The holiday season has arrived yet again, and this year the hustle and bustle means that your customers will give you the perfect opportunity to end the year on a high note. Retailers are opening their doors earlier than ever to accommodate demand and launching sales promotions even earlier. The good news is that you don’t need to have crazy holiday hours to take advantage of all the opportunities the holiday season has to offer. We’ve got some easy marketing tips to help you make the most of the busy holiday shopping season. 

Holiday Tasting Hours

With relatives arriving in droves, your customers are looking for fun entertainment options.  Now is a great time to promote special holiday tasting room hours, or come up with some special events, tours, tastings and food pairings that will be extra inviting to guests. Host an event to educate customers about which wines pair best with traditional holiday dishes. Be sure to promote your special hours and events on social media, on your website, and to your email list!
 

Sample

Often times during the holidays customers are shopping for others more than for themselves, and they may  not have an idea of which of your wines would make the best gift. Offering samples and training your employees to make suggestions and recommendations are great ways to make their purchase much easier. Host a holiday tasting event to help customers get to know your wines better.
 

Promote Gift Cards

Gift Cards are the quick and easy gift that everybody loves to receive. You may choose to offer incentives early in the season, such as a free $20 gift card when you purchase $100 worth of additional cards. Simply displaying gift cards next to your register or creating some printed marketing materials making customers aware that you offer gift cards can help boost this part of your marketing plan. Be sure to train your employees to suggest gift cards to maximize sales! 

Offer Customer Incentives

Everyone is looking for a good deal. Utilizing a purchase incentive can boost sales and help manage inventory for a particular product that you feature. If you already offer a customer rewards program. throw in an additional bonus offer or an exclusive offering for club members or loyal customers.

Be sure to have a clear plan in place to promote your great specials. Not sure where to start? eWinery offers lots of tools to help you execute your marketing plan, call or click for a demo today!
 

Market your Winery as a Holiday Event Space

Holiday parties and corporate events are a great opportunity to show current and potential customers what your winery has to offer. This is an opportunity to show off your space and let customers know that it’s the perfect place to host any gathering, large or small. In addition to renting out the space, offer tours, tastings, and other unique experiences to celebrate the season.
 

Promote Gift Memberships

Gift memberships to your wine club are a fun and personal gift that keeps on giving! It’s a no hassle gift option that lands straight on the recipient’s door step! You may consider offering a holiday incentive or discount to existing club members who gift a gift membership.   Create a few different membership levels that allows your customers to create a lineup that meets their tastes and preferences with weekly, monthly, or quarterly options. 
 
 

Create a Special Holiday Case

Customers may be looking for an easy and affordable gift option for their wine loving friends, and a holiday gift pack is a great way to meet that demand. Assemble a group of wines that displays the best tastes your winery has to offer, or pair your best sellers with some branded wine accessories all with a bow on top. These are great because they can be sold either online or at the winery to guests.    Don’t forget that customers are stocking up on wine for the holidays -- so a great deal on a “Holiday Case” of favorites makes it easy for them to choose what to serve on their holiday table. Promote this to your club members via email - and link right to your e-Commerce site for easy ordering!

In a recent study of eWinery clients using CartRescue we found one client that in a 30 day period had 394 abandoned checkouts from their website e-commerce portal, of which 57 were recovered for a grand total of $16,856.00 saved revenue. That is a 14.47% conversion rate, statistically average for CartRescue. How much are you losing each month without a cart abandonment targeted marketing strategy?








Email re-engagement is a very targeted sales opportunity that wineries should not miss out on. Nearly all retail industries are seeing email open rates for re-engagement above 50% and more importantly conversion rates around 30% across the board. That is 3 times higher than the rate of traditional marketing emails!



To learn how CartRescue can help your winery recover up to 14% of lost sales contact eWinery Solutions at sales@ewinerysolutions.com or (855) 879 1921.

This move, along with the prior acquisition of WineWare Software in 2013, puts Granbury Solutions in a position of leadership in the wine technology market.

“eWinery Solutions will be a great complement to our current wine solutions offering,” commented Tom Bronson, Granbury CEO. “They bring robust, sophisticated technology and a stellar list of customers. We are thrilled to welcome their clients to Granbury and look forward to integrating their solutions with our current offerings to provide even more tools to help all our winery clients grow their businesses.”

“We see this merger as a great step forward for our company and our clients,” added eWiner founder and CEO Richard Kline. “Joining forces with Granbury will enable us to combine forces to provide more innovative solutions faster to a larger set of wineries. Granbury has a suite of robust loyalty and marketing solutions, enterprise (multi-location) dashboards, and analysis and reporting tools that will help all eWinery clients to better understand consumer preferences, build loyalty and ultimately sell more wine.” Mr. Kline will take on the position of General Manager, Winery Business Unit at Granbury Solutions after the acquisition.

eWinery’s complete technology suite includes everything a winery needs to sell wine direct-to-consumer, with cloud based wine club and CRM, e-commerce, content management tools, integrated tasting room point-of-sale, mobile point-of-sale, and wine production management. eWinery Solutions has been serving the market since 2003; in 2013 the Napa Valley POS company merged with eWinery Solutions.

Terms of the purchase, which was completed today, were not disclosed.
   

About Granbury Solutions

A leading provider of technology to the wine, pizza, delivery, specialty coffee, quick serve and casual dining markets, Granbury Solutions markets the Thr!ve Point-of-Sale and Coffee Shop Manager solutions. Granbury also serves the specialty retail market with its Nova point-of-sale division. Granbury offers a full enterprise solution including point-of-sale, back office management, business intelligence, online & smart phone ordering, kiosk self serve solutions, and customer loyalty. Learn more about Granbury Solutions at www.granburyrs.com.

Our POS team and engineers have been hard at work improving the MoJoe mobile POS product. Enjoy the fruits of their labor with these five fantastic updates and keep an eye out for more to come soon!

#1 - $0 Transactions
Your MoJoe device will now allow for $0 transactions to cover comp orders and waived tasting fees.

#2 - Inventory Handling
You can decide whether or not you would like orders processed on MoJoe to decrement your eWinery inventory.
*This feature is optional, please contact eWinery Customer Care to have it enabled.

#3 - Expanded Cash Amount Field
The cash amount field for entering cash payments on orders has been expanded to 7 digits to accommodate amounts of up to $9,999.99 to be transacted with cash payment.

#4 - Improved Login License Messaging
The login screen will no longer show a password error if a user attempts to login and all MoJoe licenses are in use.

#5 - Purchasers Member Type
New Customer accounts created as part of MoJoe Orders are now correctly marked with the "Purchasers" Member Type in the eWinery database.

Not a MoJoe user yet?  Contact our sales team today for a demo and pricing.

The 2014 Campaign Calendar

In order to plan ahead, you need to know what’s coming down the pipeline. This handy calendar, courtesy of Jericho provides an overview of major holidays and events in 2014. On a side note, you may notice this calendar is for NZ/Australia, which explains why Dec/Jan/Feb is labeled as "Summer". Although they may be way on the other side of the earth, I'm pretty sure they celebrate most holidays on the same dates that we do.

Take a few minutes to look over the calendar, and make note of any holidays and events you might want to create an aligned marketing campaign for. Now that you have some dates in mind, you can begin flushing out a more comprehensive schedule for your campaigns. Use the content calendar planning spreadsheet below to expand your planning efforts.

Content calendar planning spreadsheet

In order to plan efficiently, it helps to stay organized. This useful content planning calendar should help you out. I prefer to keep everything in one place using Google Drive. Typically I'm working with several people on a project, and I like to use the “share” feature. This makes it easy to collaborate on a single document, and allows everyone to make edits without overwriting anyone else's changes.



Important: To use the calendar, you need to make a copy first. Go to "File > Make a copy" in the menu. If you want to save the spreadsheet as an Excel file to use offline, you can choose "Download as > Microsoft Excel" in the main File menu.

Get the content calendar

Using the content calendar

Start on the first sheet, which shows each quarter for the 2014 year. This is your big overview, and you should add the holidays you singled out, along with any relevant company happenings. For example, you should add “new release” in Q1 under March if you have a new vintage scheduled to be released.

Planning your monthly view

Next you should click on the “Feb” tab to bring up the monthly planning view for our current month. You’ll notice the left side indicates major holiday and events for this month. Your next task is to fill out the spreadsheet with relevant items. You can see a sample of how I approach this below.

Some important things to keep in mind:

• Typical examples of “type of content” include blog post, email campaign, or image/infographic
• Consider the metrics you want to measure for each campaign. Typical metrics you might pay attention to include ecommerce conversion rate, total number of visits/pageviews, clickthrough rates, and number of downloads.

I also recommend applying some conditional formatting to the “Status” column. I made it so when a task is marked “completed” it changes to a green background. I recommend using four statuses - planned, in progress, completed, and cancelled.

Misc 2014 Wine Events:

In addition to the major holidays and events listed in the content planning graphic, a good many wine-related events also exist. Over the past few years it seems that every varietal has earned its own day of celebration. Find some of the more prominent ones below.
2/18 - National drink wine day
4/17 - Malbec day
5/25 - National wine day (yes, this is different than the "drink" wine day above)
5/26 - Chardonnay day
6/21 - Sauvignon Blanc day
8/29 - Cabernet day
9/23 - Grenache day
11/14 - Tempranillo day

I'd recommend starting out by planning the first month or two ahead of us. Make it a habit to update your calendar at the beginning of the week. You'll probably have a host of other events and announcements that you can work into the mix, but hopefully this gets you pointed in the right direction.

Find the content your visitors love

If you do a lot of blogging on your website, which you should be, learning what your visitors like to read can help you provide better content going forward. Review the steps below to figure out which pieces of content drive the highest engagement on your site.

1. Display top pages on your site

2. Set the date range
Be sure to extend your date range to include a long enough span to get substantial data.

3. Adjust the number of rows
Near the bottom of the report, change the default display from "10" to "100" to get a full view of the content.

4. Sort by uniques
Now you can look for patterns and themes in the results. First, you should see what sort of articles made your top ten. Were they list-based, controversial, or lengthy tutorials? Another useful metric on this report is the “Avg. time on page” which gives you an idea of how engaged the visitors are for each article.




Tip: Once you drill down in a report like this, you should add it as a shortcut. This allows you to easily access it anytime in the future, without going through the same steps again.


Now you'll see this report on the left side menu, under "Shortcuts".

Keeping visitors engaged and on your site

One of the most important metrics you’ll want to examine in Google Analytics is Bounce Rate. This number tells you the percent of visitors who came to your site, and then left without viewing a single other page. In particular, you want to look at the bounce rates for specific landing pages.

For this, I put together a handy custom report. Click the following link:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=iMyNOS2kR-G2OWm2hkWqdA
As long as you are signed into Google Analytics, it should prompt you to load the report for one of your website profiles. Once you do, you’ll see something like this:




There are two very useful ways to begin using this report. One will show you how to find landing pages that perform poorly, and the other helps identify the most valuable ones.

1. Find landing pages with high bounce rates AND large numbers of pageviews.
When you sort a report like this from high to low by clicking the Bounce Rate column, you’ll end up with a lot of 100% bounce rate pages, which may have only seen a handful of visitors. In order to match the bounce rate to a larger sample size, you must change the sort type to “Weighted”.



Now you can get strike a balance between pages that get visits, and high bounce rates. If you want to learn more about how to understand and fix high bounce rates, check out this excellent infographic from KISSmetrics 

2. Find landing pages that convert into sales
Not all landing pages perform poorly. In fact, on the opposite end, you can use this report to find ones that drive sales. To do this, sort the report by “Transaction” or “Per Visit Value” to get an idea of how well they perform.

Fine tune your marketing efforts

Google introduced several new features to their analytics tool, and this is one of my favorites. With this data, you can understand where visitors are coming from, and the types of content they favor. For example, visitors from Facebook prefer broader types of content, like educational infographics than visitors from your email list. Certain traffic segments respond to particular types of content differently than others, and this will help you understand where to promote your content.

1. Social networks
Begin by navigating to the “Network Referrals” report, located under the Acquisition > Social section.


On the next screen, you will see a list of social networks that sent traffic to your website.


Click on a social network to see which URLs were shared. In this case, we’re looking at Twitter.


2. All referring sites
In addition to looking specifically at social networks, you should pay attention to other sources of referral traffic. To find your top refferal sources, look under Acquisition > All Referrals.

Wrapping it all up

Hopefully these tips get you pointed in the right direction when it comes to understanding how your website is performing. It's important to ask yourself what sort of insight you'll get, and decide about the types of changes you can make with this information. By focusing on the right metrics and reports that matter, you'll be able to drive more traffic to your website, increase visitor engagement, and add to your bottom line.

This is a great platform to use for driving traffic to your site. The internet is a big place, and digging through forums, social networks, blogs, and other sites to find relevant discussions can be tedious. This amazing tool takes care of that for you. Think of it like Google Alerts on steroids. For example, you could monitor your brand mentions across any website, track certain keywords, like “Carneros Chardonnay” for example, and easily find places to inject yourself into a discussion.

Mention

This is another media monitoring service that helps you discover conversations happening around the web, and engage with new users. Although not as feature-rich as Buzzbundle, their platform offers an easy to use solution for monitoring the web for your brand and certain keywords relevant to your business.

Topsy

Apple bought Topsy recently, for a reported $200 million acquisition. Topsy focuses soley on Twitter, and pours through streams of conversations to help you identify influential users and trends. They even have an archived database of every tweet since 2006! That’s a lot of information to mine, which is why Apple was so eager to acquire them.

Hootsuite

This powerful web-based application helps you manage all of your social media accounts in one place. For a modest monthly fee, you get a lot of useful features. You can hook up multiple accounts in one place, schedule postings, and create new tabs to do things like monitor keywords/hashtags, keep track of lists of users, and much more. The basic plan also provides some basic analytics reports that show key indicators of growth for your social media accounts, although the more detailed reports do cost extra money.

Socialmention

If you’re looking for a stripped down version of Topsy or Mention, try Social Mention. It’s simple to use and totally free. Just type in a keyword or phrase, select which sort of network you’d like it to search, and it spits out a list of results from around the web. The results screen provides a few key metrics as well, showing you strength, sentiment, passion, and reach. Strength is the liklihood your term is being discussed in social media, sentiment is the ratio of positive to negative comments associated with the term, passion is an indicator of how often people will talk about your term, and range is a percentage figure of unique mentions by authors.

2. Social Advertising

3. Local Search Marketing

4. Content Marketing Strategy

5. Personalization and Segmentation

What is a Landing page?

A landing page targets a particular audience, and focuses on getting them to complete a single action - usually purchasing a product, or signing up for an email list. A good landing page includes the following elements:

1. A strong headline

2. Call-to-action

3. Visual clarity

4. Focused topical content

In the example below, we see how La Crema put together a great landing page for their Pinot Gris. Instead of simply directing visitors to the product page, they developed a campaign that frames their product in a certain context. While we don't know the exact figures, we can assure you this page converts visitors into customers simply because it offers an interactive and engaging experience. Let’s examine some of the elements that make it a success.

Understanding the audience

It’s pretty clear they know women, probably ages 25-45, enjoy their Pinot Gris. Based on the images and video they use on the landing page, and in some of the blog articles about the product, it seems like they're trying to appeal to a female audience. It's definitely not aimed at the tailgating, Sunday football fans. The screenshot below shows one of their homepage slides from a few months back, so you can tell they're concentrating on a particular group of individuals.

Clear call-to-action

They provide two primary calls to action. You can either click “buy now” to purchase, or visit the “learn more” link, which takes you to this page: http://blog.lacrema.com/pinot-gris that contains more details on the wine. The aim is to drive visitors down the funnel by educating them, creating interest, and ultimately sending them to the product page.

Clean visual design

The page is clean, and well-organized with four sections. Each one brings a unique focus and context to the product; the intro video shows four women enjoying the wine in several different settings; they bring an element of social proof with the “life of the party” section, featuring a link to bloggers who featured their wine; there’s a bright image of a halibut dinner, along with four suggest food pairing recipes; finally, there's an interview with the winemaker who talks about what went into making their Pinot Gris.

Focused Content

Visitors to this page have two choices. They can either leave, or buy. There's no navigation to distract them. The content is singularly focused on the wine, and the extended lifestyle that's associated with it. Each section provides relevant information and helps to further visitors down the purchase funnel. It appeals to the casual observer who’s interested in learning more about the wine and how it was made as well as the sociallite who’s ready to host a party and needs to buy a case of great wine that pairs with sandals, hammocks and long warm summer sunsets.

Additional notes:

This landing page was conceived in-house by the Jackson Family Wines Marketing and Communications Department and developed by third party developers in Canada and Sacramento.Want to learn more about landing pages? Check out these great articles:

Why landing pages are an indispensible part of marketing
What is a landing page and why does it matter?

Landing page design service

If you're interested in having a landing page designed for your website, send us a request through our digital marketing services form.

You may also check out "The Brendans", a great design firm that was behind the creation of the La Crema microsite. For more information visit http://thebrendans.com/lacrema.html

This report measures your ecommerce stats against a number of dimensions; it includes keywords that lead to conversions, the types of browsers your visitors use, mobile devices, country and location, and the time of day that transactions occur.

How to get it

Click this link, and then choose the profile you want to add the report to. You’ll need to be signed into Google Analytics to load the report.

How you can use it

The report comes loaded with five tabs across the top. Each tab contains unique data sets, explained below.

By Keyword: It helps to know which keywords people search for and make purchases against. I recommend filtering this report using advanced segments - one for your branded terms, and another for non-branded keywords.

By Browser: You’ll also want to know how certain browsers perform against sales, and in particular look for ones that seem to be underperforming. Maybe you notice that a huge amount of visitors use Safari, but they have really low conversion rates compared to other browsers. Is there a rendering problem, or some other issue in Safari that’s preventing sales? In the case shown below, you can see that Safari is the #2 most used browser, but contributes a unusually small percentage to the bottom line; the conversion rate is only .91% compared to the average of 3% for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.

By Device: Don’t you want to know how mobile users behave on your site? You do have a mobile site, don’t you? The “By Device” tab starts by splitting users into two groups - mobile, and non-mobile. If you click “yes” it will show you the top mobile devices people use on your site, along with the contributions to sales.
By Country: This tab provides geographical information about visitors to your site. Click “United States” and you’ll be presented with a list of cities. You can drill down into each city to see the landing pages that people came through.

By Campaign > Time of Day: If you’re running adwords/PPC, or email marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to see how they stack up in this tab. Click each campaign name and you can see the time of day that users made transactions. Perhaps you’re sending emails in the morning, but users make purchases in the evening. Maybe you should try adjusting the time that you send your next email campaign to compare results.

2. Add descriptions guide other users

3. Copy/Duplicate reports

4. Filter by date range

5. Sort fields for easier viewing

Treasury Wine Estates

Chappellet

The Gatekeepers of Wine Distribution

Laws vary greatly between states

Small wineries struggle to keep up

• Free the Grapes - Learn how you can help more consumers exercise their free rights to buy wine direct from their favorite producers.
• ShipCompliant - Get a better understanding of the state-by-state laws and compliance issues that wineries and wine retailers need to be aware of, and solutions to help expand consumer direct sales.