4 Automated Emails to Sell More Bottles and Delight Your Customers

Email Marketing

Effective Automated Emails for Spirits Brands

You’ve set up your email marketing platform — now what? Here’s how to make it work for you.

Why Bother With Email?

If you’re not focusing a significant portion of your marketing efforts on building out your subscriber list and putting together strategic email campaigns, you’re missing one of the biggest opportunities to grow your e-commerce sales. 

Email can impact sales directly by sending offers to users who abandoned shopping carts or haven’t purchased in a while. Or they can be used in a more indirect way to remind people that you exist and to build a relationship with subscribers by sending on-brand cocktail recipes, serving suggestions, and info about new or limited releases.. 

And are you ready for the best part? Email marketing is inexpensive compared to other digital marketing tools and can be more precisely targeted, which makes it easy to experience an impressive return on investment.

Put Your Email Marketing on Autopilot

There are many Email Service Providers (ESPs) on the market that work well for DTC sales and beverage alcohol brands in particular. Some of the most popular tools are Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klaivyo, and Active Campaign. But almost every solution out there has a feature that you’ll most definitely want to take advantage of — email automation.

Email automation involves the use of predefined rules to trigger email messages. Based on specific actions customers take—or don’t take, you can set up your ESP to intelligently send a specific message to that particular recipient. Some examples include a welcome email sent when a customer joins your list, recommendations for similar products after a user makes a purchase, or a quick reminder to a potential customer that abandons their shopping cart. 

Email automation is great because it frees up your time for other valuable tasks, such as responding to customer questions. But it is even better because it reacts immediately to the triggers you select, so you’re confidently hitting the right person with the right message at the right time. It’s a profitable recipe when done right.

So what are some of the most useful email automations that you can set up? Here are some of our favorite ideas.

The Welcome Discount

For the reasons we mentioned above, it’s a good idea to concentrate on growing your email list. You could do that in a whole host of creative ways like giveaways, gated content offers, mini games, and more., But at the very least you should at least start by having an email subscribe form prominently featured on your home page.

To get more subscribers, offer a sweet discount (20% or more usually moves the needle) to anyone that completes the form. Then use email automation to immediately send them a message that includes a code to redeem the savings. Promotional discount codes can be easily set up within the Accelpay portal and virtually all ESPs make it super quick to set up a welcome email in just a few minutes. This is a no-brainer to bring new customers into your database and entice them to try your beverages with an attractive markdown.

Abandon Cart

This is a tried-and-true email automation tactic for a reason. People lead busy lives and are often juggling hundreds of browser tabs at a time. It’s no surprise that a good portion of them will add bottles to their cart, but navigate away from your site before completing the checkout process. Thankfully, abandoned cart automations are a great way to recapture those distracted would-be buyers and bring them back to their cart.

Usually your ESP of choice will give you some instructions for installing code snippets on your online store or integrating with your e-commerce platform. After that gets set up, you’ll be able to trigger emails to people who drop off the checkout flow.

If that sounds like a bit too much of a lift, Accelpay’s first-party data and simple preloaded cart links make it super simple to set up customized abandon cart emails that convert. Go and grab that unrealized revenue!

Restock Reminders

Make sure your customers aren’t just one-and-done with your brand. Set up an automation campaign that triggers 30 days after purchase. Ask the customer how they enjoyed their order and invite them to come back and restock. You can even use a preloaded cart link powered by Accelpay so that they can quickly reorder the exact same thing as last time, increasing conversion rates by speeding up the checkout process.

You can customize these campaigns even further by mixing and matching order quantities with the trigger delay. For example, small orders consisting of just a six-pack of cans could trigger a restock email in 10 days instead of 30. Whereas after bulk orders of multiple 750ml bottles, it might make sense to hold off for 60 or 90 days instead.

Recipe Recommendations

Ensure your customers are fully enjoying their order and coming back to restock even sooner by pairing their selections with delicious cocktail recipes or food pairing ideas. For each SKU that you offer, you can have an automated email ready to go that gives the customer some suggestions on how to best enjoy their bottle when it arrives.

This creates happy customers, brand loyalists, and repeat customers, all by investing a few hours into programming some set-it-and-forget-it email campaigns.

Closing Time

As you’ve seen from this article, email marketing has a ton of capabilities with a relatively low cost and few barriers to entry. Even if your email list is just a handful of friends and family at this point, laying the foundation now to build out these programs means that as you start to scale up, you’ll get to that sought-after exponential growth even sooner!

We hope you find these suggestions helpful, but by all means get creative! Play around with the different triggers and automation templates offered by your ESP and find a combination that works for you. And if you’ve found a campaign we didn’t mention that is working great for your brand, let us know on Twitter.

Remember: Email automation needs good data in order to trigger emails accurately. Schedule a demo with Accelpay to see how we arm you with reliable first-party data that you can use to power your email strategy successfully.