Wine Marketing & Website Tips

In a nutshell, you need to give your visitors a REASON to come back to your site.  So think about it — what makes you return to a site time and time again? 

The usual reasons are:

1. They have something you want (whether its a product or information)
2. The site is easy to navigate
3. They update their site regularly (so you know if you return there is a good chance you will see something new)
4. You receive regular eNewsletters from them about new products/information or a special offer

So how can you apply this to your own site?

Give your site visitors what they want

Most visitors to your site are looking to buy wine and/or find information about you.  So make sure your site ‘gives them what they want’!

Offer a quick and easy way for them to buy wine online

• Allow them to buy wine directly for your site (I’m planning a blog article discussing orderform/ecommerce solutions for wineries.  You can vote to have this be my next topic here)
• If you don’t want to deal with an online form or ecommerce (believe me, I understand what a nightmare shipping can be), then at least list and link to where they can buy your wine. For example, at Capitello Wines they have a link next to each wine where it can be purchased from AvalonWines.com.

Provide detailed information on your wines

• Include a label and/or bottle shot
• Provide tasting notes and/or technical notes
• List any awards and good reviews the wine has received.
• Offer a printable version of the wine information (usually in pdf format)

Tell your Story

• ALWAYS include an ‘About’ or ‘History’ page telling visitors how you got started and why you are now making wine.
• If you use any special techniques, have a unique set-up, or anything else of interest about your winery and/or yourself, TALK ABOUT IT!!!! For example, Mark and Marie Jurasevich of Noble Estate Vineyard make all their own wine using top-of-the-line but tiny equipment! So small, in fact, that during harvest Mark loads his beautiful Italian press using 5 Gallon buckets! What makes this so unique to consumers is by processing his grapes in such small amounts, he is able to control EVERYTHING that goes into them (no stray leaves, insects or bad berries).
• If you are using organic or sustainable methods, say so!  And maybe even explain what that is.

Make your site easy to navigate

Have you ever searched a site looking for a specific product or bit of information and it took at least 20 minutes to find?  If so, then you KNOW how FRUSTRATING this can be! So make sure you aren’t doing the same thing to your visitors.

• Make your navigation clearly visible (don’t hide it in a bunch of design elements) and easy to understand (don’t use ‘clever’ wording)
• Try to keep your main navigation under 10 links — otherwise you can overwhelm your visitor. If you have a LOT of pages, then organize them into categories and sub categories.
• If you have a lot of pages on your site, add a search feature and/or a site map

To see how intuitive your current navigation is, have some non-industry friends and family (maybe even trusted customers) visit your site and go through the motions of purchasing wine or looking for information. Once finished, ask them about their experience — what was good, what was bad, and what could be improved on.

This is especially important because we are always so familiar with our own sites that things we just automatically know, site visitors could be fumbling with.

Update your website regularly — especially your home page!!!!!!!

Show your site visitors you have a dynamic website by frequently updating your home page. Don’t know what to put there? Here are some ideas:

• List any wine awards and good reviews
• List upcoming events
• Add any new wine releases
• If you’ve hired any new personnel, include their information
• If you have a blog, list your latest blog title with a link to the blog itself

Besides your home page, make sure your wine list and event schedule stay current and get rid of past events — nothing makes you look more out of date then to still have an event listed from months ago!
If you’re concerned about the cost to have these changes done regularly, or if it takes your webmaster a long time to make changes, here are some ways to update your site yourself:

• If your webmaster coded your site using Adobe Dreamweaver (this is the industry standard web design software), then you can download and use Adobe Contribute (which works in conjunction with Dreamweaver) to update your site as easily as a Word for Windows document. (You will need to get your site information from your webmaster in order to set this up.) What is so great about Contribute is you can try the software free for 30 days, and if you want to continue using it you can buy it for only $199.
• Another option is to ask your webmaster about installing a content management system (CMS) onto your site. Once installed you will be able to login online and easily edit the text sections of your site.

Contact your visitors regularly

With so many places selling wine, you need to keep yourself in the front of your customer’s minds by contacting them regularly via eNewsletters.

With online eNewsletter companies like Vertical Response and Constant Contact, you can easily collect visitor emails and send out eblasts every time a new wine is released, to announce a new promotion, if you have a new event scheduled, received a new wine award, or any other reason you can think of!

By doing this, not only are you making sure your consumers don’t forget you, you’re also giving them a reason to visit your site and hopefully buy wine!