

Order bottle shots for every wine in your portfolio or at the very least, just the ones on which you want to focus in October, November, and December.

Maybe it’s simply red wines, or library wines, or bottles at the most premium level. Perhaps you want to highlight wines that you have in large supply, or customer favorites. Decide areas to place focus on and consider the style of the labels too, using color and texture inherent in the design to set a mood for your visuals. After that, the sky's the limit. Select lifestyle images from an ever-evolving gallery organized into collections for easy sorting. If you need advice on how to roll out a seasonal marketing plan featuring these images, download your free playbook from Outshinery here, Seasonal marketing: A guide for family wineries.This guide helps you break up the tasks involved in marketing for a particular season (or two). Imagine the possibilities on social media -- this stuff is solid gold!

You can also refer to WineDirect's holiday checklist for tried and true tips on making the most of this busy holiday sales season, or check out numerous holiday tips and articles featured in their Knowledge Center.

Last but not least...

Here’s a little gift to get you started: a complimentary lifestyle image for first-time test shots! If you've already claimed your image with Outshinery, you can get another one with any new paid orders as a friend of WineDirect. Just use code WINEDIRECT at checkout, through December 31, 2019.

You can browse lifestyle images on Outshinery's website. Set yourself up for success this fall and winter holiday season. Time to get festive!