REthink Wine Blog

It’s that time again - time for our Annual Consumer Direct Symposium which will be held on Friday, JULY 11th at COPIA. The symposium will be held in the theater at COPIA during the day; we’ll adjourn to the gardens in the evening for our Client Appreciation Party and enjoy some music, food, wine, and fun – all in the name of appreciation!

Our Annual Golf Scramble will be held at Chardonnay Golf Course on Saturday, July 12th. Even if you don’t golf, it’s sure to be a fun time. So, save the date for two days of learning and fun. More details to come. Hope to see you there!

If you haven’t already heard (or already RSVP’d), we’ve holding another workshop! This quarterly workshop at COPIA is on Wednesday, April 9th on wine clubs and allocation. We’ve divided the workshop into two, two-hour sessions.

The first session, Wine Club Basics, is from 10am to noon and will cover a variety of topics on planning, building and measuring the success of your wine club.

The second session, from 1:30pm to 3:30pm, is called Growing Your Wine Club and will focus on member acquisition strategies, maximizing your re-purchase program and considering an allocation program for one or more SKUs.

The Client Development Team who will be putting on the workshop need your RSVP by Tuesday, April 1st to clientdev@inertiabev.com. Space is limited.

We hope that the different tools, such as these workshops, monthly newsletters, planning tools, etc. have been useful to help our clients to grow their direct business. We’re working hard to ensure all the information provided is relevant and useful to their needs. If you have any suggestions or want to learn more about our workshop or other helpful tools, please reach out to the Client Development Team.

For more about our upcoming workshop, go to: www.inertiabev.com/inertiabev/page/workshop.jsp

Content is one of the most important parts of your website. It is how you bring your wine and your winery to life and yet another– very important – way that search engines will find you. There are many important things to consider when reevaluating your current website content, but here’s an easy and quick win: KEEP IT FRESH!

Keeping Your Site Fresh
As you know, it is important that you keep your homepage and all your content fresh and up to date. It is extremely frustrating for someone who visits your events page to only to find events from several months ago, or to see Outdoor Party recipes in the middle of December.

By updating your content on a regular basis you are not only seen as more professional to your visitors, but you also trigger search engines to take another look and move you up in the rankings. The most important page that search engines look at is your homepage, so be sure that you are continually refreshing some of the content on that page.

When did you last refresh your website? Make a plan for upcoming dates to add new and refresh old content: Weekly, if you can; Monthly; Quarterly; and/or Seasonal/Holiday

Here are three key tips to implement now:

Update your calls-to-action (CTAs)
Ask for what you want; make your specials/kickers actionable. Your CTA is what is going to point your visitors in the direction you want them to go. Use CTA’s throughout your site, reinforcing your website goals. Caution: If you don’t have any CTA’s on your home page, they will have nothing to guide their experience throughout your website.

Include a “Seasonal Features” Section
Link to this page from a Kicker on the Homepage. Offer new recipes and food pairings each season. Discuss what’s happening in the vineyard at that time. By doing so, you will give users a reason to visit again, as well as give search engines an additional way to locate you for their searchers. But REMEMBER: keep search engines happy by updating with text-based elements and not simply images.

Keep News & Events Current
The key to maintaining a successful website is keeping your information fresh. By keeping your news and events updated you:

• Hold the attention of your audience, and create interest in your website.
• Provide a reason for your visitors to return – most of us don’t read the same book over and over again. Give your visitors a weekly or monthly “magazine” and they’ll subscribe!
• Increase spending as a direct result of an extended customer focus created on your site.
• Improve the likelihood your website will be indexed higher on search engine results.

If you believe that the Direct Sale Channel is the most profitable and growing, what are you doing to make sure you’re making the most of this?

Most wineries spend a majority of their budget furthering the wholesale channel and few funds are allocated to the Direct Channel. What a different place the wine industry would be if budgets were adjusted to allow for hiring more high-powered marketing managers to oversee the wine club, tasting room and ecommerce. Imagine if the ideology that the Direct Channel is second best (and thus does not deserve the same resources) was changed and now winery staff is not tasked with wearing multiple hats to try and do the work of three people or more!

A traditional industry is slow to change, but you can make the most of what you have to work with. Think by and for individual channels – ecommerce, tasting room, wine club, and telephone – and leverage the nuances of each. Create goals and plans to reach those goals for each DIRECT sales channel. Plan, monitor, and reassess your goals as necessary. Have a plan in place on a monthly basis for the entire year, but continue to reassess and reschedule. Plan down to the detail – not only plot out what wines will go in the club shipments for the year, but what emails will you send, when you’ll send it, and what you’ll feature; plan your emails as far in advance as possible to coincide with events, wine releases, accolades, etc. If you have a solid plan with tactics and resources in place, you can take the stress out of the day-to-day.

If you believe that the Direct Sale Channel is the most profitable and growing, then plan, monitor, and reassess your methodology and tactics to grow this channel. Put your resources behind the channel in the most effective and efficient way possible to make the most return on your investment into the Direct Channel.

Maximizing OND

You may be knee deep in grapes with the harvest season in full swing, but the busiest season for ecommerce is rapidly approaching: October, November, and December (OND). Traditionally this is the time of year when the ecommerce channel develops a spike in sales for the last quarter of the year. We all understand there is money to be made, but here are a few suggestions to capitalize on OND and exceed your goals.

Holiday Decor
Have you noticed while surfing the net many businesses spruce up their website for the holiday/OND season? It’s no different than the brick and mortar stores putting up seasonal displays – it puts people in the mood to spend. Changing the look and feel of your website and communications is cost effective. More importantly, you can gain a significant return on your investment without much effort. Additionally, streamlining your purchase paths and highlighting specials and holiday offerings will also increase sales. Make sure to place your gift offering in a highly visible area.

Gift Packages
The holiday season is the gift-giving season, so make it easy for your customers to purchase gift packs and gift baskets. Build around compelling price points (psychological price barriers like $99). Many companies are willing to partner up, so use your connections and make the most of your gift packs. Try basket companies that offer wine as part of the package, or wine and chocolate, wine and cheese…the list goes on. If you can, offer consumers the option of purchasing greeting cards to accompany the gift. If nothing else, create wine bundles on your website which will not only increase the average dollar per order but also make gift-giving easier. You may want to offer discounted shipping for early ordering, and be sure to indicate drop ship dates to ensure delivery time before the holiday.

Wine Club Gifting
Wine club shipments make excellent gifts. You can post a club shipment (as a gift set) on your website and offer 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months for customers to order. You might want to provide a discounted price proportional to the length of the gift membership. For example, a three-month membership for a $40 shipment would be $120. You may want to offer it for $109 (psychological price barrier) or offer and additional 5% off. When sending out the gift memberships, be sure to include additional promo materials about your product or brand. These are future customers that you are trying to gain. You can specify a different “in-box program” for these gift memberships with your fulfillment partner – make the box fun to open by having value-adds with your shipments like a corkscrew, vineyard dirt, etc.

Corporate Gifting
Another way to maximize the potential of OND with increased sales and brand awareness is corporate gifting. Many corporations like to give the gift of wine to their employees. This is an ideal way to reach a wide range of new customers in one purchase. You and your staff should compile a list of friends and various businesses and create a sales strategy.

Prepare your strategies for OND now so you that OND won’t leave you in the dust!

Remember, DIRECT is the best way to Communicate with, Acquire, and Retain your customers.

We’re exciting to be hosting our annual Symposium, Client Appreciation Party, and Golf Scramble this month - on us! Our free Direct Sales & Marketing Symposium, on Friday, August 24th, is open to anyone interested in hearing about breaking down barriers in the wine industry and finding new opportunities. See more information on the event including the schedule of panelists for the day at: http://www.inertiabev.com/inertiabev/page/events.jsp Did I mention that this is free of charge? All you have to do is RSVP!

We will also be showing all our winery partners and investors our appreciation at our Annual Client Appreciation Party and Golf Scramble on Saturday, August 25th and Sunday, August 26th. If you are interested and haven’t signed up for our events, please call 800-819-0235 or email: rsvp@inertiabev.com by August 15th.
We hope to see you there!

I have a job that is specifically measured on how well my clients are doing. I am measured according to my clients’ progress, and for that reason, I am challenged with trying to help my clients help their winery increase their DIRECT online sales. Now, this may seem easier said than done, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to time management and planning. Most wineries are so busy with the overall business management that the person who is in charge of ecommerce is also in charge of fifty other things. In addition, the ecommerce tends to be delegated to the back seat of a winery’s DIRECT sales plan which often falls under hospitality. The romancing of a hospitality employee up-selling in a tasting room is much different than Internet commerce. Their expertise in face-to-face interaction and salesmanship does not translate the same way to a customer behind a computer screen. It requires a different mentality to gain sales and customers in this arena. So how do I do my job — help wineries to do their job effectively and more efficiently — based on these challenges?

The answer surprisingly came to me during a personal conversation I had with a friend at Starbucks. We were discussing what she would ideally like to do when she ‘grew up’. She described her short-term and long-term goals, but to my surprise, it wasn’t just her goals in some abstract, vague way, but her step-by-step plans to attain to her goals. As a wise person once told me, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any bus will take you there.” We often tend to get so caught up in our day-to-day lives, that planning goals, moving towards those goals, and continually reassessing them gets lost. The same can be said for business goals.

Getting the right people on the right track with our winery partners seems to be the main challenge — we need winery owners to see the huge potential for DIRECT sales via the internet. Once we have their attention, the wineries will need to translate their understanding of their business into attainable goals and then build the DIRECT sales channel from there. The key to this is in the planning and goal setting. (To reference a smart coworker, see Stephen Mutch’s blog on “The Six Steps to Goal Setting”.)

Once you know where the bus is going, you can help navigate the best way to get there. The first step to achieve your winery DIRECT sales goals is to focus on these five key areas:

1. Effectively build your database
2. Increase online orders month over month
3. Build loyalty among customers
4. Build your Wine Club membership
5. Reprioritize your time to maximize Return On Investment

So, help me do my job well. Let me help you help your bottom line — get on the bus that is going where you want to be.

There is an awful lot of information to consider when you first begin delving into website statistics. It can be overwhelming when trying to decipher the information you are presented with; The quantity of hits, visits, pages, entry/exit pages or bounces, referrers, search strings, unique visitor, new or repeat visitors, etc. can amount to more data than you know what to do with. So, what is really important and actionable to affect your bottom line?

The Big 5:

1.    Visits – How many people are visiting your website daily? Does it make a difference if there are 300 or 3000? Sure it does. But it’s not so much about how many come to your site, as it is about tracking the changes in the numbers based on your marketing activities. You should be able to see if your marketing efforts are helpful or not. That way you can maximize your time and effort in the future – did your visits to the website increase with your last email blast? With an announcement of your 95 points in Wine Spectator? What works best to bring you increased traffic?

2.    Unique Visitors - Your data can tell you how many unique visitors you get per day. This information can help you figure out how well (or not so well) your site is converting browsers to buyers. If you get 1,000 unique visitors per day but only 2 orders per day, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your site and merchandising. This information also tells you if marketing partners and business development opportunities are working to bring new eyes to your website. Make sure the traffic you see is inline with what they have promised.

3.    Purchase Path - Track what is selling on your website and the path to purchase trends. How is a particular product being sold? What path did the customer take to complete this purchase? Knowing this information can help you adjust the purchase path as needed for a more streamlined path to purchase, which can equate to more sales. It can also help you determine the easiest path for consumers to purchase, and how to better highlight that path for future customers.

4.    Referrals – Where are your website visitors coming from? It’s important to know what other web entities are sending visitors to your website. The more sites you link in from, the higher relevancy you will have in search engines. Evaluating how many of your visitors come from other websites such as tourist sites, limo companies, travel sites, wine related sites, restaurant sites, etc. will help you figure out where you need to spend time building relationships, and embarking on joint marketing efforts. And don’t forget about Search Engine referrals – what searches are sending people to your site? By knowing the keywords and phrases being searched, you can refine your meta tags and keywords to maximize your exposure to visitors.

5.    Hot Spots - Track what is popular by ‘page views’, ‘bounces’ and ‘exits’. If you notice some of your pages are receiving more visits than others, or if you want more visits to a page that isn’t getting many visits in comparison, you can affect change by switching content or images on that page. You can also determine which pages are getting the most traffic and put key messages – directing consumers to buy, or submit contact information in these key places.

While much of the information provided by various website analyses is qualified, there are key data sets that when analyzed can positively affect sales. Don’t get lost in the absolute numbers and statistics, but rather focus on how those numbers change and what the trends reflect.

Everyone knows that summertime heat can sometimes prevent customers from buying wine online. To help you overcome that summer slump, here are some tried and true methods that will continue to increase your bottom-line throughout the summer. Our goal is to help you see those dollar signs increasing on a monthly basis and help you steer your marketing efforts in the right direction.

States
The first step to increasing your online sales in the summer heat – open up those ship-to states! You would be amazed to find that not all wineries are shipping to all the reciprocal states. This is an easy way to broaden your market. You can find a current list of states and the restrictions, or lack thereof for each, at the Wine Institute online or check with your compliance partner. Why not make your wine available to a new state full of potential customers. They’re just waiting to taste your wine.

Online Wine Promotions and Incentives
Can’t ship during the heat? Give your customers a reason to buy anyway – offer promotions and incentives to keep buying: discounted shipping, limited release wines, winemaker signed bottles, etc. Promote white wines for the summer. Connect with your outlying customers. Make sure they know that you are still available to them even if they are unable to come in and visit during the summer. Continue to send regular communications! Contacting your customer builds loyalty, regardless of whether you are currently shipping your wine or not.

Promote Your Summer Events Online
During the summer online visits are at their lowest, while the tasting room is overflowing with visitors. Make the most of this by promoting your summer events on your website and offer ticket sales for Will-Call or pick-up parties. Continue driving traffic to your website through the summer and keep your customers updated on events, how else will they know the best time to visit?

Try a pickup party for your wine club. Usually pick-up parties are reserved for wine club members who live close enough to drive to the winery and pick up their wine shipment. But why limit the purchases to locals? Make an event out of the pick-up party and invite everyone to place an order online, and then come visit you to pick it up!

Participate in Business Development Opportunities
There’s no time like a slump to acquire new customers. There are many businesses out there just looking to partner with a winery for a business deal – try swapping your customer list with another hospitality- or travel-industry business; if you have access to other opportunities to acquire new customers, make the most of them (such as third-party wine clubs, wine-of-the-day programs, corporate gifting, etc.).

Concentrate on the Important Things
When you have the time, make the most of it. Reprioritize your time to maximize your return on investment (ROI): call your top 50 customers; collect contacts at each tasting event you attend; redesign your website or refresh your online store.

Remember, DIRECT is the best way to Communicate with, Acquire, and Retain your customers.

To ensure the success of your ecommerce plans this spring, a fresh look and new ideas are essential. The following suggestions will undoubtedly help you get back into the spirit of selling more DIRECT! To accomplish online what retail managers do with their brick and mortar business, you have to employ best practices and effective promotion tools that create the ‘look and feel’ of aisles in a store.

Creativity is Key:

• Besides having a compelling layout, the way in which you present or even spin the products you sell is completely up to you. This is where you can get creative, and turn those visitors into buyers!
• Try putting banners on products for emphasis on tactics like limited production, or have an image of a medal to highlight a high wine score or winner of a contest.
• Other promotional methods may include: Pre-Releases, Ratings, Exclusives, Themes, Seasonality, Mixed Packs, Behind the Scenes/Educational Stories, etc. These methods have all proved to be great selling tactics in the past, but you can always dare to be different!
• Identify the key business goals and ensure they are obvious on your homepage, with calls-to-action. Have these ‘kickers’ link to your wine club, wine store, and events on your homepage with complementary/compelling images.

Compelling Layout:

• Identify key products and areas that you want to draw attention. Create your store design to specifically highlight notable products, and place these items above the fold.
• Be sure you create the proper messaging to set customer expectations. Negative space or “white space” can add a sense of sophistication to your website, while too many products, text, and images can make a webpage seem busy and confusing for a customer. Graphics in strategic places tend to draw the eye and entice customers to purchase.
• Keep the number of clicks-to-purchase low; more than 3 clicks and your customers will start to lose interest.
• Make sure your store looks neat and fresh; your customers will find it much easier to purchase your products, and enjoy their shopping experience!

Create Strategies That Speak to Your Customers:

• Don’t forget to up-sell and cross-sell. Feature exclusives or related products. This allows you to take advantage of the online medium, pushing customers to shop at your website.
• Try merchandising categories that drive sales such as Limited Releases, Library Wines, Large Formats, Gifting, and Gift Baskets. Also, you can try strategies that create a feeling of scarcity or limited availability such as allocation and mailing-list only wines.
• Anticipate the needs of your customers and provide the shopping experience to match.

Promotions that Drive Traffic:

• No matter how good your store looks, and what great discounts you offer, you need to get customers to your site - before they can buy. Zero promotion equals zero sales.
• Focus on marketing your website at wine club events, in direct mailings, and in the tasting room as well as email marketing. You can promote your store using online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, email marketing, banner advertisements and affiliate marketing among others.
• By constantly reminding your customers and contacts of your online store, they are more likely to buy your wine online when they aren’t close enough to visit.

Remember, direct is the best way to Communicate with, Acquire, and Retain your customers.