Wine.com’s email a heady mix of best practices with a hint of excellence and oak
Posted by Rob Ropars on November 12th, 2009
I recently received an email from wine.com, and it was one of the best email marketing emails I’ve seen in some time. They managed to incorporate the vast majority of email marketing best practices, had a simple clean layout and detailed information about their products/offer.
The “from name” clearly identified the sender (“Wine.com”-though they seem to use “Wine.com” and “wine.com” interchangeably) and the subject line detailed the special offer and its limited-time availability, “2 days only – up to 30% off select Geyser Peak wines”.
Opening the email I saw one of the best “images off” layouts in a long time. No “all image” email here! Right from the top they get so many things refreshingly right.
They have preheader/snippet text, “Two phenomenal wines in limited supply” reinforcing the subject line and available for mobile devices and email snippet preview in the inbox. That is immediately followed by a link to a web copy and their white listing/safe sender info. The header area has a small logo with an alt tag so I can clearly see it’s from “Wine.com” and it’s not taking up a lot of preview pane real estate.
There are a few images to its right that are so small I can’t see what they are at least in Yahoo’s images off rendering and then a forward to a friend link for viral promotion. Right below that is a site navigation row with links (as text-awesome) to key parts of their site (“wine shop,” “fine wine,” etc.).
That’s always a great addition in case I want to look around your site and do/buy something else if the featured offer isn’t of interest. Right below that is an extra section with an intriguing pitch for free shipping for a full year followed by a personalized greeting (Dear Robert…”), and a summary of the offer with links to learn more about each wine featured.
All of the above should fit in most preview panes and provides everything I could want and know more. I cannot stress enough how utterly fantastic work that is all around! About the only thing I’m puzzled about is the two or three small images top center next to the forward, but that’s obviously something small and hopefully not critical.
Moving to the main area, each item has very detailed descriptions of each wine. I suppose one could argue that a shorter copy section would reduce the email length, but I think given that most people into wine are looking for details, the copy is fine. There are always rules and guidelines, however emails should be tailored to their recipients. So I think the details of the “heady forward aromas” make sense. I would only suggest trying to get the copy to be closer in length so they aren’t so uneven, but that’s just me.
The legal copy at the bottom is the usual details often seen in emails. As a wine distributor they have to clarify some shipping details which is placed first. They do have a sentence that could add some spam score points: “You received this email because you have requested to receive such occasional communications.” I’ve seen spam scoring systems flag such wording because many spammers use that wording to trick people.
I also noticed that they explicitly state that someone unsubscribing should “Please allow up to 10 days for your request to be processed.” There’s little reason with today’s email marketing technology for an unsubscribe link to not immediately update/block a record. The CAN SPAM law does give marketers up to 10 “business” days. If I unsubscribe today and you’ve said “10 days” and I keep getting emails 3-4 days after day “10” I could start complaining. I wouldn’t have a legal basis to complain, but if enough people complain it could impact delivery.
There is a link to contact wine.com’s customer service with a request to “not reply to this email.” They aren’t explicitly saying I can’t reply and unsubscribe (which must be allowed by law), but their instructions to contact them are not so good. I have to click a link to a page then navigate to an “Ask a Question” section to contact them. At the very least, they should link directly to that page, but a better practice would be to have a contact email address exclusive for the emails. After all, email marketing should be about-communication not “blasting” (dialogue not monologue).
When I enabled images the email remained clean with conservative image usage. I learned that the missing images at the top were links to their blog, Facebook and Twitter. They might consider using some HTML text instead of only graphics of their logo and three more images that are so small you can’t see their alt text. Even a “Follow us on:” would have clued me in that it was something related to Social Media.
My biggest surprise was the two big product images. I didn’t see bottles, people enjoying their drinks, or anything like that. Instead, I saw the bottle’s label, the wine name/year, an “Order Now” button, pricing, current rating and past vintage ratings. The vast majority of that could/should have been done in HTML text. In reality only the label should have been an image and I think an image of the bottle and/or people enjoying wine would add a personal touch to the email. Maybe this decision was intentional, but with everything else done so well I would still recommend this change.
So overall, this is an excellent example of email marketing done right. With a few minor adjustments this could be improved and really motivate wine lovers to buy. A heady mix of best practices and social media notes, I can only say “Cheers” to wine.com! No bitter aftertaste from this email!
