In this video, Ben Salisbury walks winery and distillery owners and executives through the process...
The Perfect Winery Website (Video)
This is a short video pointing out all the key features to a new website we just build for a winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York called, Trestle 31. A "modern" winery website simply must be able to do all of the things listed in this video!
The video points out the following website features:
00:19 - Simple Age Gate
00:35 - ADA Compliant
00:48 - Optimized for Email Subscriber Sign-Ups
02:24 - Customer is the HERO
02:58 - Store Finder
03:44 - Trade Section
05:00 - Reservation System
05:35 - Google Reviews
05:49 - Social Links
06:03 - Blog/Press/News
06:35 - Fast Loading
06:54 - Frictionless Shopping Experience
Transcript:
Today I want to give you a tour of what we are calling the perfect winery website. And I'm going to give you this tour using my mobile device because this is so key. Something like 60% or 70% of the people who visit your website are going to do it on their phone, so I'm going to give you this tour using my phone.
Simple Age Gate
One of the first things you see is the age gate. A simple yes or no is the best practice. You don't want anyone having to fill out birthdate. That is a waste of time, and you're going to just scare them away. A simple age gate, that is one of the key features.
ADA Compliant
Another thing is the ADA compliance right here. If you click on this, it will give people have who need special assistance the tools that they need, which is just fantastic.
Optimized for Email Subscriber Sign-Ups
One of the things I want you to notice here is this website is optimized to get new email subscribers. That's a big part of the website. You see these two call two actions, shop or subscribe. We want that subscribe to be really front and center for visitors so they know what actions to take. Most people visit a website, and they're just there for a very brief time, so we want to capture that. And there should be a pop-up coming up here in a minute for inviting us to subscribe. That's another key feature of the website. It's possible that it isn't popping up because I'm not a first time visitor.
But when I click the subscribe button right here, you'll see it takes us to a best in class email signup form. It gives some compelling reasons to join the list. Stay in the know on all our exclusive sales, surprise discounts, special announcements, and more. We promise to only send you interesting content and information you might find useful, but not too often. It's just a fantastic signup form. Two simple fields only. Now, the more fields you have beyond two, the fewer conversions you're going to have of visitors to subscribers, so you want to keep it to these two at a minimum. But look, they have a chance to identify whether they're a wine lover or a member of the trade. And this is really, really key to getting more signups.
Customer is the HERO
Now, another thing I want you to mention, let's go right back to the main page, is the customer is the hero of this story. When you first visit the website, you see people enjoying themselves at the winery. There's lots of information in this website. Let's go take a quick look at our story, our family. That information is there, but the first impression is all about the customer feeling like they are the hero of the story, so that's another key part.
Store Finder
One of the cool features of website is finding the wines out in the markets. What restaurants or retailers are carrying the wines? At the bottom of the website here, we've got a place called Find Our Wines. Every winery, every craft distillery needs to have this component if you have three tier distribution. And this is a really nice example of what this should look like. In addition to our tasting room in Geneva, you can find Trestle 31 Wine at any of these locations below. You could use your current location or you could search a location, and it starts showing you where they are, including directions, so this is a wonderful feature of the website.
Trade Sections
I also want to show you the trade section of the website, which every winery should have. You see down here at the bottom left, you've got trade. This is where distributor sales reps, sommeliers, package store people can come and get the information they need. And there's a popup to join our trade only email list. This is a huge game changer. You have trade members visiting your website all the time, but you've got to be able to convert them to your trade only email list. This is a very important part of the Perfect Winery website.
Now, you see here, you've got spec sheets that load really fast. Look how fast this loads on the mobile. And you also have bottle shots, scores. And then there's another place at the bottom here where you can join the trade only email list. Here it is, join the family. Takes you right back to that form. This is just a wonderful feature of this website.
Reservation System
Another feature of this website is there's a great reservation system. Commerce7, which is the e-commerce provider, and I'm going to go over that in a second, it's integrated with the reservation system, Talk. When you come up here and you click on experience, we want people to book. In this case they have, you can book a tasting or you can book a stay in their loft. And you see how beautiful this is on mobile, how clean and easy it is to navigate. It's got all the information that you could want.
Google Reviews
And one of the cool features here is the ability to integrate Google reviews right here on the website. That is a marvelous, marvelous feature of the website.
Social Links
Couple other things I want to point out is the working links to social sites down at the bottom here. It's so important to have these. You'd be shocked how many wineries don't have them. That's really important.
Blog/Press/News
There's also a blog and a press page that is really important for SEO. So here, if we go to news and we find there's two sections, there's the press at the top and then news at the bottom. We could have articles written here if we wanted to. It's just a really nice feature to have on your website. Helps a lot with SEO and also getting external links.
Fast Loading
The last few things I want to talk to you about is I hope you've seen how fast the website is. All the images are compressed properly. The pages are not cluttered; they're easy to read. The whole thing is optimized from mobile. And this speed will also help with SEO.
Frictionless Shopping Experience
The last thing I want to show you is the amazing frictionless shopping experience brought to you by Commerce7. There's a number of places you can go to shop our wines. Let's take a quick look. You can explore the current releases, you can find wines at various locations. But if you want to purchase, let's just add a few things to the cart here. And you can see how easy this is. You can view the cart, you can proceed to check out. It's nice and fast and simple to use. You really want to have that seamless, frictionless shopping experience. That is essential.
There you have it, a quick tour of what we're calling the perfect winery website. And I'm going to put the checklist of features right here at the end so you can write them down or take a screenshot. And of course if you have any questions, you let us know.