Get More Repeat Customers: Email Marketing for Breweries

Generating new customers is an important part of any brewery’s business strategy, but maintaining repeat customers is just as important. Repeat customers represent your brewery’s customer base. They buy your products frequently and make up a significant portion of your monthly and yearly revenue.

Why Email Works

Email marketing can be effective for every type of business, whether they intend to sell products and services to other businesses or directly to consumers. It’s a great marketing tactic for small to mid-sized businesses like breweries because it’s fast, simple, and effective.

Email marketing works because the individuals receiving the emails are signing up to do so. When people take the time to sign up for an email newsletter, 95% consider the email useful once they receive it. There are a number of different ways to acquire customer email addresses organically.

For example, you could ask for an email address when you register customers for tastings or you could post a short form on your website for your email newsletters.

Email marketing also grants breweries an extraordinary return on their investment (ROI). By some estimates, email marketing has an ROI of over 4,000%, which means for every dollar your brewery invests in email marketing, you should see a return of over $40.

Doing Email Marketing Right

In order to maximize your ROI, your emails need to be designed, written, and distributed effectively. Some businesses attempt email marketing by downloading templates, writing their own email copy, and sending out emails to a list of contacts. Some businesses also purchase contact lists online, but these types of contacts don’t always list real customers or even real human beings.

Doing email marketing on your own may be more acceptable than doing no email marketing at all, but the best way that breweries can use email marketing to get more repeat customers is to partner with email marketing professionals.

Marketing emails that will actually get opened and read are always designed specifically for the business in question and the marketing campaign at hand. Your brewery is a unique business. In order to stand out, you need unique designs and messaging, even in an email.

It’s also important to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile viewing since 68% of marketing emails are opened on a mobile device.

Get More Repeat Customers

Breweries can use email marketing to get more repeat customers by choosing the right types of email campaigns and sending the right messages.

A good starting point is to establish an email newsletter and sending it out on a regular basis. You can send a newsletter monthly or even weekly. The content of your newsletter may depend on what’s happening at your brewery at that given time. If you have an event coming up, such as a tasting, email newsletters are a great way to promote it.

If you have a blog, you can include your latest blog post in your newsletter. Furthermore, you can tell customers about new products and new recipes. You can even tell a funny story that happened recently.

There are many different types of email marketing campaigns that would be useful to breweries. These could represent the content of a newsletter or a stand-alone email campaign. Here are a few examples:

• Product Announcements
• Event Invitations
• Transactional Emails
• Confirmation Emails
• Welcome Emails
• Thank-You Emails
• Industry News Emails
• Social Media Emails
• Content Promotion Emails

Each email campaign should be designed for a specific purpose and targeted to a specific group of customers. No email should be wasted, either. Confirmation emails, welcome emails, and thank-you emails may seem rudimentary, but they are excellent devices for providing customers with the opportunity to continue engaging with a brewery.

Choosing your email campaigns will also depend on your budget and how much time you have to commit to email marketing, but breweries can use email marketing to get more repeat customers by turning single customer interactions into life-long customer relationships.