Tasting New Readers: Wine Spectator Uses E-Newsletters to Reach Vino Lovers
Wine Spectator is hoping a trio of new e-newsletters will help the magazine magazine broaden its reach online and drive new subscribers.
The target audience for the newsletters is obviously wine drinkers, notes Thomas Matthews, executive editor. More specifically, the magazine hopes to attract younger vino aficionados who are Internet savvy, as well as more serious wine drinkers who want to take advantage of WineSpectator.com’s subscriber-only database of over 170,000 wine ratings.
Online users of the publication tend to be a bit younger than print readers, as well as more internationally based and slightly less advanced in their wine knowledge, he adds.
The magazine previously published one weekly e-newsletter, Sips & Tips, which offers things like value wine recommendations. “It’s a very introductory and meant to build awareness of wine spectator and hopefully bring people into our orbit,” says Matthews.
The newly introduced e-newsletters include Video Theater, a weekly offering which will showcase links to the latest videos posted on WineSpectator.com.
The site has logged a million video page views since first offering videos about a year ago. “As a wine drinker it’s one thing to go to the store and buy a bottle or read about it,” notes Matthews. “But wine reflects the place where it’s made. There’s something so informative about being there.”
Video substitutes for that, he explains. “You may not be able to go to Boudreaux, but you can see it in a way that you can’t even when you’re looking at a picture or reading an interview.”
Wine Spectator recently launched a contest asking readers to share their favorite wine videos. “User generated video is big on the Web, so we’re hoping to tap into that and let people express their own creativity,” he says.
The other two new e-newsletters are biweekly and a bit more specialized. Wine & Healthy Living reports on wine and wellness. “You don’t have to be a serious wine drinker to care about your health, but we’re hoping that people who want to keep up with the news and are interested in more deeper appreciation will find the site’s useful and wind up subscribing,” notes Matthews.
Collecting and Auctions will offer recent auction results, as well as information on upcoming events and answer questions on collecting. The material linked to will be free, but the magazine hopes the newsletter will reach a sophisticated audience interested in subscriber only features on the site, like the wine rating database and editor blogs.
The newsletters are being promoted in the print magazine via ads and editorial support; other marketing may be considered down the road.
