AUSTIN, Texas (August 24, 2020) —

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on how wineries are able to do business. The closure of bars and restaurants cuts out an important sales channel, and the closure of winery tasting rooms has an even bigger impact on their ability to sell wine.

It is in this environment that Bingham Family Vineyards selected Big Thirst Marketing as its agency of record responsible for marketing programs to enhance direct-to-consumer e-commerce wine sales. It is essential that wineries help consumers find their wines and buy it online. We’re on board with Bingham Family Vineyards to assisting the winery to have a better understanding of its customers’ purchase behaviors so we can set up highly targeted email marketing, content marketing, and digital advertising campaigns to reach them.

“With the onset of the current pandemic, we lost the ability to sell our wines at our three tasting rooms, which is where we have traditionally generated the majority of our revenue,” says Betty Bingham, director of marketing, Bingham Family Vineyards. “Individualized, in-person selling is how we’ve built our brand and wine club. It is essential that we find new ways to reach our customers with a similar personalized touch with our online presence. We choose Big Thirst Marketing as our agency partner because they are adept at growing e-commerce. They know the wine industry, they know how to use data analytics, and the Big Thirst Marketing team has valuable hands-on experience tailoring the Commerce7 platform to meet unique needs. We know we made the right decision to hire Big Thirst Marketing. The first email marketing campaigns gave us an immediate 616% increase in online sales over the same period last year. That’s a substantial ROI on our marketing spend.”

To get started with Bingham Family Vineyards, we conducted a complete evaluation of its existing sales and marketing tools, analytics, and systems to determine the best ways to optimize email and advertising campaigns to increase online wine sales. The good news is that they are using some of the industry’s best e-commerce platforms and marketing tools in the business. That gives us a head start in evaluating customer data to be able to create effective, insights-driven marketing campaigns.

available data to create highly effective email and digital advertising campaigns that directly support online sales objectives in shipping, delivery, and curbside pickup.”

We’re able to optimize the use of near real-time customer behavior and sales data from the Customer Analysis that WinePulse is providing inside Commerce7 to identify automatically meaningful customer segments. We set up customer personas in segments such as Best Customers, Loyal Customers, Regular Customers, Customers at Risk, Dormant Customers, and Lost Customers so that we send the right information to them at the right time.

This customer segmentation creates the ability to better reach customers with the right communication to enhance their experiences. We’ve set up automated email campaigns with a system of touchpoints to nurture customer relationships, retain customers, increase chances of purchase, and grow overall sales as well as retain club loyalists. We’re using the same data and segmentation to implement effective digital advertising campaigns. Using data from Google Analytics, Commerce7 and WinePulse we plan content timing and conversion mapping with audience segmented keywords for geographically targeted campaigns to create mass awareness in distributed markets and to drive e-commerce sales.

How are you using customer information to improve your online wine sales?

Media Contact:
Matt McGinnis
Big Thirst Marketing [email protected]