An article this week in The Pour, Eric Asimov’s wine column for the New York Times brought to mind the idea of building and promoting a set of wine lists for your wine shop customers. It’s a great way to market your wines without overtly selling. (In other words, you market by providing useful information to your customers and potential customers.) [level-members]
Asimov’s column is titled, “12 Everyday Bottles for Wine Lovers” and he likens these 12 wines to the staples in a home cook’s pantry: basic foundational wines to have around for everyday drinking with everyday dinners.
He goes through his list of must-have basics and includes a few wild card choices, as well. Always a good idea to keep things interesting.
From a marketing standpoint, a list like this gives you the opportunity to market your wines in a fun and interesting way. Managed creatively, it also gives you great content for social media and email marketing work. You can update the list for each season – winter pairings are likely to be different from summer pairings – and change it from year to year.
You can also create off-shoot lists – 6 Great Summer Grilling Wines, say – to get more marketing mileage out of the concept. I would recommend against building promotions around these wines specifically as the lists can then look like they were put together primarily to flog wines you want to move.
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