Steal This Play · Oct 28, 2026
Steal the seven-week phone campaign that catches the orders email misses
Holiday inboxes are full and open rates drop right when gift orders are biggest, so the complex multi-address orders get abandoned online. This gives you a dated seven-week calendar, three call segments, and the one add-on question that lifts order value.
Chatterbox Wine Marketing published its holiday DTC phone plan, and the mechanics are specific enough to run as written.
The setup. Holiday email open rates fall exactly when the stakes rise. Meanwhile the orders that matter most in December (multiple ship-to addresses, gift notes, magnums, verticals, special packaging) are the ones people abandon in a cart and happily finish with a human.
The play. Weeks 1 and 2: set a revenue goal first, because it sizes your list. Build an offer of five or six wines, one clear incentive, and one or two gift-ready options like a curated three-pack. Segment into club members, non-club buyers who ordered in the last two years, and lapsed buyers. Clean phone numbers, kill duplicates, flag anyone who asked not to be called. Get your carrier's holiday cutoff and build the calendar backwards from it.
Week 3: send a storytelling email (the vintage, the winemaker's holiday table), then the offer email, then start dialing within a day or two.
Weeks 4 to 6: highest-value customers first. Short voicemail, same-day email or text. Track calls, contacts reached, orders, and average order value daily. Ask every buyer: "Is there anyone on your list who'd love this?"
Week 7: call back every "maybe" and remind them of the cutoff.
The result. Chatterbox says an experienced agent makes up to 300 dials a day and most campaigns run two to three weeks. The firm does not publish conversion or revenue figures.
Adapt it. One person at 40 dials a day still covers 400 contacts in two weeks, so start with your top 200 by lifetime spend. A brewery sells allocation packs and barrel picks the same way, a distillery sells gift sets and engraved bottles, a retail shop works corporate gifting accounts, and a distributor rep calls on-premise buyers about holiday features. Larger teams add temp callers and split by segment.
Pick your shipping cutoff date, count back seven weeks, and put the two email sends on the calendar today. Every call note goes into your CRM, because that is what makes January's first campaign easy.