Content and Commerce for Silverado Vineyards

Published on September 30, 2020

The Challenge

In April of 2020 the wine industry was in the early days of the US Covid-19 lock down and the acceleration to running business digitally was underway as brands shifted their focus to e-commerce and online marketing.

Napa Valley’s Silverado Vineyards asked Wine Enthusiast to develop a digital marketing program that would go beyond awareness building to providing a digital platform that would include reach, commerce and content.

A Rapid Response

Seeing what was happening in the industry and responding to similar requests Wine Enthusiast began developing content marketing programs that combined content and commerce in most turnkey fashion for our advertisers.

The first such program was the Native Dedicated Email. “Native” because the program worked on two levels:

Advertisers provided content such as an article, recipe or video, that would be published on WineMag.com.
In parallel, a new email template was developed that provided beautiful hero images to promote content and also included an e-commerce section of the email where sponsors could feature up to 4 wines with buttons to BUY NOW clicking through to their own e-commerce sites or online retailers.

Silverado was able to publish a beautifully photographed grilled cheese sandwich recipe that was paired with two of their Chardonnay’s. Each wine was available for purchase directly from the email message that was sent to our opt-in list of 300,000 people.

The Outcome

In the first week following the email being sent over 2,000 people clicked through to the piece spending 2.5 minutes on the page. Visit the Page

The email performed equally well:

Sent: 303,275

Unique Opens: 55,886 (18%)

In addition to the marketing and branding value the program provided, Silverado sold a significant quantities of the featured wines.

The success of the program resulted in Silverado running two additional Native Dedicated Email programs.

Enhancements and New Opportunities

Wine Enthusiast continues to develop the ability to marry content and commerce to provide our advertising partners to simultaneously market while driving sales. Below are two new marketing programs available now:

Turnkey Shoppable Content:

Enable any native article, sponsored content piece, image gallery or videolanding page with our seamlessly integrated shopping platform that provides order taking, credit card processing and order fulfillment. Order fulfillment is provided by a network of national retailers. Learn More
Discount codes from Drizly and Vivino:

We’ve partnered with these two e-commerce giants to provide our clients with a $5 off cart discount code that can be added to any Wine Enthusiast content marketing program. Pick up more sales from your banner, email and social calls to action by including the WE discount code.