Why Your Wine Marketing (Really) Isn’t Working
You gotta look at the whole pictures when determining if your marketing is working.
Every month, I review the analytics from the previous month for my clients. We look at reach, engagement, follower growth, etc, and we think about:
What our goal was for each post we made/email we sent/the month as a whole
If the content we made got us at least partway to that goal
What was going on in the world and in our own business that might have impacted our results (good or bad)
I like doing this because I’m a bit of a slut for data, but also it helps us pull some of the emotion out of our decisions when we are able to look at the cold, hard facts. We make better decisions with cool heads.
This is especially important these days when it’s easy to spiral about shitty engagement on social media and low sales. So before we spiral, I want us (myself included) to remember that these numbers don’t live in isolation, and putting them into context can help us stop blaming ourselves for shit that’s out of our control while also fixing the things that are within our control.
Case Study: Holiday Bundles
Let’s take a recent email I sent for one of my clients about Thanksgiving Bundles. They sell these bundles every year, so we have some really useful data from previous years, including sales figures.
The client reached out to me, concerned that we haven’t seen as many bundle sales as we did this time last year. This is a totally fair worry, but after some investigating, I found that, from a purely analytical standpoint, the email we sent this year is actually performing better than last year’s (marginally).
We sent it to fewer people this year, and the open rate was a bit lower than last year, BUT we had more link clicks per open. In fact, our link click rate was actually double last year’s.
So we talked about it. We’ve led the horse to water, so to speak. So what is keeping these folks from making a purchase this year that didn’t stop them last year?
Let’s give it some context:
The email we sent last year was a few days before the general election, during a time that was significantly more economically stable and secure than this year.
We sent this year’s email on the day of a very intense local election (we could have chosen a better time, but hindsight is 20/20).
That, on top of the government shutdown and fears around food insecurity, right before the holiday season? Phewph. I don’t blame these folks for not necessarily following through on buying premium wine right away.
Internally, we are also in the middle of a wine club cycle, and we’ve just started allowing members to customize their shipments, something we weren’t doing in previous years.
And on top of all of that, we also had just finished a (very successful, I should note and pat myself on the back about) Mystery Case promotion. When sending the Thanksgiving Bundles email, I didn’t think to remove anyone who had purchased wine in the last month from the list. I figured everyone would want to know about this promotion, which, after all, is very good. But I didn’t think about how potentially burned out some of our customers were from already buying from us so recently.
How Can We Adjust?
So, how can we apply what we know and surmise from this info?
Tweak the subject line and preview text to make them more compelling and time-sensitive.
Shorten email copy so the call-to-action appears “above the fold”
Segment the audience more precisely. Next time, we can send different versions of the same email to different segments:
Wine Club Members can get an email explicitly tailored to them that acknowledges they just recieved their wine (and maybe even gives them a sneak preview of the bundles that they can add on to a future shipment)
Non-members who have purchased the bundles before but haven’t purchased anything in the last month, so they aren’t getting email/purchase fatigue.
Lurkers who haven’t purchased anything yet or haven’t purchased in the last 12 months.
Choose better timing. We can’t really control what’s going on politically, but we can be aware of how elections and world news may impact how our promotions are recieved.
These are all relatively easy adjustments that should help us in the future.
So, What Analytics Should You Pay Attention to and How Can You Read Them With a Cool Head?
When your analytics don’t look great, don’t freak out! Investigate. Because as we’ve established, data doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Here’s how to start breaking them down across both email and social media:
1. Email Analytics
Open Rate
If your open rate is low, ask yourself:
Was your subject line strong or just… fine?
Did you send it at a smart time (not during election week or while your audience was getting bombarded with other winery emails)?
Are you targeting the right people?
Fixes to try:
A/B test subject lines and preview text
Narrow your segmentation to qualified buyers (Members, recent buyers, lurkers, etc.)
Resend to non-openers with a slightly tweaked subject line
Pay attention to your wine club calendar.
Click Rate
If your open rate was decent but your clicks were low:
Did you include a clear, visible call-to-action button above the fold?
Was your copy too long, too dense, or not compelling enough to scroll?
Was the offer actually enticing?
If your click rate was high but sales were low, shift your focus to the site experience:
Were the links working?
Was checkout smooth on both desktop and on mobile?
Was there anything internally or externally (economic, political, emotional) that prevented the sale?
Fixes to try:
Add more buttons and make them visually pop
Simplify your copy and put a CTA above the fold
Streamline your checkout process (and test it on your phone!)
Set up an abandoned cart automation for people who clicked but didn’t complete checkout.
Segmentation Burnout
If you’ve been emailing the same list multiple times during a club cycle or promotion, you might be seeing fatigue. Exclude recent buyers or alternate your messaging (education, story, offer) to give them breathing room. Erica from Email Mavens even suggests setting up Preference Automations so people can take a break from hearing from you if they need to.
Remember External Factors
Sometimes it’s not you, it’s the world. Economic downturns, politics, and natural disasters can temporarily tank sales. It’s important to recognize which external factors were at play so you can adjust your timing or messaging next time.
2. Social Media Analytics
Social media is harder to tie directly to ROI, but the insights you get from it can still help you adjust your strategy. Here’s how to interpret the numbers that matter:
Views
This is the total number of times your post was seen. I like to compare this to reach and engagement numbers. High views with low engagement might mean people scrolled past without caring; low views with high engagement usually mean you made something your existing followers really connected with, but you didn’t really reach people outside of your current community.
Reach
Reach measures how many unique accounts saw your post. I like to look at reach vs. views. A high reach-to-views ratio = people came back to it multiple times (that’s good!). A low reach-to-views ratio = people saw it once and moved on (less good, but not necessarily terrible).
If your reach is low, experiment with media types (video vs. photos vs. graphics), timing, and keywords in your captions.
Engagement/Interactions
These metrics tell you how much your content moved people to take action.
Likes: Not the end-all metric they once were. Likes are easy to give and even easier to skip. There are a lot of folks who will share a post with a friend but not “like” it, not because they didn’t enjoy the post but because they were taking a “bigger” action and forgot. Take likes as a light indicator, but don’t put too much weight on them (if they really bother you, Instagram allows you to hide them from your feed).
Comments: If your goal was conversation, but you didn’t get many/any comments, did you actually ask something? Prompts, opinions, and open-ended questions work best to get more comments if that’s what you’re after, but, and I hate to say this, most people need explicit instructions on what you want them to do.
Saves: High saves indicate that it’s a post that people want to come back to. If your post offered education, tips, or inspiration, you want to see your saves be higher, but this is another one of those metrics that isn’t the most impactful.
Shares: This is one of the more powerful metrics out there, as it can help you increase your reach and views. High shares = “This resonated” or “This reminded me of someone.” Low shares = maybe it wasn’t relatable or didn’t have a clear takeaway worth passing on.
Reposts: This is a newer metric on Instagram, but it has been around for a while on TikTok, Threads, Twitter, etc. When someone taps the repost icon (the little swirly arrows), the post not only gets shared to a separate tab on their own profile, but it also gets shown to their followers on the newsfeed. It’s a little different than sharing a post to stories in that stories disappear after 24 hours, but reposts last as long as the person keeps the post on their profile.
I think that, after shares, reposts are among the more powerful metrics out there. If your followers are actively reposting your content, it means your brand is part of their identity, which is huge. It reminds me a little bit of Instagram Guides (RIP—I’m still so sad and bitter that these don’t exist anymore), where people can curate other people’s content in its own tab on their feed. There’s a lot of potential here.
Profile Visits & Link Clicks
If you had low or no link clicks, ask yourself:
Did I ask them to click?
Did I make it easy to find the link? (Pro tip: you can now list up to five clickable links in your Instagram bio.)
Did I tell them why they should click?
If you had high-profile visits but low link clicks, your links might be buried or confusing. Streamline them. Use clear, actionable, benefit-driven language (“Get our wine delivered to your door,” not “Learn more”).
Follows
This one’s easy to misread. If you had a lot of profile visits but few new followers:
The post that got attention might not reflect your usual content (so they didn’t see a reason to stay).
Or your bio/profile didn’t clearly say who you are, what you do, and why you’re worth following.
If you want to grow followers, you have to reach more non-followers, meaning posts that use shareable content, relevant keywords, or trending audio without abandoning your core story.
And sometimes you just need to ask people to follow you.
The Point
The long and short of it is that we can lead a horse to water, and we can try to persuade the horse to drink it, but ultimately it’s up to the horse to actually drink the water. Did you lead the horse to the water, but the water was gross? Make the water better. Did you lead the horse to really good water, but the horse isn’t thirsty? Make sure you lead an actually thirsty horse to the water next time. I know, this analogy is breaking down, but you get my point, right?
Don’t only look at the numbers. Look around them.
A single data point rarely tells the whole story. When sales are down, the issue isn’t always the content. Sometimes it’s timing, audience fatigue, or the world being really scary, dude.
So the next time you review your analytics, start at the top and keep asking why to get closer to a conclusion.
The context around the Thanksgiving bundle campaign is so importnat. The timing issues you identifed with the local election and economic uncertanty really show why we cant just look at click rates in isolation. Your segmentation strategy for future campaigns makes a lot of sense.