REthink Wine Blog

The most successful direct sales programs always consider whether the growth of the business and its’ sustainability, is directly related to the quality of their relationship with the customer. This relationship has become increasingly more important as the direct sales channel and the larger margins it has produced, augments growth within the industry. The fundamental question for direct sales-oriented wineries is: “What tools do you need to best serve your relationship with your customers?”

The answer is the Unified Database.

Having a successful unified database requires a tool that is accessible at all times and allows the winery to track all interaction with its customer base, including:

• Online purchases, wine-club shipments, e-mail orders and telephone orders (with the exact purchase details both recorded and searchable).
• Track non commerce-related customer interaction and information such as telephone and e-mail conversations, tracking numbers of shipments as well as birthdays and preferences.
• Monitor inventory, shipping compliance rules, and is integrated with a fulfillment partner.

Save time. Save money. It’s that simple.

The time saving element of using a unified database results from having all the information you need, in one place. Administer any direct sales program without having to access numerous information centers. Mining your customer base for new sales opportunities and targeted marketing offers can now happen in a fraction of the time.

The money saving element of using a unified database allows one person to do the work. This minimizes employee costs and allows a business to engage independent contractors (if necessary) to help run the direct marketing effort through the use of the universally accessible database.

Increase your direct sales with one database by analyzing your customer purchasing trends, habits and data. By translating those figures into a targeted and more profitable interaction, a business can both enhance their customer experience while maximizing their sales. Satisfied customers are more likely to return, assuring repeat business and creating loyal ambassadors that in turn will lead to more customers.

Shipping Compliance Issues:

Without a unified data system, a winery that engages in significant out-of-state direct sales could easily use the energy of a full time employee to manage state-to-state compliance.

A unified database can track inventory and sales, manage accounting, control complex compliance rules and maintain an efficient fulfillment system. However, when you leverage the tool as a marketing catalyst with the power to increase and sustain your DIRECT sales channel, its full potential is reached.

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

As a variation on the saying: ‘you can take the girl out of California, but you can’t take the California out of the girl’, this hit pretty close to home when I took time off for the holidays last month. I don’t know about you, but when I travel, especially to see good friends and family, I like to take a nice bottle of California wine with me. As it was, I happened to have had a couple of nice bottles of wine that I wanted to share with my friends. However, flying thousands of miles and not being able to carry the wine on, I was in a bit of a conundrum.

So there I was, packing my suitcase, and among the paperback books, sunscreen, and bikini, I was trying to figure out how to safely include a couple of bottles of wine. It’s one thing when you’re just packing up the car and heading out for a few days, it’s another thing entirely when you’re leaving the country. So, in an attempt to achieve my objective, I decided to try a sample of a product a company had given us to try – a wineskin. This product fits around a regular-sized bottle (750ml) giving it both padding and sealing it ‘just in case’. Knowing my bathing suit and books wouldn’t be much in the way of padding, this was the ideal solution. Suffice to say, it worked!

You gotta try it for yourself, so the next time you’re traveling by plane and want to take some wine with you, get a wineskin at www.wineskin.net Or, if you do retail sales at a winery, this is a great added value for customers instead of carry-on boxes. Just tell Wineskin we sent you!

Inertia’s Traveling Queen,