Why winery marketing breaks in a specific and predictable way
Wine marketing is four different businesses that have agreed to share one budget and one person.
You are running a retail operation that ships bottles to strangers. You are running a hospitality operation that fills a room on Saturdays. You are running a subscription business, which is the club, and which is the only part that pays whether or not anyone shows up. And underneath all three you are running a discovery problem, because none of it works on people who have never heard your name.
Most wineries in the Walla Walla Valley handle this by giving the whole thing to one person who is also pouring in the tasting room on weekends. That is not a failure of seriousness. It is what a payroll looks like at nine thousand cases, and it is exactly why the marketing tends to be one thing done well and three things done whenever there is a Tuesday free.
This page is the whole system: what each piece does, which order to build them in, what they cost and how long each takes before it shows up in the numbers.
The four jobs compete for the same money and the same screen, and they pay back on wildly different schedules, which is what makes the budget conversation so hard.
Tasting room work pays this weekend. Ads pay this month. Club work pays over the next three years and is almost impossible to attribute to the thing that caused it. Search pays in six to twelve months and then keeps paying through quarters where you spend nothing. When a winery has one person and a limited budget, the fast-paying work wins every argument, because the fast-paying work is the only work anybody can point at.
So the pattern goes like this. The tasting room gets the effort, the club grows by whoever happens to walk in, the website stays as it was built in 2019, and the winery arrives at the end of a slow year genuinely unsure which of the four things underperformed. Nobody made a bad decision. The decisions were just all made on the same short timescale.
The arithmetic that makes the case for direct sales
A bottle sold through distribution and a bottle sold off your own website are not the same bottle.
Distribution moves volume and it costs you most of the margin to do it – which is a fine trade when the alternative is bottles sitting in a warehouse. A bottle sold direct keeps the margin, keeps the customer’s name and email, and gives you a person you can sell to again in November without asking anyone’s permission. That third thing is worth more than the first two – and it never shows up on the invoice.
This is the reason wine marketing spending is worth arguing about rather than trimming. Every direct sale compounds, because it adds a name to a list that is worth something next year. Every distribution sale is a transaction that ends when the truck leaves.
Winery website design
The site is where three of the four jobs actually happen, which is why it goes first even though it is rarely the thing anybody is excited about.
The bottle gets sold on a product page. The tasting room gets found on a page carrying hours, directions and whether reservations are required. The club gets joined on a page that has to sell a several-hundred-dollar annual commitment to somebody who has met you once. All three of those are website problems before they are marketing problems, and a site that fumbles them wastes every dollar spent driving traffic to it.
The common failure is a site built as a photo album with a shop bolted on the side. The vineyard photography is beautiful, the story about the soil is well written, and the commerce is an afterthought that looks like it came from a different company, because it did. On a phone, on tasting room wifi, the hero image takes four seconds to paint and the shop button sits three screens down. The visitor gives up and asks somebody at the bar, which works, and which is why nobody ever discovers the page is broken.
What we build instead is hand-coded WordPress with no page builder, a real page for each wine and each club tier, structured data so Google can read the hours without guessing, and a shop that behaves like part of the site rather than a guest in it. You own the code, the content and the data.
Wine label design
The label is the only marketing you own that a customer is holding at the moment they decide.
Somebody picks up the bottle because of the label, and then they taste it. That order offends people who have spent four years on a blend, and it is still the order. A label has to work at four feet on a shelf under fluorescent light, at reading distance in a hand, at four hundred pixels wide in a club email, and in a regulatory file at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which either approves it or does not.
Most label problems are really system problems. A winery designs one bottle, loves it, and then discovers that the reserve, the rosé and the club-only bottling all have to look like relatives without looking like the same wine. Design the system first and the fourth label takes an afternoon; design one bottle in isolation and every addition becomes an argument nobody wins.
Wine club marketing
The club is the most valuable thing a winery owns and it is usually the worst page on the website.
A club is a subscription business, and subscription businesses live and die on two numbers that most wineries do not track: how many members join in a month, and how many quietly leave. The second one is the one that matters and it is the one nobody looks at, because a cancellation is a quiet email rather than an event. A club losing two percent a month is losing a quarter of itself a year – and it can do that while the join number looks perfectly healthy.
The work splits into acquisition and retention, and they are different jobs. Acquisition is mostly a tasting room conversation supported by a page that does not read like a terms of service agreement. Retention is shipment timing, communication before the card is charged, and giving members a reason to feel like members between shipments rather than three times a year when a box arrives.
Full treatment on wine club marketing.
Winery email marketing
Email is the only channel where you own the list, and for most wineries it is the highest-return marketing there is.
It is also the channel most often reduced to a release announcement four times a year. A list that hears from you only when you want money learns to ignore you, and the open rate falls quietly for eighteen months before anybody notices. The wineries that do this well send things that are worth opening between releases, and then the release email lands on a list that is actually awake.
The mechanics matter more than people expect. Segmenting club members from list members from people who bought once three years ago changes what each of those groups should receive; sending the same allocation email to all three is how a winery trains its best customers to skim.
Full treatment on winery email marketing.
Direct to consumer wine sales
Direct to consumer is where the other four pieces cash out, and it is mostly an operations problem dressed as a marketing one.
Compliance rules change by state and by season. Shipping wine in July is a different proposition from shipping it in October, and a winery that has not thought about temperature will find out from a customer. The website has to carry all of that without making the purchase feel like a permit application, and that is a design problem with a legal constraint attached rather than a legal problem with a design attached.
Full treatment on direct to consumer wine sales.
Wine marketing strategy, and the order to build in
The order is website, then label if a label is due, then club, then email, then everything else.
That order is not a preference. It is dependency. The club page lives on the website. The email list is built by the website. The label sets the type and palette that the website inherits, which is why doing the two together costs less than doing them a year apart and discovering they disagree about what the winery looks like. Search sits underneath all of it and starts working the day the site is built properly rather than the day somebody buys an SEO package.
Wineries that skip the site and start with ads get a real, measurable bump for as long as the spending lasts. When it stops, the winery is back where it started, with a slightly larger email list and a slightly smaller bank balance.
Which order to buy it in
Nobody should sign the monthly number before the site is right, because monthly marketing spend on a broken site is a subsidy for the broken site. We would rather do the build, hand it to whoever runs your marketing, and be available when you want us.
How we run it
Phase one is measurement, which is unglamorous and takes about two weeks. What ranks now, what the club retention actually is, what the site does on a phone, and what the last twelve months of direct sales look like by month.
Phase two is the build, which is the website and the label if one is due. Six to ten weeks.
Phase three is the compounding work: the pages that earn search traffic, the email cadence, the club retention changes. This is the part that pays in months rather than weeks, and it is the part most likely to get cut in a slow quarter, which is exactly backwards.
Common questions
Where should a small winery start?
The website, unless the label is actively holding back a release. Three of the four jobs happen on the site, and money spent driving traffic to a site that cannot convert is money spent proving the site cannot convert.
How much should a winery spend on marketing?
Somewhere between five and ten percent of revenue is the range most wineries land in, but the more useful question is what share of it goes to work that compounds. A winery spending everything on ads is renting attention. A winery spending half on the site, the club and the list is buying something.
Do you work with wineries outside Walla Walla?
Yes. The Walla Walla Valley is where we are and where most of our wine work has been, but the four jobs are the same in Napa, the Willamette Valley and the Finger Lakes.
Can you just do the SEO?
Yes, though we will tell you if the site is the thing holding it back. Search work on a slow site with no real pages is the most common way wineries waste a marketing budget. The general version of that argument lives on small business SEO.
Who owns everything if we stop working together?
You do. The site, the content, the label files, the list and the data. We do not hold client sites hostage and you should not work with anyone who does.
Do you build sites for businesses that are not wineries?
Most of what we build is not a winery. Web design covers the general case, and the portfolio has restaurants, retail and a dental practice in it alongside the wine work.