The Goal

As part of District Winery and Brooklyn Winery’s COVID-19 responses, both wineries launched virtual wine tastings designed to sell wine online ahead of live broadcasts on Facebook. Due to the success of these tastings in terms of both brand awareness and increased wine sales, Meaghan and the director of marketing set a goal of capitalizing on this newly engaged community and their willingness to purchase new wines week after week.

It became clear that both wineries’ customers craved opportunities to discuss the wines with the winemaking team and each other, and they were already ordering wine on a regular basis. Thus, the perfect scenario existed to finally launch community-minded, subscription-like wine clubs for District Winery and Brooklyn Winery.

The Approach

From the early planning stages, it was clear that these new wine clubs needed to be modern and customizable. They needed to provide opportunities for members to gather virtually until in-person events could resume. And the discounts, benefits, and pricing needed to be generous and enticing, but still generate significant new revenue for the wineries.

In the end, we decided to offer customizable, subscription-like wine shipment options, paired with wine, food, and tour discounts, exclusive virtual tastings, and other benefits. (View our current offerings on the websites for District Winery and Brooklyn Winery!)

Once the club terms were established, our team evaluated online wine club and ecommerce platforms, in order to build a system that provided the best buying experience for our members. This led to implementation of an entire ecommerce switchover from our wineries’ pre-existing Shopify stores, to new online stores (and eventually automated wine club sign-ups) on the cloud-based winery platform Xudle.

After building our new ecommerce stores on Xudle, we planned marketing campaigns to launch and continue promoting the clubs. Meaghan worked closely with the wineries’ marketing director to secure photography and graphic design assets to promote the clubs, from website banners to print posters, to animated eblasts.

Meaghan crafted paid social media ads to match the design style of the rest of the campaign, while simultaneously planning both wineries’ organic social media strategy for the launch. Meaghan also planned, wrote, and executed the email marketing strategy for the clubs’ launch, and drafted press releases to share the news with local media.

The Result

Before launching wine clubs for Brooklyn Winery and District Winery, we knew our customers were interested. But we were surprised and delighted to see how enthusiastically our audiences signed up on launch day and throughout the subsequent week.

From the moment we announced to the public via email, to when our social media posts went live later than evening, the sign-ups immediately rolled in and have continued ever since, exceeding our initial goals. We are thrilled by how strong our communities’ interest has been and can’t wait to see the new clubs grow!

Interested in working with Meaghan on a marketing project? Get in touch here.