REthink Wine Blog

Over the past 4 months I have spoken with many wineries that are “thinking about” dedicating more time and resources to support their ecommerce channel. After all, a website for many wineries today is nothing more than an online sales brochure. They see that nearly all of the reports support the fact that the Ecommerce is the fastest growing channel and most importantly, levels the playing field for the smaller wineries. But when is a good time to revamp a website to make it worthy of facilitating ecommerce? Well, I can certainly tell you that waiting until after harvest is too late.

More often than not, what prevents wineries from fulfilling the most important phase of sales and marketing - planning - are activities relating to production (i.e. bottling, harvest). Is it more important to focus on producing wine than selling it? Shouldn’t they have equal balance within your business? Also, with the current state of the economy (gas prices, drop in disposable income, etc.) many consumers are choosing to pay FedEx and UPS to ship their wine rather than make the annual drive to wine country. Historically, most planning activity comes to a complete halt in the summertime in order to align resources to focus on the tasting room customers. This year, I suggest carving out some of that time and energy to support those customers that may not be ale to visit…and in doing so you will provide a great destination for those who have the opportunity to visit and want to stay connected.

So what non-production related event can the sales and marketing folks rally around to generate a sense of urgency for the Direct Sales channel? It’s called the ‘Fall Release’. It might not sound quite as fancy as harvest or crush, but it certainly has dollar signs associated with it for those wineries who only release wine twice a year. Following the ‘Fall Release’, of course, is the holiday season (O-N-D) and if you don’t have your plans in place 60 days prior, there is a good chance those plans will never come to fruition (no pun intended).

This entry was posted by Dan Chapin on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under E-commerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.