The ultimate dream is to make money while you sleep. Email is still the top performing digital marketing channel. But, let’s face it, it’s so easy to push off writing another email campaign when you have a long list of to-dos. We get it. That’s why it is important you let technology help you and build email automations. With a little work you can let your email platform message your customer, sell your wine, and get more club sign ups. 

Why Abandon Cart Emails Matter

The most important email automation for any winery is the abandoned cart flow. Your ecommerce platform logs any customer that begins checkout and doesn’t complete it. Once they get past the first step of adding their email address to your cart, you have enough info to email them. Note that each platform has different rules around opt-in consent so check with them if you are unsure. 

According to leading web UX research group the Baymard Institute, 69.99% of shoppers abandoned their cart. There are multiple reasons for abandonment with extra costs like shipping and fees leading the way. 

Your number one job as a digital marketer is to recover as many carts as you can. Based on these averages, if you recover 21% of your abandoned carts, you would grow your ecommerce by 50%. Yeah, this is worth the effort!

How To Set Up Abandoned Cart Emails

You will need to first check with your ecommerce and email platform to see what level of integration is possible. If you use Commerce7, then the Klaviyo and MailChimp apps by Digimatic make this entire process effortless. If you use WineDirect, they have their own internal email system called “Action Emails” or you can use the Vintools Mailchimp Integration.

Once you’ve determined your platform integrations, you will want to build the automation. In Klaviyo it is called a “Flow”, and in MailChimp it is called a “Customer Journey”. Click those links for the respective step by step instructions. 

Now the fun part begins where you can strategize and design your email automation. We suggest a series of 2-3 emails for maximum effectiveness. Your first email should be sent 4 hours after cart abandonment. Successive emails should be sent 1 day apart. 

Keep these emails simple and to the point. The goal is to remind your customer they have an abandoned cart and get them to click back to their cart. Both Klaviyo and MailChimp have blocks you can add to your email that automatically display the customer’s products in their cart assuming you’ve integrated with Commerce7 or WineDirect.

The most important detail that is often overlooked is to filter out recovered carts if you are sending more than one email. In both email platforms you can add logic to the automation to check if a customer purchased since the last email was sent. If so, it will remove them from the journey. It is annoying to receive an email for an abandoned cart after you purchased it.

Our Best Hack For Abandon Cart Emails

The biggest roadblock to email marketing is getting your customer to open the email. This is why your subject line is crucial. Customers will ignore you if you are annoying or too cute. Furthermore, email providers like Gmail and Outlook are notorious for filtering emails into promotional and spam folders if they have big file sizes or come from a mass email platform.

With our winery clients at Highway 29 Creative, we’ve found our abandon cart emails regularly see an open rate of 60% or more. That’s a good thing! We typically send 3 emails in the automation and found by the third email the open rate had dropped drastically. We thought the customer wasn’t interested. It turns out we were wrong!

For our third email we changed strategies and saw a drastic improvement.

Instead of sending a typical email from the winery that had fancy graphics and layouts, we went back to the basics. We utilized a little known feature in Klaviyo and Mailchimp called a plain-text email. These emails look normal with black text on a white background. Right away it doesn’t look like a marketing email.

To further humanize the email, we put a real employee’s name and email as the from address. For example the from name is “John from Smith Family Wines” and the email address is john@smithfamilywines.com.

Instead of trying to sell in the email, we simply ask the customer if they need help placing an order. Check out an example of this email below and feel free to use it:

After we implemented this new strategy we found open rates in our third email actually outperformed the second email by over 17%. This led to more clicks and more purchases. 

Use Abandoned Cart Emails For Wine Club Sign Ups

Abandoned Cart emails are usually focused on recovering shopping carts with products left behind, but thanks to some innovation they can be used for wine club sign ups now.

Commerce7 and Digitmatic worked together to allow users that abandoned signing up for a wine club to be targeted. This is game changing! 

Using this new capability, we’ve set up abandoned wine club sign up flows and have seen amazing results. In one case study, a client converted 50% of abandoned club sign ups. We all know the value of club members, so this statistic should be motivation enough to set up this automation. 

Remember to still use our hack above to send a personal looking plain text email in the flow.

With just a few hours of time you can set up complex email automations that help you sell more wine and sign up new members. 

We get that not everyone has the time or expertise to set up these email automations. If you’d like assistance, our team at Highway 29 Creative would be glad to help. Simply fill out our contact form, and we will follow up to schedule a consultation.

Simon Solis-Cohen is the founder of Highway 29 Creative, a leading digital and creative agency serving the wine industry. He challenges clients to think about the future and constantly innovate. The agency chases data, not fads, and provides one-stop shopping for wineries looking to enter or jolt their direct to consumer sales. Their approach starts by designing and building a website focused on conversion (wine sales, club sign ups & tasting room reservations) and then dives into each digital channel with consistent and effective content and messaging.