The Broadcast

Here’s where we share everything worth knowing, watching, and reading. From sharp opinions to deep-dive articles, from podcast episodes to wine marketing news you actually need—The Broadcast brings together all our content in one place. If it’s on our radar, it should be on yours.

Accessibility Icon text Do The Right Thing

Accessibility, compliance, and your winery website

Greetings, friends, and welcome to another Must Read. This week, I’m handing the reins back to Michael to give us the lowdown on Accessibility compliance, why it’s a must, and why a solution that looks too good to be true, generally is. In the last DBAD series, we talked about site speed. What it is, why…

Mike’s Don’t Be a Dick Series, Part 1: Site Speed

They say speed kills. In this case, a lack of speed kills. I’m talking about the speed of your website. So, what is speed? What exactly is speed relative to? Simply put, website speed refers to the time it takes for your visitors to see your website in their browser, from the moment they click…

“Hi Virginia” or "Does your personalization suck?"

“Hi Virginia” or “Does your marketing personalization suck?”

Technology, data, and the interwebs gave us an ability to “personalize” content, which many businesses took at face value: add a name here or there, automate emails based on what someone’s bought or visited, remarket elsewhere to the same people; but, for the vast majority, it simply meant adding someone’s first name to an email…

A love letter to old friends: how to revive a dead email list

What the heck do you do with an email database that hasn’t been used in ages? We’ve all been on the receiving end of these emails, the ones where we think, “who IS this?” and immediately unsubscribe. So in typical fashion, I’m going to take the “real human” approach to this conundrum. But first, let’s…

Built for Play. What the wine industry can learn from Video Game design.

Lately, I’ve been pondering my GenX husband’s secret guilty pleasure: MMORPGs, huge multiplayer online games with complex story plots that often rely on community-building to master. Dear Hubby has been a gamer for as long as we’ve been married, and before life got busy with kids and businesses and mortgages, I spent many an evening…

Creating delight and building connections

I’ve decided to eschew the crappy list-ification that you’ll find littering Google when you search Customer Delight, because while those lists might give you some very middle-of-the-road places to start, they don’t help you shift your thinking. Delight is a way of looking at communication and marketing that needs to be embraced by everyone on…

Kanye West saying "for me, I'm a creative genius"

Kanye & Blind Dates: Tackling the About Us Page

Today, let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart as a wine, beer, and spirits marketer…the single piece of content that sends even the bravest of business people running for the hills: the About Us web copy. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times that I have seen sites stall for lack…

photo of sunset taken through airplane window

30 days of Instagram ideas for wineries

Need a little inspiration for your social media posts? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter and get the news and updates you need, straight to your inbox. It’s the best darned news you’ll read all week. 30 days of Instagram ideas

GDPR for Wineries

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is the new data protection law in the EU, it comes into force in May 2018, it has serious penalties, and it applies to data collected about EU citizens from anywhere in the world. This means that pretty much every winery site anywhere needs to care about…

Designing a Better Customer Experience

In a recent article, we talked about the decision-simplicity index, and I received a few emails asking about clear pathways versus the old-school tactic of upselling via meandering paths. “Isn’t it better to encourage people to look around, so maybe they add more to the cart?” Before I answer, I will lead in with a story:…

Anatomical sketch of naked male by Leonardo da Vinci

Simple truths for better winery websites

Recently, someone (not the client) looked at one of our most thought-out, well-planned, customized sites (with innumerable goal-driven features) and said, “it just looks like a simple site to me.” Honestly, my team was gobsmacked. We had spent months working on discovery and custom development and optimization and testing ….My ego reared its head and…

5 Edits You Can Make to Wine Product Pages to Sell More Wine

This article has been updated for 2024. We often get emails from winery owners and marketers asking how they can improve their ecommerce site’s wine product pages. I always get over-excited by these requests because product pages are baby steps toward frictionless customer experiences. BUT, before you start (and this is super important), any successful…