I always get a lot of questions from friends who are starting new wine labels and they want to know the best way to get their names out there and build up their mailing lists. What do you think of these methods and their effectiveness?
Sending free wine to active Berserkers with the hopes/expectations that they’ll give the wine positive and numerous Cellartracker reviews.
Inviting wine writers who appreciate your style to come visit your winery, and spending the time and money to wine and dine them with exclusive “other” wines after they’ve tasted your wine.
Enlisting the help of wine and food focused P/R people to get interviews on local and national news networks so you can get some positive press.
Participating in Berserker Day with a special sale.
I personally know that #4 works very well! The others seem to require a pretty big budget, but would they be worth it? And what other ideas are out there?
I was one of the group who took a flier on Jamie. I admired his goals, his determination and his dream. Thought of it as seed capital. I’m very glad I did. But what do I know. I bought Manlin’s first release, too
Don’t plan on a mailing list to run your business. It’s great when it happens, but even great wines don’t always garner attention (and really poorly made ones sometimes do). No guarantees, but if you can’t make it as a new label selling through tasting room or trade and three tier systems, you need to rethink your model. There’s a lot more noise on the top end of the spectrum than there was even a decade ago and overall quality of wine is much higher. A mailing list and direct sales if you have no prior reputation are a slow build based on consistency of product, relationships and hearing positive things about your work as much as possible from as many people as possible. Otherwise known as a labor of love.
Your advice and analysis both seem sound. What % of your production is sold direct to consumer on lists and what percent at tasting rooms?
How long did that take to get established?
Nearly all of our wine is currently sold to stores and restaurants by us, so no 3rd tier. My goal is to have a good % of our growth over the next few years be direct from the winery, local and shipped. Any comments on how to best accomplish that would be greatly appreciated.
While not ITB re: wine, I consult on how to use online channels to build businesses and I’d say that the biggest mistake made by people who want to move in the direction that you’re envisioning is to not lay the groundwork ahead of time. They don’t have a list that they’ve been building and communicating with over time, so when they want to go direct so they need to build one. My advice? Start building a list now. Make it easy and enticing to signup for a mailing list at every consumer interaction. Maybe that list is nothing more than a quarterly newsletter now… that’s fine. Start getting names. Do a quarterly newsletter so people are reminded of you and what you’re doing. Put a signup form on your site, take along signup sheets at events, etc (keep those… if someone complains about spam, you can show them that. More to the point, you can show the email provider if they question you).
Also, participate in social media. Peter Tryba is active on Google+ and has a bunch of wine folks circled. Setup a Facebook Page for the winery and use it to keep people up to date, even on mundane things like buying a new press, etc. Some people love to feel connected to the behind the scenes stuff. Use the page to tell people about events, press, etc. Get people to “Like” your Facebook page and give them an offer for doing that (10% off an order of 3 bottles or whatever).
None of this is magic, it all takes time. But it’s like compound interest… a year or two from now you’ll have hundreds of interested people on your list that have been getting newsletters from you, etc. When you go direct, those people are gold.
Ian, very realistic and wise advice. From your post, someone might think you’ve been in the business for 40 years!
Andrew, I hope your customers don’t require so much of your time to make sure they stay current with their invoices. That seems to be the most time consuming part about sales other than the initial sale, collecting the $$. Good luck with growing your business.
My experience with building mailing lists at tastings/social media is that you get such low stickage that its hardly worth the time. Now, I’m a cellar rat and vineyard dork, not a marketer, so someone slicker could potentially do better, but if you don’t have enough buzz/scarcity to attract and retain the compulsive wine-buyer/berserker (really tough right now with the softness in the over-$30 segment and everybody and their mother still wanting to be a boutique winemaker), your best bet is to do something special and have people seek you out – and in that aspect, Rick is right. You have to be semi-available/findable or twittering your head off so they take notice, and the discount to build a following is a great idea. I’ve put next to zero work into it (look for my website) other than hanging out here and pointing fingers, but I’ve accumulated a list of several hundred,. That’s misleading as most just like to read the newsletter (I’m like the Richard Brautigan of the wine world!). I do work with a few wineries who have been successful developing there direct sales and others that have not. It comes down to experience (with the owner/staff or at the winery/vineyard/tasting room), undivided attention, and having wines that close the deal/support that model. I’ll pm you my number Andrew and I can give you the more nuanced essay length view. As I said before, there are no easy answers – but its mostly common sense.
There was a lot of white noise before the recession over the way you need to build your winery through scores, media, scarcity, aspiration, direct sales, etc. and keep your prices high damn the torpedoes! that was pretty much silliness. I had dinner with John Alban in 2005 and he called it way back then; the escalator to the top is mostly over and you have to build it the old fashioned way – hard, consistent work and better wines/concept/value. I’ve been growing hand over fist (for a small guy with no checkbook) making nice little ‘village-level’ wines for urban markets. There’s excess demand for fruit off of Coastview, so we keep that label small and precise, just making the portions of the vineyard that we really want to make. Its a labor of love and the wines are slow-developers. But, if you can do well enough with the more widely available wines, you get to have those labors of love and grow organically… and avoid the false scarcity/allocations, forced purchase, peacocky bullshit that seems to occur at the top of the market, making it much easier to honestly relate to those that do find you.
The question I always ask when I hear ‘new label’ is what are you doing that isn’t being done? You have a much better answer than most, Andrew. If you don’t have a decent answer, don’t waste your money.
PS, buying a (decent) new press is a boatload of money, nothing mundane about that at all. When I get there, I’ll be grinning ear to ear and crowing.
I am not a winemaker nor ITB but rather a consumer and member of numerous mailing lists. I am responding because I find this to be very interesting topic of conversation.
I think that Rick has provided some very good advice as to how to grow a list of potential customers at virtually no cost. Ironically, the one area that he omitted (probably because it should go without saying) is to be more involved in the dialogues on boards like WB. I tend to join and stay on mailing lists after developing an understanding (albeit virtual) as to the character of the winemaker, their passion, and what they are trying to accomplish in their wines. Often this is conveyed by other WBers who post flattering comments/reviews but more importantly is when the winemakers themselves are participating on threads on a variety of topics, not just the wine they currently have for sale. Examples are commenting on the challenges they are facing during the growing season (the weather threads), field reports on what is happening in their growing region, tasting notes on wines made by others who they admire and/or wines that align with their palates, etc. Sure, it takes time out of your busy days but it doesn’t cost you a thing and is a great way to allow potential customers to gain a better understanding of what you are all about.
A great case study that is in process is Roy Piper. I do not know Roy, do not know anybody that knows Roy, have never communicated with him, and really know nothing about his background. However, through his postings, I have found him to be a knowledgeable source of what is happening in the Napa Valley during the growing season. I have also learned that he will soon be going live with a web site which, undoubtedly, will provide users with the ability to sign up for his mailing list in advance of the release of his first vintage of wine(s). All this info was gleaned over time just from reading posts by Roy and about Roy. I would not be surprised if his mailing list grows quickly just from WBers who have gotten to know him in person and virtually over the years.
Now, my purpose is not to pound the drum for Roy Piper but to illustrate how being an active participant (he has over 2400 posts on WB) can greatly expand the pool of potential customers. There are lots of other examples, and this is already getting too long-winded, but it still surprises me that more winemakers are not taking full advantage of a free resource to communicate with exactly the people they are trying to attract to their mailing lists/customer base. Be sincere, be knowledgeable, be transparent, be responsive, be timely, but most importantly be engaged in the conversations.
Excellent point. Participating in online interest communities can be powerful. You do need to be cognizant of the fact that you’re representing your brand and that, here at least, the board is indexed by the search engines, i.e. what you say is public (aside from the member only fora). And face it, the board can be a timesink. The way I suggest people deal with the demands of social media (here, Facebook, twitter, etc) is simply to make it a task that they schedule every day. Put in 30 minutes during a time when you are usually near a computer. Check and post here, post on FB or Twitter, check saved searches for topics that interest you.
There are tools that can help streamline this too - Nimble as a CRM seems interesting, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and, for people ITB Vintank too. No connection to any of these and people should trial and evaluate them, but there ARE tools that provide a surprising amount of power to small businesses for a very reasonable cost.
Great idea for a topic and the information that has been posted so far is truly helpful, especially to someone like me who’s been working on launching a wine label since '08.
I think Ian sums it up best as describing it as a “labor of love”.
Incidentally, while everything I said above will help, there are two other things that come into play. One is foundational - your product needs to be very good. Not merely run of the mill good, but above average; remarkable in the literal meaning of the word, that it’s something that’s worth making a remark about. Second, a very high score or other prominent accolade by the right source will give you more signups in a month than you might get in a year of consistent work. That doesn’t mean you abandon doing the work in hopes that someday you’ll win the marketing lottery, but it does mean that if you get such a mention you should be ready for it. What happens if 500 people signup and want your current release wine that just scored 98? What if 50 people signup because of a local news mention and send you emails about your wine?
What I mean here is that you need to get people on the list but you then need to engage and be responsive. Someone just sent you an email? Don’t let it drop… reply. They made a comment on your Facebook page? Comment back if it makes sense. There’s a question there? Answer it. Here’s an example: I sent a shop I do business with an email asking who distributes a wine here and if it was available, etc. I got the name of the distributor so I sent back a question on what was available, price, etc. Crickets. Nothing. A friend of mine once put this really well - “People will work hard to make their money. They won’t work hard to spend it.” Don’t make them work hard to be a customer of yours. If you lose track of email conversations easily, use a CRM system that tickles you about open inquiries. Need to check on something? Mark that email as a task and set a reminder. Use the technology to help you overcome your weaknesses because, at the end of the day, a customer doesn’t care why you don’t respond, only that you don’t.
More than putting a lot of hours into marketing, the key thing is to do it consistently. Maybe one would like to spend 10-15 hours a week on marketing, but that’s not going to happen. Fine, spend 2 or 3. But do that each week.Think of it this way… 30 minutes a day is 2.5 hours. Almost anyone can spare that time.
Too often people look at marketing like sales - if an activity doesn’t close a deal right away they move on. You DO want to figure out ROI, but you also want to consistently, week in and week out, build awareness. Where you can, definitely have a call to action that converts someone… but realize that conversion isn’t only sales but is also a mailing list signup, etc. This is one big reason I feel people should just make this a daily task on the calendar. Yeah, sometimes it will drop, but keep it in front of yourself and spend a bit of time on it as much as you can. Got emails? Send a regular newsletter. Doesn’t have to be long… just a “what’s happening, what’s coming up, stuff that we like” newsletter.
Finally, DO build a website. Why? Because it’s your online home. You get to write up descriptions of your wines, the vineyards, etc. It’s something that you completely control. Be smart about wine descriptions - use the varietal name and the vineyard. If you’re one of 8 people making wine from Vineyard X, your potential market isn’t just people who know about you but people who try any other wine from that vineyard. Say I try a wine from there and then want to see who else makes wine from there… so I google the vineyard name. If you have a site and have pages that talk about the wines you make from Vineyard X there’s a chance I’ll see you and come to your site. Your own site also gives you control over things like directions to your place, hours, etc.
Spring newsletter comes out in a couple of weeks. Website has been in process for a couple of years. We’re getting it ‘really’ right. No directions to our place (it’s through four gates and you have to drive through a stream), but pictures, philosophy and ideas about what winemaking should be about. I’ll send along a copy when we get close if you don’t mind giving me a critique.
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