5 Reasons Why Your Winery Website Isn’t Generating Online Sales
It’s incredibly frustrating. This we know. After months of considerable hard work and effort (not to mention spend), your winery’s online store is live and your virtual wine shelves are fully stocked and ready to go. And yet days, maybe weeks pass, but you’re not seeing any real quality sales. Some trickles at best. What’s wrong? At Highway 29 Creative, our goal is to help ensure your winery’s website converts leads as effectively as possible – after all, your success in sales is our success in strategy. With this in mind, we thought we’d share some insider tips on what we’ve found, time and time again, to be simple tricks to transform your site into a high performing 24/7 salesman.
Your Template Isn’t Right For You
When you first set out to build a website, you may find that your developer will advise you to simply pick a template that you like. Yet, while there is a lot of merit to selecting a ready-made template, the one you pick will have a long-term impact on the effectiveness of your site. As a winery, you will find your website will have niche content blocks such as vintages, tasting sheets and awards that will need to be updated on a regular basis. For this reason, Highway 29 Creative has developed a top-of-the-line winery template called Johnathan James for WordPress with amazing features that don’t come with other winery website templates. This includes seamless integration with Commerce7 or WineDirect, 24 content blocks (including product badges for awards!) designed for various, wine-specific content and displays needs and follows ADA compliance best practices. The template really is an ideal starting point for new or small wineries or even wineries that want to test their market before committing to a full custom design.
2. You Have No Traffic
Like any good salesman, a great website will work for you while you sleep, serve clients, or spend time with your family. This means that it must be geared to stand out among Google’s gazillion pages to attract potential customers. In order to set this up, you need your site to be optimized so you can rank highly in someone’s Google Search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for a successful site, and luckily Highway 29 Creative’s Johnathan James template automatically generates rich snippets for specific pages using our SmartSchema system. Our template also generates and syncs changes to an XML sitemap automatically, so that your site’s structure is always up-to-date in the Search Console. While this all sounds rather complicated, the point is that we do the hard work to ensure your winery catches the eye of not just anyone, but the right people. Beyond SEO, it is worthwhile to explore Social or PPC campaigns, to generate more targeted traffic (but let’s leave this topic for another day!).
3. You Have Low-Quality Content
Let’s face it: a website is only as interesting as the content that it is filled with. People are visual creatures who like to be entertained, and even if you make incredible, award-winning wines, if they are not presented in the best possible way, your website might have a high bounce rate. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after only visiting one page. A high bounce rate may mean people are leaving your site too quickly because they are not finding the information they need or perhaps the content is not interesting enough to make them want to see more. The solution? Add better, more engaging content that speaks to your audience. When it comes to wine, we have developed a template that offers recipe and blog support, event publishing and ticket selling capabilities, an integrated Instagram feed and an ultra-minimal content management workflow for a smart, easy to manage Trade & Media page that’s always in sync with your current wine offerings. This variety of media will help grab your customer’s attention, while the well-designed template will ensure the site is easy to navigate and enjoyable to browse.
4. You Have A Bad User Experience
A website layout, menu navigation and calls to action are critical to the success of converting leads into sales. As all our websites are built on WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, the website layout is easy to use, has compatible plug-ins, and is well-versed by both developers and content managers the world over. In addition, visitors need direction. Much like way-finding through an airport or on the roads, having clear menu navigation for your potential customers will make them feel more welcome and comfortable in their buying decisions. With this in mind, all our template is built with navigation best-practices in mind, meaning you have the option to use mega menus, a type of expandable menu that allows you to keep your main navigation minimal and focused. This small detail is the beginning of a high-converting journey with positive user experience. In addition, when it comes to salespeople, the mantra tends to be "ABC," or “always be closing”. The equivalent to that in websites is to always have a call-to-action. Whether it’s a ‘Contact Us’ page to invite people to ask more questions, or a ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Read More’ button, you want your website to be like a rabbit hole that invites your browser to keep exploring. Finally, having a website that is mobile-first and fully responsive is essential to retain customers. Luckily, our winery template is optimized for mobile browsing, ensuring your wines look beautiful on any device.
5. Your Website Isn’t Secure
Sometimes, the simplest and quick fixes are the most important. For example, having a slow load time on your website may be causing a high bounce rate. Typically, this is caused by a large volume of unoptimized images which consume lots of bandwidth while loading. The solution here is to ensure your images are web-ready when uploading. Another essential trick is to ensure your website is HTTPS secure. HTTPS is a signal to your browser that your website is secure (the S in HTTPS stands for Secure) and protects the integrity of your website and by extension, brand. If you have an online store and expect your potential customer to provide you with their valuable credit card information, having a secure site is critical. It helps prevent intruders from tampering with the communications between your websites and your users' browsers. Intruders include intentionally malicious attackers, and legitimate but intrusive companies, such as ISPs or hotels that inject ads into pages.
While these are just 5 reasons why your winery website isn’t leading to sales, there is a much longer list to explore. That’s why it’s best to ensure you are in the capable and credible hands of a team that know the snags to avoid when building your e-commerce site. At Highway 29 Creative, our Johnathan James website template is a one-stop-shop for creating the optimal wine e-commerce experience. Our team of creatives and developers have built a solid skill set so you can rest assured that your brand is in the best hands.
Want to see it for yourself? Check out the Johnathan James website template demo site here.