15 Ways to Grow Your Winery Email List (Video)

15 ways to grow your email list coming up right now.

Introduction

Recently I produced a video called 7 Reasons Why Email Marketing is the Best Way to Sell Wine and Spirits, I'll put a link in the description below to this video. I highly suggest that you watch it. But today's video is all about how to grow your email list.

Number 1: Multiple Places to Join

Now, the first thing you need to grow your email list is your website needs multiple places to join your email list. It's not enough to have just one place where it says join or subscribe, you need multiple places. This will really help improve the odds that someone is going to join your email list. I'll put a couple of examples here on the screen of what that might look like.

Number 2: Compelling Reasons to Join

Number two is you need compelling reasons to join your email list. People aren't going to sign up just because it says, join our mailing list or join our email list. You've got to give compelling reasons. Be as explicit as possible. Let people know that you're only going to send them information when it's important or valuable. You promise not to send them too many emails. They have access to special offers, access to special discounts, access to special releases.

Be creative. I'll put up a couple of examples here on the screen of great compelling reasons to join, but you have to provide compelling reasons or you're just not going to get people to sign up.

Number 3: Popup Forms

The third way to grow your email list is to use pop-up forums, I would use at least one. The best practices for pop-ups are to only show them to new visitors to your website and wait 15 seconds before you show them. Now, you might say, all pop-ups annoy me. Well, pop-ups will annoy you if you don't do them right. That's why you wait 15 seconds and you only show it to new visitors, that cuts way down on the annoyance factor. But popups are a fantastic way to grow your email list.

Number 4: Landing Page

The fourth way to grow your email list is to create a simple landing page where you can take a link to that landing page and you can put it everywhere. You can put it in the signature section of your email template. You can put calls to action buttons on social media. You can use it in a number of ways, but a simple landing page with just a few fields, a dedicated place to send traffic to for the sole purpose of signing up for your email list can be very effective. I'll put an example of what ours looks like on the screen.

Number 5: Lead Magnet

Now, the fifth way to grow your email list is also one of the most powerful, and that is to create a lead magnet, some kind of a checklist or a guide, some digital asset that you give away for free in exchange for someone's email address. You make it really obvious that by grabbing this free item, they're joining your email list. You can promote your lead magnet organically on your social media, on your website, in popups. There's various places in the website where you can promote your lead magnet.

But you can also run paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram advertising your lead magnet. This is a really great way to accelerate the number of people who sign up for your email list. They'll have a couple of examples here on the screen of what this looks like. I also have lots of resources that I can send you to to learn more about how to create lead magnets and leverage them, but lead magnets are a game changer when it comes to growing your email list.

Number 6: Use Instagram Bio

Now, the sixth way that you can grow your email list is by using your Instagram bio. Go look at your Instagram bio. Does it just send people to your website? That's really not a good best practice. What would be better is to use Linktree, and I'll show you an example here on the screen of what Linktree looks like, but one of the call to action buttons in that Linktree list is to join your email list. That's a great way to send them to the landing page that I just talked about where you can get people to sign up. But this is a really powerful way to convert your Instagram fans into email subscribers.

Number 7: Instagram Stories

Now, the seventh way to grow your email list is also by using Instagram, and this is in the Stories. You can't put a link to anything in an Instagram post, but you sure can in a Story. So you can have a simple video or carousel slide carousel or just something in the Story, and then put a link to that landing page that invites people to join your email list. So there's two great ways to turn your Instagram followers into email subscribers.

Number 8: Facebook Action Buttons

The eighth way to grow your email list is by using Facebook action buttons. You'll have to do a little bit of investigating on how to do this, but it's not hard at all. When people visit your Facebook page, you can have a call to action button that says sign up or subscribe, and that can take them to that simple landing page that we talked about earlier in this video. This is a powerful way to take that Facebook traffic, your Facebook fans, and convert them to subscribers.

Number 9: Gated Content

The ninth way to grow your email list is to have some of the content on your website be gated, and by gated I mean you can only access it by entering your name and email address. This might be a great place to put your lead magnets that I just talked about. It might just be a place where you've got a lot of great information, maybe food and wine pairing tips, or maybe drink recipes, just something that compels people to want to go deeper by filling in their name and email address.

Not all the content on your website is gated, of course, that would be dumb. But you can gate a lot of it, and I'll give some examples here on the screen of what some of these might look like. But it's a very effective way to get people to subscribe to your email list.

Number 10: Simplify Your Signup Form

The 10th way to grow your email list is to simplify your signup form. It really grieves me when I go to somebody's website and I see all these forums that you want me to fill out. First name, last name, zip code, birthdate, mother's maiden name, whatever. The best practice is one field, and that would be email. You can always get information later. Now, I like to use two fields. I like to use first name and email address but that's it, and this way I can personalize my communication. So keep your email signup forms as simple as possible. You will see a much greater increase in the conversions of your website visitors to your subscribers.

Number 11: Collect Emails from Events

The 11th way to grow your email list is to collect email addresses at various trade shows, public events, farmers markets, public tastings, liquid to lips is a important thing, I agree, but it's just as important to get the email addresses of those people who are stopping by your table. This works really great for both trade and consumers. But a lot of wineries, they're so focused on getting you to taste their wine they forget to ask for the email address.

There's several ways to do this. One of the most popular is to just take a clear fishbowl, put it on your table with a sign that says drop in your business card for a free drawing or something. Just make sure that on that sign in the small print says, by dropping your business card you're agreeing to subscribe to our email list. Or you can have an iPad, that's a simple way for people to sign up.

What you don't want to do is have people write down their email just because their penmanship is usually bad and it's almost impossible to get an accurate email address. But collecting email addresses at trade tastings and events is an incredibly powerful way to grow your email list.

Number 12: Host Live Webinar

The 12th way to grow your email list is to host some kind of a live webinar where people have to register for the webinar and by registering for the webinar, you're going to grab their email address. Now, depending on how valuable the webinar is, you could actually collect more information if you want to like their company name and their title.

These work really great for amassing email addresses for trade buyers, but they work great for consumers too. I know that live webinars and tastings became popular during the pandemic, but they're just as accessible now. Not everyone can visit your winery personally, but they might show up for a webinar. So there's no shortage of information about how to execute and plan a great webinar, but it's a fantastic way to grow your email list.

Number 13: Leverage QR Codes

The 13th way to grow your email list is to leverage QR codes. You can generate a QR code from just about anything. All you need is a link and the QR code generator tool. There's tons of free ones, you don't have to look very far to find one. Here's a good place to use that link that takes them to a special landing page on your website where they can sign up. Put these QR codes everywhere, put them on the back of your business cards, put them on a little table, a little sign on your table when you're out in the field, there's all kinds of ways that you can use QR codes. When people snap the QR code on their phone, it takes them right to the landing page where they can enter their name and email address. Very, very effective.

Number 14: Collect Emails from Tasting Room Visitors

The 14th way to collect email addresses is probably something you're already doing, but like many things you're already doing there could be a way to do it better, and that is collecting email addresses from people who visit your tasting room, either at your winery or your distillery. There are several different ways to improve the conversion rate of this.

One of the best ways is when people are paying for something and checking out, they need to enter their email address to get their receipt, and there could be a little default checkbox that says, sign me up to be on your email list. There's all kinds of things you can do. You can also have a little iPad or a QR code or something right there at the checkout, which allows people to sign up for the email address. Even if they don't purchase something, they can still sign up for your email list.

Numbers 15: Better Email Content

The 15th way to grow your email list is a little more complicated but extremely powerful and it has to do with the way you create content when you send out emails. How great would it be if most of the people who received your emails liked it so much they shared it with someone else? This is a fantastic way to grow your email address. So your email content needs to be very brief, it needs to be very valuable or entertaining or some kind of in information, valuable information. But if you really focus on the quality of the content of your email broadcast, you'll create shareable information, which is going to in turn grow your email list.

Now, there's a lot of information out there about how to make your email content better. One of the places I would start is this video called, The Anti Newsletter Email Strategy. Because email really isn't about newsletters and blasts to everyone in your list. It's about building a relationship and taking people on a journey with you until you build trust and confidence and then you're able to sell things to them. So just focusing on better content of the emails you do send out is going to have a dramatic effect on the growth of your email list.

Wrapping it Up

So there you have it. Are there more than 15 ways to grow your email list? I'm sure there are. In fact, I would love it if you would leave a comment below with something you are doing that I didn't mention. This way it'll benefit everyone else who's watching this video. And if you ever have any questions, just leave them in the comments below. I read all the comments and I answer all of the questions.

And lastly, if you want to go deep on the subject of email marketing, especially modern email marketing, that is so, so powerful, you can visit winesalesstimulator.com, go to our blog and you'll see videos, articles, webinars, case studies, and downloadable content to your heart's content. You can even search keyword email when you get to the website and it'll queue up all these great resources.

As always, thanks for watching. If you got value from this video, we'd love it if you would hit the subscribe button and don't forget to ring the notification bell because we produce videos like this all the time. Thank you very much.