Guide · Spirits & beverage

Email marketing for spirits brands: how to sell when you can't lean on ads

By Amber Nowlin, Founder of Nowlin Parks · November 2026 · 6 minute read

Small spirits brands have a tough setup. Alcohol ads come with age targeting rules and platform limits, shipping rules change from state to state, and most sales happen at a bar or a store you don't control. Email is the one place you can reach your fans directly, on your own schedule.

We've spent nearly 9 years marketing beverage and spirits brands, from a craft brewery whose online releases sold out in under a minute to Belfour Spirits, where we set up Klaviyo and a weekly newsletter. Here's how we'd build email for a spirits brand today.

1. Age-gate the signup, not just the website

Your site probably has an age gate. Your signup form should confirm age too. Ask for a birthday or a simple "I'm 21 or older" check, and save the answer in Klaviyo so every profile on your list has it. It protects the brand, and it gives you birthdays to celebrate later.

2. Make sure your emails land in the inbox

Deliverability is the most overlooked part of spirits email. For Belfour Spirits, we took email delivery from about 86% to 99%. That alone means more people see every send.

• Send from your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place.
• Keep spam complaints under 0.3%.
• Add a sunset flow that stops mailing people who never open.

3. Sell where you actually sell

If you can ship to some states and not others, or most of your sales happen at retail, your emails need to point people to the right place. Link to your store locator, name the retailers and bars that carry you, and use Klaviyo location data to send regional emails when a new store picks you up. For direct orders, keep the shipping rules clear so nobody gets to checkout and finds out they can't buy.

4. Give people a reason to open every week

A consistent newsletter beats a random blast. Belfour's weekly newsletter averages a 33% open rate. The trick is giving people something they want every time: cocktail recipes, behind-the-scenes stories from the brand, new releases and events. Some ideas that work well for spirits:

• A cocktail of the week made with your bottle
• The story behind a release or a label
• Tasting events, bottle signings and bar takeovers
• Gift guides before the holidays and Father's Day

5. Set up the flows that sell on their own

1. Welcome series that tells your story, introduces the core bottles and shows where to buy.
2. Post-purchase with serving ideas and cocktail recipes, then a nudge toward a second bottle.
3. Release alerts for limited bottles, sent to your most engaged fans first.
4. Birthday email using the birthday you collected at signup.

6. Use your blog and site to bring people in

When ads are limited, search does a lot of the heavy lifting. Cocktail recipes, food pairings and brand stories bring in people searching on Google and asking AI tools for ideas, and every one of those pages should have a signup form. At Belfour, refreshing older blog posts for search and writing new ones helped grow site traffic 331%.

Where to start this week

Check two things: your delivery rate in Klaviyo and whether your signup form confirms age. Fix those, and every email you send after that does more work.