Despite popular belief, Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. He stole the idea (I know, sorry). If there’s a silver lining in your now bursted bubble, it’s that I’m going to share how you can do something similar in creating emails to your winery customers. It turns out that streamlining your emails to go out in less time than you can say “Model T” (and with better results) is actually quite simple. Just don’t tell Henry Ford we told you.
Let’s begin with
Armour Refrigeration, who produced the world's first refrigerated train car. Naturally, the next step was to fill those cars with products and make some cold hard cash. So started the Armour Meat Packing Facility.
A disassembly line.commons.wikimedia.org
Imagine an early 1900's brick warehouse with a trolley system hanging from the ceiling. Meat hooks dangling in mid-air, ready for animal carcasses to be strung upon them. In this facility, the cattle or pigs (not sure which, honestly) would be brought to the top of the multi-story building… and slaughtered. They would get hung on the trolley system, then be progressively rendered and packaged at the next floor down. To get to the next floor, they would use wooden chutes. At the ground level, they packaged and crated the finished perishables into the refrigerated boxcars, then hauled them off to metropolitan areas around the nation.
Henry Ford cited his visit to this plant as the inspiration behind his assembly line.
The same thing - only in reverse - was to become a proven industry best practice. Tailored and adapted to the unique business needs of countless other industries. Indeed, stealing an industry best practice is very lucrative.
How does this relate to winery emails?
707.253.7400
Targeted emails have a 14.32% higher open rate and a 100% higher click rate than non-targeted emails. (Mailchimp, 2017). Think about it- no customer is going to be interested in a message that’s not relevant to them. Would you be?
