Three Ways to Capture More Customer Emails in Your Cellar Door

A study by Wine Australia found that on average 75% of cellar door visitors bought wine while they were there. This is a fantastic conversion rate and speaks to the incredible work that wineries across Australia are doing in their cellar door with DTC wine sales.

The problem is that many of these purchases will be a one-off. They’re often from people visiting the area on holiday and it’s unlikely they’ll be returning to see you any time soon, no matter how good your service is.

But, you say, they can purchase on my website. Or they can phone me and order that way. While a small portion of them will, many of them won’t and you’ll lose the opportunity for valuable repeat sales. That is, unless you collect customer emails.

While collecting an email doesn’t guarantee a customer will purchase from you again, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing techniques and it does give you a much better chance that this will happen. Most wineries know this already and include newsletter sign-up sheets on their cellar door and at events, but in our experience, the success rate of these is relatively low.

So, here are our top 3 tips to capture more customer emails: 

Send Email Receipts

A report found that 90% of customers would prefer an emailed receipt to a paper one, you can count us punters in that 90%. Unfortunately, most wineries don't have the setup for emailable receipts. 

There are many advantages to email receipts for your winery – besides saving on paper rolls. The best advantage of email receipts for wineries is for building your database. And, good news, they can be set up with a wine POS, like ours.

Customers who are reluctant to give out their email addresses are unlikely to think twice about handing over their email to receive a receipt.

We recommend you do two things with this newly acquired email. Firstly, you should design an email receipt that goes beyond the basics – include wine recommendations, an introduction to your wine club or even just your social media handles to engage people. Secondly, send a thank you email to people who visited your cellar door for the first time and include a promotional offer in it. Many companies have found that these appreciation emails have particularly high engagement and conversion rates.

Offer Incentives

This is something normally used by eCommerce websites to entice visitors to hand over their email addresses, but with a little tweaking, there’s no reason that it can’t also work in your cellar door.

You can approach it in two ways. Firstly, you can do a discount on the spot for customers who are making a purchase. There are a few problems with this, as it will only get you the email of the people who are making a purchase on the day and there is no guarantee they will give you a correct email, as they have already got their discount.

Instead, the better way is to email the discount information to customers. This means they must give you a correct email and increases the chance that they will make a second purchase to ensure the discount doesn’t go to waste.

If you do decide to do it this way, you need to make sure that you are sending the discount emails to new customers daily. Not doing so runs the risk that they will lose trust in your winery and the immediacy also encourages an impulse second purchase.

Use Digital Menus

This one might just be for our wine POS clients, but we love our Digital Menus enough we wanted to talk about them anyway.

One of the most frustrating experiences about being a wine consumer is trying to remember the wines you enjoyed at a tasting. Whether it’s at a cellar door with only one brand or an event with many more, most customers will have had the experience of enjoying wine and intending to buy more at a later date, only to forget what it was the second they walk away.

Our Digital Menus address this. Designed to replace traditional Paper Tasting notes, they allow customers to access a mobile-friendly site that lists all of your wines and even your tasting notes. As they enjoy your wines, they can mark the specific ones they not only tried, but the ones that they liked as well as add any of their own notes. But that’s not all. This list can be easily emailed to customers so they have a record for future purchases and included in this process is an optional sign-up to your newsletter.

Clients who are using these Digital Menus are experiencing phenomenal growth in their database, managing to double the number of emails on their list in only months.