A few years ago at the DTC Wine Symposium, a panelist joked about the modern winery website formula: the guy, the dog, the truck, and the vineyard. Beautiful backdrop, strong lifestyle photography, a thoughtful founder story. Polished, absolutely. Strategically distinct, rarely. The critique wasn’t about branding. It was about structure. Most winery websites aren’t broken, but they aren’t built as decision environments either. Calls to action are unclear, revenue pathways are buried, shipping surprises appear late, and wine club often lives in isolation instead of throughout the buying journey. After auditing winery sites across regions and production sizes, the pattern is consistent: performance is constrained by friction, not effort. Most wineries don’t have a traffic problem. They have a conversion architecture problem. Before increasing ad spend or launching another promotion, run a winery website audit — on your phone. Start at the homepage and move t

With the peak season of OND right around the corner, now is a great time to assess your sales team's skills before the final push of the selling year.  Of course, if your sales strategy isn’t already in place by Labor Day, your OND will likely fall short of your goals. But it’s not too late to take an assessment! The need to do more with less has never been more essential, and the waning days of summer provide an opportunity to assess your sales team’s skills.  Most adult beverage companies devote significant time and effort to ensuring the sales team’s product knowledge is as sharp as possible. But many stop there. They devote little, if any, of their training budgets to “technology for sales.” With this in mind, we would like to provide you with a list of the five tech skills every sales professional should have.  1) Sales pipeline management In the modern selling era, there are two primary pathways salespeople take. T

Gamification And Customer Engagement It Just Works This is how I know.  I used a gamification tool to see if I could attract potential clients and to my amazement it did.  I attended the 2023 North Coast Wine Industry Expo (WIN Expo) and wanted to determine if gamification would improve customer engagement.  And through the process would they share their contact information and they did.   At trade shows vendors have a host of small tchotchkes at their booth in hopes of attracting visitors.  It’s pretty much an unwritten tradeshow standard.  Everyone knows that without a giveaway no one is coming over to see you.  And the bigger the tchotchke the more people will stop by, grab one and they may take two more for a friend.     So you gave something away but did you get anything?  At a tradeshow most of the time you get a smile and a thank you.  Well at least you may get some brand recognition.  But what if you chan

At RedChirp, our mission is to make communication better for businesses and their customers. RedChirp makes it easy for highly regulated businesses to text with their customers in all kinds of ways including one-on one, in bulk, through automations, drips and more. But our mission doesn’t end once a text message is sent; RedChirp is dedicated to helping our customers create the most delightful and effective conversations possible! Not all texts get the same results and we want to help our customers learn how to text in the ways that will earn them the most sales, create goodwill, and build strong and genuine relationships. The opportunity At RedChirp, we have long held suspicions and shared best practices about simple changes businesses can make in their texting to delight their customers more consistently. But these suspicions were nothing more than that – ideas we had based on anecdotal evidence. We did not have a way to know that we were right. Advances in Artificial In

Use These 4 Tricks to Compose Your Next Marketing Masterpiece Many wine marketers who are required to write for their businesses quickly point out they are “no Hemingway.” The irony is that Hemingway is known as a “plain” writer who preferred to use straightforward language when crafting his work. It’s an approach that–in theory–anyone should be able to replicate. Of course, emulating Hemingway’s style is easier said than done. When you boil it down, what people are trying to get at when they reference the author is the importance of clarity and conviction. With text marketing, you’re often faced with limited character space. So, writing clear text messages is critical, and you can learn some essential lessons from Hemingway’s approach. While you might not win The Nobel Prize in Literature, your text messages will be easier to read and more engaging. So, in the spirit of brevity, let’s dive right into what Hemingway can

When it comes to the cork industry’s challenge to win the closures battle, one enormous boost has come in the findings of a Lifecycle Assessment study by Ernst & Young, which shows as scientific fact how cork stoppers can reduce by a quarter the total carbon footprint of an average bottle of still table wine and by almost half that of a bottle of sparkling wine.  Mike Turner talks to world-leading cork supplier Amorim, which commissioned the study, and suggests that for an industry that has often been forced into owning a narrative, the carbon footprint argument sits neatly with an already impressive record of sustainability and biodiversity.  By Mike TurnerApril 29, 2020 “Amorim has always advocated that science can highlight the problem as well as the solutions, whether that realm is TCA taints or carbon emissions,” writes Turner. For the last 30 years, the cork industry has been under attack. Wine producers that didn’t have easy geograph

  Posted by Laura Ness of Spirited Magazine | Mar 31, 2020 | Packaging, Equipment, Wine, Production    You have to be just slightly natters to engage in a livelihood that can literally blow up on you—and yet, the sisterhood (and brotherhood) of bubbles runs deep. That’s probably why it’s considered the ne plus ultra of winemaking. There are many ways to sparkle a beverage, but méthode Champenoise is considered the highest form of sparkling art. It’s a process that’s been painstakingly perfected, by hand, over the centuries. It requires two entirely separate fermentations, the second of which occurs in the bottle, which is where the magic happens. Says Todd Graff, winemaker and general manager at Frank Family Vineyards in Napa Valley, “The secondary fermentation in the bottle is the trickiest part, because however many bottles you’re making, each is an individual fermentation.” Méthode Champenoise is time consuming, filled with repetitive tedium, complicated (often by many months o