The wine industry isn’t exactly swimming in extra cash right now. For many wineries, the instinct is to respond by cutting costs, including marketing. Fewer campaigns. Delay a website refresh. Less photography. Less advertising.
But reducing your visibility isn’t necessarily the best place to save money.
In our experience working with wineries of all sizes, there is often plenty of money hiding elsewhere: redundant software subscriptions, unnecessarily expensive platforms, services you’re already paying for twice, oversized agency retainers, and technology that provides far more functionality than the winery actually needs.
The goal shouldn’t be to do less marketing. It should be to eliminate waste while preserving—or even improving—the things customers actually see and interact with.
Here are some of the first places we’d look.
1. Audit Your Marketing Technology Stack
Start by writing down every recurring marketing and technology expense your winery pays for.
Website hosting. Ecommerce. Reservations. Email marketing. CRM. SEO software. Analytics. Plugins. Domain services. Review tools. AI software. Advertising platforms.
Then ask a simple question:
Does another product we’re already paying for do this too?
Software stacks tend to grow one subscription at a time. Five years later, nobody remembers why half of them were purchased.
Consolidating even a few monthly services can produce meaningful annual savings without your customers noticing any difference.
2. Make Sure Your Ecommerce Platform Fits the Size of Your Winery
You no longer need a huge technology budget to get a capable winery ecommerce system.
Vinoshipper, for example, currently has no fixed monthly platform fee and instead operates primarily on transaction-based pricing. Bottle360 offers a Lite plan for qualifying smaller wineries starting at $49/month.
Even Commerce7—generally considered the gold standard in winery DTC technology—now offers Commerce7 Lite for wineries under $100,000 in annual DTC revenue. At $59/month, it includes ecommerce, wine club, CRM, POS, reservations and analytics.
The answer isn’t automatically to choose the cheapest system. It’s to avoid paying for a level of technology your winery doesn’t need yet.
3. Reconsider Expensive Standalone Reservation Software
Reservation platforms are another place where costs can quietly add up.
Tock’s current plans start at $289/month. For a busy winery with complex experiences and events, that may be money well spent.
But does every tasting room need it?
If you’re already using Commerce7, reservations are included within its current platform offerings. Winery-specific alternatives such as Block 55 also provide reservation, experience and event tools and integrate with platforms including Commerce7, Vinoshipper and Bottle360.
A winery doing relatively straightforward tastings may be able to eliminate an entire monthly subscription.
4. Use the Email Tools You Already Have
Before paying separately for Mailchimp, Klaviyo or another email platform, look carefully at what your ecommerce system can already do.
Commerce7, for example, now includes email campaigns, customer segmentation, branded email themes and trigger-based automations.
Klaviyo and Mailchimp are excellent platforms, and sophisticated wineries may absolutely benefit from their additional functionality. But many wineries are sending release announcements, newsletters, event invitations and a handful of automated emails. They may not need another major piece of software to accomplish that.
A better investment can sometimes be having a designer properly configure and brand the email system you’re already using. Vinbound can help wineries create polished Commerce7 email designs without adding another expensive platform to the stack.
5. Don’t Buy an Expensive AI Platform Just Because It Says “AI”
AI is creating an entirely new category of software upsells.
There are fantastic tools available—but wineries should be particularly skeptical of enterprise platforms selling enormous suites of AI, CRM, automation and marketing functionality.
For perspective, HubSpot’s current Marketing Hub Professional offering starts at $800/month, while its broader Professional Customer Platform starts at $1,300/month. That doesn’t make HubSpot a bad product. It makes it far more product than a small winery needs.
AI should help wineries reduce marketing costs and workloads—not introduce another four-figure monthly bill.
6. Fix Your Website Before Spending More on Advertising
We see this one frequently. A winery spends thousands of dollars driving visitors to a website with confusing navigation, a poor mobile experience, outdated tasting information or an unnecessarily complicated path to purchase.
Before increasing your advertising budget, make sure the website is doing its job.
Improving the experience for the traffic you already have can sometimes produce a better return than simply buying more traffic.
And while you’re reviewing advertising, take a close look at branded Google Ads. If someone searches specifically for Your Winery Name, and your website already occupies the first organic position, you are paying Google for clicks you would have received anyway.
7. Stop Paying for Hosting and Domain Add-Ons You Already Have
Domain registrars and hosting companies (especially GoDaddy) have become very good at selling extras. SSL certificates are one common example. Many modern hosting providers (including all website hosted by Vinbound) include SSL certificates with hosting. Yet we still encounter businesses paying separately for SSL certificates they don’t need.
The same principle applies to backup products, security packages, domain protection and other add-ons. Before renewing one, find out what your hosting provider or web management company already includes. Vinbound includes all of the above in our core site hosting & security plans, with no need to purchase them elsewhere.
8. Choose the Right Level of Website Investment
Not every winery with an outdated-looking website needs a full custom redesign.
If your existing site is technically sound and well structured, sometimes it really does just need some sprucing up: updated typography, better imagery, improved spacing, refreshed homepage sections, stronger calls to action or a cleaner mobile experience. In those cases, making targeted improvements to the existing website can be much more economical than starting over.
But some winery websites have reached the point where continuing to patch them doesn’t make sense.
That’s the market for Vinbound’s Magic Refresh.
Magic Refresh isn’t simply a visual makeover of your existing website. We rebuild severely outdated winery websites from the ground up in Elementor using a streamlined one-page or few-page format. It’s designed for smaller wineries that need to make a dramatic leap forward without investing in a fully custom $5,000–$10,000+ website.
For wineries with larger sites, more complex requirements or a stronger need for custom creative direction, a Vinbound Template or fully custom Squarespace or WordPress website is still the better investment.
The important part is matching the solution to the actual problem—not automatically paying for a full custom redesign when a more focused approach will accomplish the goal.
9. Stop Re-Photographing Every Bottle
Traditional bottle photography still has its place, particularly for important print applications and high-end campaigns.
But wineries often spend money repeatedly photographing nearly identical bottles simply because the vintage changed.
For many digital applications, professionally created digital bottle images can eliminate that expense.
We also encourage wineries to maintain vintage-neutral bottle imagery wherever possible. A beautiful Cabernet bottle that doesn’t prominently display the vintage can remain useful on collection pages, email campaigns, website features and digital advertising for years.
Spend photography dollars where photography creates the biggest impact: vineyards, people, hospitality, food, architecture and the story of the winery.
10. Build a Photography Library You Can Use Everywhere
Along those same lines, don’t think about a photography shoot as “website photography.”
Think of it as creating a winery’s visual content library.
A thoughtfully planned shoot can provide imagery for the website, social media, email campaigns, Google Business Profile, press requests, tasting-room promotions, advertising and event marketing.
Planning those needs before the photographer arrives can turn one shoot into years of usable marketing material.
11. Right-Size Your Website Management
Your winery website absolutely needs ongoing attention. That doesn’t mean every winery needs an enormous monthly agency retainer.
The appropriate level of management depends on the complexity of the website, ecommerce integrations, how frequently content changes and how proactive you want your agency to be.
A smaller winery with a stable website shouldn’t necessarily pay the same monthly fee as a national brand with constant campaigns and development work.
At Vinbound, we’ve intentionally structured website management around wineries rather than trying to fit wineries into a traditional large-agency retainer model.
Pay for the oversight you actually need. Add larger projects when you actually need them.
12. Invest in Marketing Assets That Compound Over Time
Finally, when budgets are tight, prioritize marketing investments that continue working after you’ve paid for them.
A useful page about private tastings can generate traffic and bookings for years.
A well-optimized Google Business Profile costs very little to maintain.
Dozens of genuine customer reviews become a long-term reputation asset.
A detailed vineyard page can support search visibility, sales conversations and discovery through AI platforms.
A great website can continue converting visitors long after the invoice has been paid. Paid campaigns disappear the moment you stop funding them.
That doesn’t mean wineries shouldn’t advertise. It means your owned marketing foundation should be strong before you continuously rent more attention.
Cut Waste, Not Marketing
There is an important difference between cutting a marketing budget and eliminating marketing waste.
One can make your winery less visible. The other can make your business healthier.
We’d rather see a winery eliminate an unnecessary $300/month software subscription and put some of those savings toward better photography, a stronger website or a campaign that actually reaches customers.
And sometimes the correct recommendation is simply to spend less.
That’s a philosophy we believe more marketing companies should be comfortable with.
Wondering Where Your Winery Could Save?
Vinbound works across winery websites, ecommerce platforms, reservations, email marketing, SEO, analytics and digital strategy. That gives us a pretty good view of where winery technology stacks become unnecessarily complicated—and expensive.
If you’d like another set of eyes on yours, talk to Vinbound about a Winery Marketing Stack Audit.
We’ll look at what you’re currently paying for and help identify what we’d keep, consolidate, downgrade, replace or eliminate.
The goal isn’t to give you fewer marketing tools. It’s to make sure you’re only paying for the ones that actually matter.
