Important: Update on Text Message Marketing (SMS)

SMS marketing is an increasingly important part of B2C communication, and as mainstream adoption grows, it's also becoming more regulated and complex. Recent regulatory changes have made it even more imperative that businesses — especially highly regulated wineries — centralize their SMS within dedicated texting platforms designed for their specific and complete texting needs. With these most recent A2P 10DLC changes, we've made the decision to discontinue our ancillary SMS marketing services and recommend our customers transition to one of our partner SMS providers, such as RedChirp or SimpleTexting. Both stand out with a specialized offering tailored to wineries, ensuring your marketing campaigns remain impactful and compliant.

We appreciate your understanding. Our focus remains on equipping you with the best tools to thrive. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact support through the wine glass icon in the bottom right of the admin panel or support@winedirect.com.

If you use text messaging for Multi-Factor Authentication on your SiteAdmin, please visit our newly updated blog.

New Offer: Enolytics Helps Turn Data into Action

What should Wineries be doing post COVID-19 closures? Embrace Data!

Here we are in May, over a year since COVID-19 shut everything down and finally, in most areas, the world seems to be slowly opening up. For wineries, this is excellent news as guests once again venture out to enjoy the in-person winery experience. And what’s really exciting is that many wineries are entering spring/summer 2021 with a whole new set of tools learned over the past year. Wineries are embracing digital marketing in so many forms – social media, email marketing, paid search, online advertising – all designed to engage with consumers and drive them to websites (or into tasting rooms) to buy wine. The next few months we’re going to see wineries perform a delicate balancing act as we return to the land of in-person visitation while working hard not to forget about our new-found digital friends who have been supporting us over the past year.

One thing that will help wineries continue to thrive both in ecommerce and on-site activities is data. Acquiring new consumers is getting to be increasingly expensive as competition increases. Using your own existing data to understand and engage with consumers is an incredibly effective way to maximize your winery marketing efforts. Think of it from your own perspective as a consumer. What is more effective at driving you to purchase something? A generic email showcasing wines that you’re unfamiliar with or clearly don’t appeal to you? Or a personalized email that is addressed to you (properly!) and features wines that you know and love? Maybe the email even references a recent purchase you’ve made and provides a recipe for an appetizer that pairs amazingly with the wine. Or perhaps it’s a note from the Winemaker just to check in to see how you enjoyed the wine? To be able to do these things you need good data and you need to know what to do with it.

I know what you’re thinking – who has the time? Resources? Knowledge? We are all out here trying to sell wine. Completely understandable. This is why Cathy Huyghe and the team at Enolytics, have been working to solve for this problem. Enolytics takes your winery data from within the WineDirect system and creates simple to navigate (as Cathy says “It’s designed for wine people, not just data people!”) reports and dashboards from which wineries can find the data that is most important to them to help guide decision-making. The ability to perform customer segmentation and data cleansing is just the beginning. With Enolytics, wineries benefit from advanced reporting for immediate results, and support resources available 24/7. 

Enolytics are generously offering a special incentive for WineDirect clients: a 30-day free trial and zero set up fees along with a 15% discount on the first year’s subscription. This offer is good through September 6, 2021. Set up is fast and easy and the team at Enolytics will walk you through the whole thing. Click here for more information.