Online Sales, Website & Google Campaigns – Small Winemakers

 


When the pandemic closed bars and restaurants, Ontario wine agency Small Winemakers was faced with losing almost 90% of its business. Up Marketing was called in to help replace it with direct consumer sales. The challenges? Ontario regulations prevent direct agency sales, orders must be by case not bottle and are processed by the LCBO, then delivered.

To connect Small Winemakers to the consumer market, we crafted a Google Search campaign promoting sign-ups to their e-newsletter. Release went from once or twice a month to weekly. Success increased it to three times per week, then more, but to avoid about consumer overload, it became targeted by past interest and purchase.

Our next step was to reflect interest in particular wine types and regions in the Google campaigns. Responsive and Dynamic Search Ads were composed to echo Google users’ search terms. For Small Winemakers’ most popular source regions, we combined images from their producers with bottle shots on geographic backgrounds in Responsive Display ads that we targeted to websites featuring wine and food.

We also worked with Small Winemakers’ to redesign their website and streamline the online shopping experience with categorization of the wines in the library feature. This made their entire available stock searchable by wine type and wine region. With Covid-19 waves continuing and online shopping gaining popularity, Small Winemakers established a substantial lead over competing vendors, but they faced a new challenge: pandemic restricted delivery, especially from distant producers. In response, we set them up with a Google Merchant Account and built a Smart Shopping Campaign connected to their live inventory, and then linked it with Google Ads to record respondents’ dollar purchase volumes as Conversion Data.

The result? The Smart Shopping campaign achieved the lowest Cost per Conversion and highest Conversion Value to Cost ratio, ever. We then faced one more challenge – lack of wine supply! We couldn’t deal with weather in France, marine shipping constraints or increase their inventories, so we responded the one way we could – we stocked up for the holidays.

Cheers!