An Ohio Tasting Room Was Losing 500 Visitors a Month. Here's What Stopped It.

The situation

Uncorked Wine Tastings opened in Dublin, Ohio on September 5, 2025. The first two months were what you’d expect from a new venue with good word of mouth: discovery traffic, social shares, guests Googling the name after a first visit. The site peaked around 2,300 sessions in September and October.

By December, that wave had crested. The site was shedding roughly 500 sessions a month with nothing to replace them. No organic search presence — the site had been live for five months and Google was returning it for almost nothing. Email existed but wasn’t doing work. No foundation under the hospitality.

At that trajectory, February would have been around 300 sessions. Every month without an organic channel was a month of compounding absence.

My Pub Marketing took over January 9, 2026.

Email: from adequate to 2× the industry average

The email list existed. It wasn’t working hard.

After My Pub Marketing took over strategy, copywriting, and execution, open rates jumped from 52.4% to 65.7% — a 25% lift. For context: the average hospitality email open rate runs 25–35%. That 65.7% is two to two-and-a-half times that benchmark.

Click rates doubled — from 1.66% to 3.36%. Unsubscribes dropped 56%, more than cut in half.

Open rates tell you whether the relationship with the list is real. A 65.7% open rate says guests are actually waiting to hear from you.

The list itself shrank intentionally — from roughly 850 contacts down to 450–480, after hygiene and segmentation work. Lower volume, significantly higher signal. A smaller list that reads everything outperforms a larger one that ignores you.

Organic search: built from nothing

The Uncorked website launched in August 2025. Google Search Console returned zero data prior to February 2026 — not a reporting gap. A true absence. The site existed for five months and produced no organic search traffic.

My Pub Marketing built the channel from scratch.

First 82 days of tracked organic search (February 21 – May 14, 2026):

The site now appears in Google search results every day. It didn’t before.

A 5.7% CTR is roughly twice what hospitality sites typically see. That’s not a volume story yet — it’s a relevance story. When the site shows up, people click it.

Website traffic: the free fall stopped

The September/October peak was discovery traffic — people Googling a place they’d just heard about. That’s an opening event, not a marketing result. The baseline that matters is December 2025, after the buzz settled.

December: 1,302 sessions and falling at roughly 500 a month. On that trajectory, February would have landed around 300–400 sessions.

February 2026 actual: 1,398 sessions.

The free fall stopped. Monthly sessions from February through April ran between 1,163 and 1,398 — stable, no longer falling. Bounce rate dropped from approximately 49% to 41%, meaning the sessions that arrived were engaging more meaningfully with the content.

The organic channel that produced zero traffic for five months now drives daily visits.

The member platform: built for what’s coming

The wine club infrastructure is built and operational. Members join online, pick a tier, and manage their own subscription. When a member walks up to the counter, staff scan the QR code on their phone — the screen shows name, tier, and remaining redemptions. One tap marks it done. No spreadsheet. No manual reconciliation.

The platform connects to the venue’s existing point-of-sale system. Operating costs at current scale run a few dollars a month on pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure. There are no per-member licensing fees.

The membership program is still building its base. The technology is ready when it is. A system that handles 20 members as easily as 200 is the right shape for a first-year program where the goal is learning what works before committing to scale.

What My Pub Marketing runs

• Email — strategy, copywriting, list hygiene, segmentation, scheduling
• Organic search — on-page optimization, meta structure, local search
• Website — content updates, performance monitoring, analytics
• Social — ongoing Instagram and Facebook content
• Member platform — QR check-in, admin portal, online signup, automated billing
• Campaign work — Memorial Tournament 2026 multi-venue campaign (results pending June 2026)

In their words

“Matt’s analysis uncovered patterns in our customer data that immediately changed how I think about our business.”

— Jennifer, Owner, Uncorked Wine Tastings

If your venue is running on spreadsheets and gut instinct, this is the kind of work I do. Learn about how the digital operations model works, or run the free 5-minute Digital Leak Check to find out where your guest relationships are quietly slipping.