The Real Marketing Problem Beverage Brands Are Dealing With
Sporadic marketing does not fail loudly. It fails quietly through customers who would have purchased again if the brand had simply shown up at the right moment.
As the holidays approach, expect an influx of gift purchases across the next few months — an annual event that’ll only be heightened by the post-COVID e-commerce shopping boom.
Even more so, broader delays in global supply chains are trickling down to affect availability and shipping for e-commerce brands across all segments. Our recommendation? Beat this year’s slowdown by getting a head start on your seasonal campaigns, promotions, and more.
We’ve laid out four steps below that every alcohol brand should take to beat the annual gift rush, while also maximizing the profitability and potential of this concentrated shopping period.
Step One: Time Blocking
First, you can start building out a major messaging campaign by looking ahead on your calendar and selecting key dates to lay out a time frame from early November up until Christmas.
Specifically, we recommend blocking out three primary phases for your campaign delivery.
Pre-Black Friday
By pushing messaging campaigns out as early as mid-November, you’re gearing folks up for the holiday season around the corner, as well as letting potential buyers know to keep an eye out for a promotion in the works.
More importantly, you’re setting your brand up to start the season on a strong note — and to not get caught unprepared by the sudden arrival of Thanksgiving crunchtime.
Thanksgiving & Late November
From Thanksgiving onward, particularly that first weekend including Black Friday, you’ll want to host and advertise some kind of actionable event, i.e. a special release or promotional discount, to jumpstart customers into their seasonal shopping cycles.
Cutoffs for Christmas
Finally, you’ll want to round out the season by selecting a cutoff date for placing new orders.
Seven to 10 days before December 25th is a safe bet for buyers to receive a bottle at their door by Christmas Day, and reminders should be sent out in the days leading up to this cutoff.
In terms of the broader time crunch that’s anticipated due to global supply chain slowdowns, you should emphasize the convenience of purchasing from a domestic brand paired with the reliability that you offer for a timely, safe delivery of your product.
Step Two: Spice Up Your Specials
Once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, it’s time to elevate your campaign by crafting it into something creative and exciting for the spirit of the season.
In other words, your buyer’s inbox may be flooded by holiday deals, but you can capture their attention and help them recognize the thoughtfulness through your core brand messaging.
For instance, Far North Spirits is offering a holiday two-pack for drinks that’ll warm you up in the colder months. Imagine a whiskey, rye, or bourbon for your spicy cocktail or mulled wine.
Ultimately, you’re working with the inventory you have and considering which themed products can play into people’s holiday spirit — even better if it’s in a bundle to boost your AOV.
On the other hand, this period offers a practical opportunity to look back at the year’s releases and offload any remaining inventory through a unique discount or exclusive holiday promo.
Step Three: Ramp Up Your Promotion Game
Next, consider the tactical logistics of your promotions. After all, it can be tricky to time promo launches, depending on whether your customer pool skews toward early or late gift grabbers.
There are two general approaches you can take: 1) offering enticing deals early on to preempt other sales or 2) holding off until late in the buyer’s window to pull the trigger on your promo.
The former can snag early shoppers, or at least convince late shoppers to try an early purchase, but could also lose its appeal by mid-December when fresher deals are dropping every day.
The latter can appeal to buyers who play the long game and wait it out for the most optimal deal, but can still ultimately result in you losing out on early or average shoppers.
Ultimately, there’s no gold-standard method and you’ll need to use your judgement depending on what aligns with your brand’s target demographic, metric goalposts, and even inventory.
For instance, returning to your campaign calendar, you can skew discounts away from marking down products and toward offering cheaper, faster shipping as Christmas creeps closer.
Step Four: Email Marketing On Deck
As we pointed out in our advice for email marketing, setting up your email flow so your comms can run seamlessly is a simple yet essential step of the process that’s easily overlooked.
We recommend starting with a quick info sweep: pull last year’s seasonal purchase data and make sure that customer cohort is consistently re-engaged early on.
In turn, your team won’t be stressed out and frantically attempt to piece together the perfect layout in MailChimp just a few days before Thanksgiving — which circles back to our larger point: the holidays are a time of year with promise of high ROI for your alcohol brand.
You can utilize this opportunity to the max by planning thoroughly and creatively, not stressfully executing a last minute, makeshift campaign.
If your brand has these moving parts staged within the first weeks of November, you should be ready to hook the earliest seasonal shoppers and take full advantage of the holiday rush.
Sit Back and Enjoy the Holidays!
Once you’ve got these steps locked in — a killer campaign calendar, creative promos, and ready-to-launch email marketing — you’ll be the one leading the holiday rush, not falling behind.
Whether your user base is composed of individuals shopping for friends and family or corporate customers with high-volume needs, Accelpay is the platform of choice for your alcohol brand.
To get access to our instant storefront setup and stress-free bulk ordering, get started here.
Most beverage brands do not have a creativity problem.
They already know what they should be doing. Email campaigns, win-back flows, re-purchase reminders, and promotions triggered by real customer behavior are all well understood at this point.
The issue is execution.
More specifically, it is consistent execution. The kind that happens every week, even when teams are stretched thin and something more urgent demands attention.
That is where most marketing quietly breaks down.
What Inconsistent Marketing Looks Like in Practice
When we talk to founders and operators, the patterns are remarkably similar.
Email and SMS flows are built once and then left untouched. Campaigns are sent when someone remembers rather than because a plan is in place. Promotions swing between being too frequent and completely absent. Customer data exists, but no one has the time to analyze it or act on it.
None of this happens because teams are careless or uninformed. It happens because running a beverage business is operationally demanding.
The outcome is not bad marketing. It is sporadic marketing.
Sporadic marketing does not fail loudly. It fails quietly through customers who would have purchased again if the brand had simply shown up at the right moment.
Why This Happens Even on Strong Teams
On paper, the solutions seem obvious. Hire another marketer. Bring in an agency. Add another tool to the stack.
But when we dug deeper, we kept hearing the same underlying truth.
Teams know what should be happening. They just do not have the time or headcount to keep it going.
Most brands are not short on ideas. They are short on capacity.
Marketing works best when it runs continuously. Unfortunately, it is also one of the first things to get pushed aside when priorities collide. Product launches, distributor issues, supply chain problems, and retail deadlines all take precedence. Marketing gets postponed to next week.
Eventually, next week never comes.
A Simple Reality Check You Can Run Today
Before changing anything, it is worth pressure-testing how consistent your marketing actually is.
Ask yourself a few straightforward questions.
When was the last outbound email or SMS campaign you sent? Do you have an active win-back program for customers who have not purchased in the last 90 days? Are your re-purchase reminders tied to actual buying behavior or arbitrary timing? How many campaigns are currently sitting in draft?
Most brands we speak with fall short on at least two of these.
Not because they do not care, but because no one is responsible for making sure it happens every time.
What We Set Out to Build
When we started building AccelPay’s AI Marketing Assistant, the goal was not to introduce another system that added work.
We were not trying to give teams another dashboard to monitor, more configuration to manage, or a platform that only performs well if someone actively babysits it.
We wanted marketing that runs by default.
The idea was simple. Build something that behaves like a dedicated growth marketer focused on the fundamentals. Who should we talk to? When should we reach them? What is actually working right now?
Then let it improve automatically over time.
What Always-On Marketing Actually Means
This is not AI that generates copy and leaves execution to your team.
The system handles the operational pieces that usually break down first.
Audience selection is based on real purchase behavior rather than static lists or generic segments. Timing is informed by when customers are most likely to engage, not when it is convenient to send a campaign. Performance data is used continuously so campaigns improve without manual testing cycles.
The result is fewer lists to build, fewer schedules to manage, and far less guesswork.
What We Are Seeing So Far
The AI Marketing Assistant is already live across hundreds of beverage brands, and the early results have been consistent.
Brands are generating meaningful incremental revenue that would have otherwise gone uncollected. Automated campaigns are driving roughly a 28 percent lift in purchases. All of this is happening with zero setup, as campaigns begin working immediately.
In one case, a brand realized it had not communicated with thousands of one-time buyers in months. Automated win-back campaigns recovered five figures in revenue within weeks without increasing send volume or adding workload.
The common thread is simple. Brands are not sending more messages. They are finally sending the right messages to the right customers.
What Is Live Today
We intentionally started with the highest-impact fundamentals.
Re-purchase reminders are triggered by actual buying cadence rather than arbitrary schedules. Win-back campaigns re-engage customers brands already paid to acquire.
These are not flashy tactics. They are basics. When executed consistently, they work. Automation makes that consistency unavoidable.
What Is Coming Next
The roadmap is focused on compounding impact rather than novelty.
Upcoming capabilities include continuous A/B testing, personalized product recommendations, SMS campaigns, predictive upsell logic, and creative that adapts based on customer response.
Every addition follows the same principle. Reduce effort, increase relevance, and improve performance over time.
The Bigger Takeaway
The beverage brands pulling ahead today are not necessarily spending more on marketing. They are removing friction from execution.
Whether that means automation, dedicated headcount, or rigid internal systems, the advantage comes from showing up consistently even when the team is busy.
Marketing that runs, learns, and improves on its own does not just perform better. It prevents revenue leakage that never shows up clearly in a dashboard. That is the real problem we set out to solve.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Braxton Freeman
Grolsch