Over the years, email has become a cornerstone of the digital marketing ecosystem. Email allows you to easily analyze data, keep your customers up to date, and distribute targeted messages. In this video, Kim Nguyen of Speakeasy Co. discusses some ways to use email marketing to drive conversions, build an audience, and ultimately increase your brand’s key goals.
Email Marketing Basics for Beverage Brands
Kim Nguyen 0:09
Hello, I’m Kim Nguyen, Director of Marketing at Speakeasy Company. We are here today to discuss the power of email marketing. By the time this video is complete, I would like for you to know how to build an audience, drive engagement with them, and then ultimately increase your brand’s key goals through email. Before we dive into some of these key strategies, let’s first highlight where digital can support brick-and-mortar. For example, for new-to-market brands or new SKUs for established brands: as a supplier, you are entirely removed from the end-consumer transaction in a bar, restaurant, or liquor store. All you have is your bottle and label on the shelf or your name on the menu, which is really not enough real estate to educate your customers on what makes your products unique. It’s pretty clear that you can’t just sit back, produce amazing juice, and expect your brand to grow. You need to be thinking about marketing, and in particular, digital marketing.
Kim Nguyen 1:19
Outside of the alcohol industry, brands invest heavily online, which brings me to email marketing. We can distill down the levels of consumer engagement into three major categories: discovery, engagement, and conversion. Why should you consider email marketing as part of your digital ecosystem? First, you can contact your customers in real time. Have a sale going on? Send an email. Have an event scheduled? Send them an email. Second, you can achieve truly measurable results that give you key insights into your fanbase. Are people interested in a new product launch? Check to see how many people opened your last email and clicked through to your product page. Third, it’s an affordable way to distribute highly targeted messaging that maximizes the dollars you’ve spent to drive traffic to your site. They were interested enough to give you their email address—why not email them? Finally, almost everyone uses email.
Kim Nguyen 2:20
Brand awareness is at the tippity top of any consumer buyer funnel: getting customers even subconsciously familiar with your brand and products. In the world of email, building your email subscription list is the key goal in generating tangible results for brand awareness and discovery. You first want to set up your business on an email marketing platform. If you don’t have one in place, we recommend MailChimp to start, as they have a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers. Eventually, we would like you to graduate to Klaviyo, which has more robust capabilities in automation and workflows. Once you’ve set up your email marketing platform, your next step is to drive traffic to sign up for your newsletter.
Kim Nguyen 3:10
There are so many ways to leverage potential customers and brand-loyal fans to subscribe. If you have a tasting room, you can have a sign-up sheet; on your social media pages, you can link directly to your email newsletter subscription page; and if you’re at an event, you can hand out business cards or coasters with a QR code link that goes directly to the email subscription page. But as a consumer yourself, you don’t just give away your email to any business—it’s actually important to incentivize your audience to share their contact information by offering something in return. Common incentives are complementary shipping or a percentage off a customer’s first purchase, exclusive priority access to limited-time products, or future discounts at the tasting room. On your website, this typically lives as an embedded form in either the footer or contact page, or via a subscription pop-up after the user passes your site’s age gate.
Kim Nguyen 4:22
Now that you’ve succeeded in capturing email addresses, the next step is to keep engaging with them. The first email engagement typically is a welcome email to your newest subscribers, which can easily be set up as an automated email triggered immediately after subscribing. Be sure to include any special promo codes or links to exclusive products in this email if promised as an incentive. This is also an opportunity to educate your new subscribers about your brand, the history, and the process behind the product. Typically, this educational content is set up as a welcome series automated over the course of a few weeks. Next, develop an email communications cadence to continually engage your audience with valuable updates, new product releases, promotions, LTOs, market expansions, events, or fresh cocktail recipes. We recommend starting with at least a monthly email to keep your brand top of mind, but sending no more than one email per week to avoid negative over-emailing effects.
Kim Nguyen 5:40
Nothing is more important in the digital world than analytics. Your brand should be set up with Google Analytics in order to understand how users are interacting with your site. It’s crucial to leverage UTM parameters at the end of your email links to define your email traffic within Google Analytics; without these parameters, your email traffic could be mislabeled as direct traffic. If tracked properly, you will be able to see how your email subscribers interact with your site after clicking a link—like the pages they viewed, how much time they spent on each page, where they exited, and whether they completed a purchase.
Kim Nguyen 6:30
So you’ve built an audience and familiarized them with your brand—the next natural step is to convert. In the e-commerce world, the point of conversion is sales. First, we recommend recovering your abandoned carts; the average abandoned cart rate is greater than 68% in most e-commerce stores, so recapture these users through automated email and provide an incentive to increase the likelihood of conversion. Second, acquiring a customer is the hardest, most expensive part of any buyer journey, so make sure to remind existing customers to come back to restock by automating a win-back campaign after 3 or 6 months. Finally, surprise and delight your highest-value customers with exclusive discounts, mystery sales, or merchandise. If you’d like to start selling your spirits online to reach a wider national audience direct-to-consumer while staying three-tier compliant, visit us at speakeasyco.com. Thank you for joining me today!