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…
Continue reading “Hi Virginia” or “Does your marketing personalization suck?”
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…
Continue reading 💌 A love letter to old friends: reviving a dead email list
This week’s news is entirely based on Keith’s secret guilty pleasure: MMORPGs, huge multiplayer online games with complex story plots that often rely on community-building to master. Mr 5f 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…
Continue reading Built for Play. What the wine industry can learn from Video Game design.
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…
Continue reading The secret formula for creating delight and building connections
As anyone who follows my personal Twitter account (@mme_hammond) will know, I’ve spent this past week in Portugal at the MUST Fermenting Ideas conference. I honestly can’t say enough good things about this event! A diverse blend of presenters coming at the future of wine from all angles: media, marketing, tech, psychology, and production…people who…
Continue reading Delight first, educate later: What Richard Simmons and good marketing have in common.
Today, let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart as a digital 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 of About Us content.…
Continue reading Kanye & Blind Dates: Tackling the About Us Page
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 My communication may be intermittent in the next few weeks, but I’ll be working…
Continue reading 📸 30 days of Instagram ideas
Today, let’s start with two caveats and a thank you. The thank you goes out to Charlotte who emailed me with a question that made me sit my butt down and write an article that I have been avoiding. The caveats: GDPR. WTF? GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is the new data…
Continue reading GDPR for Wineries
Last week, 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?” Yet again, I will lead in with a story: A few years…
Continue reading Let them spend money💰: Designing the Wine Customer Experience
Recently, someone (not the client) looked at one of our most thought-out, 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…
Continue reading Simplicity sells.
We often get emails from winery owners and marketers asking how they can improve their winery’s website product pages. I always get over-excited by these requests because product pages are baby steps toward frictionless customer experiences. Plus, most wine site admin interfaces allow you to make these changes yourself. BUT, before you start (and this is…
Continue reading 5 Updates for Kickass Wine Pages