Your email list is probably worth more than you’re getting from it.
Email consistently outperforms every other marketing channel for small wineries and hospitality businesses. Most don’t have a program — they have a list and good intentions.
The gap between a list and a program
Most Finger Lakes wineries have an email list. A meaningful percentage of them send emails occasionally — when there’s a new release, a harvest event, or a wine club shipment going out. Between those moments, the list sits idle.
A well-run email program looks different. It has a welcome sequence that arrives within 24 hours of sign-up and earns the relationship before asking for anything. It treats wine club members differently than tasting room visitors on the list, because they are different audiences with different relationships to the business. It goes out on a regular cadence — not so often that it becomes noise, not so rarely that it becomes a surprise. And it measures what actually matters: open rate, click rate, revenue attributed to email sends.
The difference between a list and a program is not effort — it is structure. Building that structure is the work.
What we build and run
The welcome sequence
The first email a new subscriber receives is the most important one. Most wineries either never send it or send it three weeks late. A proper welcome sequence arrives promptly, acknowledges the context in which the person signed up, sets expectations, and gives them something worth reading. Wineries with strong welcome sequences convert 15–25% of new email subscribers to wine club members within their first year. Without one, that number is closer to 5%.
CRM setup or rebuild
The right CRM for a small winery is not complicated — but it has to exist, it has to be used, and the data in it has to be clean. We assess what you have, set up what you need, and make sure the list is segmented in a way that makes every email more relevant: wine club members separate from prospects, local visitors separate from shipping-state customers, active buyers separate from lapsed ones.
Ongoing email program
Calendar planning, content, subject lines, send timing, list hygiene, and performance review. Some engagements involve hands-on writing; others involve building the system and training the person inside the business to run it. Either way, the goal is an email program that runs predictably and earns its keep.
Wine club retention email
Wine club churn concentrates in three windows: the first shipment, the 90-day mark, and the annual renewal. Targeted emails at each window — the right message, at the right time, to the right segment — are the most cost-effective retention tool available. We design and write these sequences, measure them, and adjust.