How A Good Wine Menu Design Can Increase Sales

Whether you are creating a full experience at a winery or focusing on wine sales at your restaurant one of the primary goals is to generate consistency in your wine sales and ultimately increase sales over time. One of the easiest ways to make this happen is by optimizing the design of your wine menu.

Unless your patrons are already literal wine aficionados then it’s likely they don’t actually know much about wine at all and their first introduction to options is the menu itself which is your first opportunity to influence their decision on what to choose. This is where a few simple design hacks will generate incremental sales increases that over time add up to big numbers on your bottom line.

Let’s go a little deeper into each of these wine menu design tips below.

4 Menu Design Tips that Will Sell More Wine

Below we’ve taken 4 four of the most effective menu design optimization and shared how you can implement this on your wine menus.

Keep Everything Legible

This may sound basic, but many wine menus try to get “fancy” and use typefaces and fonts that are very hard to read. They may look elegant, but if the customer struggles to read what the menu says it will actually be hurting your sales.

Another common issue with legibility is the menu layout is too “busy”.

By stuffing too much text on the menu or overusing images and using opaque images in the background of the menu it becomes very hard to read.

The solution is to keep things basic.

• • Use easy to read fonts
  • Only include images of the wines that provide you the best margin
  • Don’t include dollar signs on your prices

Emphasize Your Brand

One very intriguing fact is that when you heavily showcase your brand on products considered to be premium, luxurious or sophisticated it generates a level of trust between the customer and you. They believe what you say and accept your recommendations. Wineries and restaurants should take advantage of this opportunity.

This means ensuring that the look and feel of the menu matches the venue, setting and ambience of where the customer is partaking in the choosing of and drinking of the wine. Colors, textures and finishes should all complement the entire experience.

Increase Menu Browsability

While we talked about creating a menu that is legible and simple it’s also very important to make the menu easy to browse. This is what we call “Browsability”.

Creating easy to navigate bolded category headings that the eye can jump to allows the customers to quickly access the type of wines they favor most.

Then listing the wines beneath each section with enough padding in between them to allow the eye relief so it can pause at each wine but quickly jump to the next with little effort.

Laying out your menu in this way will generate quicker decision making and provide a more pleasant wine buying experience.

A strategy used to increase wine sales and profitability is to anchor the wine lists with expensive wines and contrast them with very cheap wines and place moderately priced wines with higher margin products closer to the top so that customers gravitate to choosing the more profitable options from each wine category.

Use Quality Paper

This is another psychological tactic where customers who hold, view and select wines from a wine menu that looks and feels premium or sophisticated will ultimately enjoy the wine selection process more and be willing to pay higher prices for the wines they choose.

This ties into matching to the brand regarding look and texture, but also consider the weight of the menu. Thicker papers and premium paper backed with wood will increase the weight of the actual wine menu and drive even more of a premium perspective.

Using the wine menu design tactics we’ve shared here will ensure you increase wine sales, margin and provide an experience that customers will tell their friends and family about generating even more future sales and new customers.

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