REthink Wine Blog

Last week I got this call from a younger relative expressing all their plans for the summer. It quickly brought back that feeling we have all experienced. You remember how you felt when you walked out the door after taking that last test of the year. That first breathe of fresh air after 9 long months of schedules, tests, long days and sometimes long nights. I then quickly realized that I will not have that feeling again for at least another 30 years! Now I’m not here to be a Debbie downer but the true take away is the understanding of what TIME means to us. TIME is the currency that can’t be earned, it can’t be given back, it’s all in how you use the TIME that you have been given. So instead of saying that I will give you back the time used to read this blog, I will hopefully provide you a couple quick tips to help you Re-prioritize your time so that you will have a better return in the time you do spend at your job. (These tips are meant specifically for wineries)

Customer Appreciation
During slow times in the tasting room, call your top customers and thank them for their loyalty to your brand

Communication
Instead of being over-whelmed with sending a mailer, send a email to a specific audience providing them a specific incentive to purchase

Support your key supporters
Keep track of your top customers and keep them on the list to call when certain “limited” wines come up. Instead of taking the time to move it through your tasting room, simply make a couple calls to your key customers. This will not only sell through the wine but also bring those customers closer to your inner circle.

Don’t recreate the wheel
Instead of racking your brain to come up with new ideas in your office, take a day to visit other wineries. Enjoy the day, keep your eyes open and you will not only be refreshed but I guarantee you will walk away with ideas to build upon.

Support your staff
Don’t get so caught up in the busyness that you forget to make the time enjoyable for your staff. This will make everyone enjoy the time they are working. Once you get them to enjoy their time, their time will be more productive.

Listen
Take time to listen to your customers and staff before trying to change your customer experience, tasting room tours, wine club, or events. This will not only increase the efficiency of the transition but will keep you from having to go back to the drawing boards.

Although most of us will not have our summers back for a while, we should make the most of the time we do have so that we can more efficiently do our jobs. Always remember that the goal is to work so that we can live, not live so that we can work.
Enjoy the day!

This is something that can both positively and negatively affect your business. There are 4 things that you must think about when projecting your clubs revenue or better yet, truly understanding the value of your club. Most wineries fall into a trap of thinking their wine club revenue is simply the number of members times the cost of the shipment. If that is all you are looking at, then you are simply letting money fall through your hands. Here are the keys to focus on:

1. View your club shipment as a sample program and focus on getting your club members to repurchase what you just gave them an opportunity to taste.

2. Know your average decline rate for your club runs and keep it under 10%. Well run wine clubs have a decline rate of under 10 percent. If you find that you are running a higher percentage than that, then you have some cleaning to do. Implement a de-activation plan for those club members that are simply sitting on your list and never purchased, let alone received your last club shipments. If you don’t do this, we guarantee you will have a difficult time planning for your year’s financials.

3. Have a repurchase plan and execute on it 2 weeks after your shipment has been sent. This will remind your members to purchase the wonderful wine they just consumed. More often than not wineries condition their clients to simply wait for the wine their shipped and every once in a while consume it. Successful wine clubs condition their club members to consume the shipment they receive so that they know how many bottles/cases they should repurchase.

4. Know the % of club members that are repurchasing and continue to find ways to increase their order. By watching this percentage you will see what your club members like and don’t like. (Very valuable information)

When you put all of this together you get:

((# of club members – 10% decline rate) x package price) + (# of club members x 20%) x Ave purchase price)) = Total Club Value

CLUB ACTIVE NUMBER x CLUB REPURCHASE = Total Club Value

As we all know, the wine industry has always been viewed as a very romantic get a way. A place were we can easily mix business with pleasure. Where we encourage all of our senses to dive into a barrage of taste, smell, and yes texture. A true experience not quickly forgotten.

In this new day that we are now living in, we are vigorously trying to pull this love story into a technical heist action movie. This has been a tough journey for both the wine producer as well as the wine connoisseur. The average age for the wine connoisseur has quickly dropped over the last 5 years and we are seeing that this trend is really driving the channels in which wine is being bought. New ways of getting information about your favorite wine are popping up daily and we are all just trying to keep up.

There is one winery that I have been watching, Twisted Oak Winery. Twisted Oak has had a very interesting approach but in everything they do they have not only been consistent but have tried everything under the Wine 2.0 sun. If you own a winery, I would suggest taking a look at what they are doing, if you are a consumer, check out their site and have some fun. I guarantee it will make you either scratch your head or smile.

As they would suggest, have a Twisted day…

We wanted to give you a recap of how the Email Workshop, we held on Wednesday, went. We were very pleased with the high volume of response and look forward to providing this service on a monthly basis.

We had over 10 wineries attend both our training session and workshop. Everyone there had an opportunity to work, one on one, with one of our Client Development Managers as well as benefit from working directly with our design team. As you can imagine this was a huge success for everyone involved.

With that said, we have will have a schedule for these workshops to you shortly. Although we would love to open these workshops up to anyone in the wine industry, we have to keep these open to only those that are either Inertia clients or if you know some one who is a client with Inertia you can attend with them. Because we have limited space for all of these workshops, we will only be allowing 15 wineries per workshop. Be sure to RSVP today, this will be a first come first serve basis.

Before I say good-bye, I would like to introduce you, once again, to one of our client stars, Jenny Haug. Jenny Haug is the Sales Manager for Titus and has provided all of us with a couple blogs in the past. Today she wants to let you know what her experience was when she applied a couple simple tactics to her wine club after attending the club workshop Inertia provided last month. I hope that this will be helpful to those of you out there that have a club of your own.

Cheers,

When a Wine Club member’s credit card is declined when you are processing a Club shipment. Do you

A.) Immediately alert your customer and invite them to log into the website to update their information.
B.) Set it aside to (hopefully) deal with it later when you have the time.
C.) Cower in fear at the possibility of actually having to interact with a customer who might decide to quit buying wine from you.
D.) Wait, you mean I’m actually supposed to do something about declined credit cards?

A recent workshop at IBG helped me to refocus my strategy for how I handle declined credit cards in my wine club. As a result of a sloppy approach, I realized I was wasting time, losing Titus Vineyards Wine Club members, and forfeiting wine sales. I was already emailing the declines at the time of processing, but after that my follow up was haphazard. It was time to create and employ a consistent strategy. I decided to reframe the yucky situation of declined credit cards as another opportunity to reconnect an existing customer with Titus Vineyards. Instead of assuming that a Wine Club member’s declined credit card meant “Goodbye”, I decided it was a precursor to a friendly “Hello, My New Best Friend”.

I started with an email. Rethink makes it really easy to email declines after batching your club. Be sure to warn club members not to include their credit card information in a reply email but to instead log in and update their account. Create a sense of urgency in these emails. Try the following:

“I need updated information so I can get your wine out to you right away before (insert one or more of the following as needed)
a.) the reorder discount ends.
b.) the weather gets too warm to ship.
c.) we run out of this wine.
d.) your Club membership is jeopardized.

“I would hate for you to miss out on this … (insert one of the following options)
a.) unique,
b.) winery only
c.) Wine Club only
d.) proprietary
e.) exciting
…wine while all your fellow Club members are telling me how much they are enjoying it.”

Next, re-batch our club on a specified date to charge those declines that have immediately responded. If you still have a few declines, follow up with a postcard or phone call. Again, choose your words and create a sense of urgency.

The next step was to tighten the bad credit card cancellation policy. Decide how many club shipments a club member can skip due to a declined credit card before you cancel their membership. If they hit that number then send them a polite letter alerting that you are going to cancel their wine club membership. Explain that their credit card was declined and that you didn’t receive any response to your prior communications. Encourage them to rejoin the club at any point and thank them for their past support of your brand.

One Club member, who received a cancellation letter at his billing address, was horrified to learn that his overworked assistant hadn’t updated his Club membership. I got back on the assistant’s radar in a big way when I told her I still had the wines available to send from his missed Club shipments. After perusing her bosses purchasing history, I made a few personalized suggestions. The boss bit and purchased nearly 6 cases of wine, including large formats and 2 cases of missed Club wine.

Another club member realized his spam filter was preventing my emails from getting to him. He updated his information, increased his Wine Club membership level, asked to receive the missed Club shipments and filled me on his eminent job change which opened the doors for corporate gifting conversations.

In experimenting with this approach, all of the Wine Club members who received cancellation letters immediately telephoned to re-enroll in the Wine Club. Not one of the Wine Club members I spoke with was rude or angry or put out. In fact, they were thrilled to be talking with silly old me in my jeans and flip flops at my desk in the funky old Titus Vineyards farmhouse. It was a valuable lesson. By tightening my strategy I decreased my overall number of declined credit cards, wasted less time, strengthened customer connections and sold more wine. Hello indeed.

Jennie Haug
Titus Vineyards - www.titusvineyards.com
jhaug@titusvineyards.com

As a free service to our customers, our Client Development Team has designed a compilation of workshops that are specifically designed for each customer’s needs. This Wednesday, the first workshop, will focus on developing an email campaign that will not only drive traffic to their websites, but also increase their sales online. At the workshop’s completion, the attendees will have learned the following:

1. What are the best reasons to send an email?
2. What is the best approach for my brand?
3. How do I segment my customer database?
4. What do I look at to see if it was successful or not?
5. What is the difference between a text based email and a image based email, and when do I use each one?

This will be one of the first hands on workshops where the attendees will be able to work on their brand during the workshop. By the end of the session each attendee will be leaving with an email that speaks directly to their customer database and focuses on what their brand goals are.

There will be many more workshops to come, here are some of the following topics:

1. Email Marketing
2. Market Segmentation
3. Online Merchandising
4. Improving your SEO
5. Reporting with Quickbooks
6. And more to come

The full calendar of events is still in the works, but for those of you that are already a part of the Inertia family just keep your eyes open. This is one more service that Inertia is putting together to meet their clients needs. We fully welcome any and all feedback.

Cheers,

With the world of compliance constantly changing, it’s hard to keep up the states that you can ship to. Understanding the statement, “the more states that you have open the more wine you will be able to sell through the Direct Sales Channel”, it becomes all the more important to keep all reciprocal states open and verify on a monthly basis what states you, as an individual winery, can legally ship to.

Below you will find a quick list of all reciprocal states as of this morning. (all information gathered from the Wine Institute)

• Illinois – 2 cases per person, per year
• Iowa – 18 Liters per person, per month
• Missouri - 2 cases per person, per year
• New Mexico – 2 cases per person, per month
• Oregon - 2 cases per person, per month
• West Virginia - 2 cases per person, per month
• Wisconsin – Annual registration fee $10, annual reporting on all direct to consumer purchases, 27 Liters per person, per year

For those of you that have a fulfillment partner, always feel free to check with them to see if there are any states that you could be shipping to. On average, I have noticed that most wineries will have 2 to 3 states that they could ship to today but simply have not targeted those markets. Once you open a new state, always, I repeat, always put together a direct marketing plan, that is allowed within the states laws, followed by a direct call plan for your customers that reside in that specific state.

Don’t get discouraged when it comes to compliance, but rather have fun with targeting the customers that absolutely love your wine!

Cheers,
Michael Coffey
Sr. Account Manager

In today’s more technologically advanced world, we are beginning to see a transition from the traditional “snail mail” to email. With this transition comes the obvious debate - “Which is more personal?” And more importantly - which method is more effective in turning contacts to customers?

There are arguments both for and against each side of the question. It remains to be seen if there is a solid reason to choose one over the other. I believe there is validity in each argument. Finding the happy medium between email and printed mailings, is finding suitable occasions for both. Some customers need to have something tangible to feel they are truly appreciated. Others would rather have your communications delivered to their phone, PDA, or computer so that they can be informed of an upcoming event or offering with minimal interruption.

With that said, how do you go about segmenting your customers?

1. Form a plan to effectively communicate to both groups of consumers, separately.

2. Design a mailing which specifically tells your customers to choose their preferred method of communication. Make sure to include a return mailer for “snail mail” customers and a web address directing your tech savvy to sign-up online.

3. Send the direct mailing and wait for the response. For contacts that don’t respond, put them on your email list.

After segmenting your customers, you will be amazed at how much time and money you will save by cutting down your mailing list. This simple task will help you better understand your customers and their preferences and help you establish a clean email database.

Michael Coffey

Sr. Account Manager

There are many times in life where we hit this preverbal wall and really don’t know where to go next. There are times when we sit in front of our computer, knowing that we should be able to pass on the knowledge that lives in side of us from our pasts, but come up with nothing. We all experience this and we need to be refreshed with new ideas. We need something that is out of our box and rekindles our imagination and brings the joy of what we do back to life. My goal in today’s blog is to rekindle your imagination and give you one, out of the box, idea that you might be able to use wherever you might be.
For those of you that are avid readers of this blog, know that there are very creative ideas that run throughout these postings. This is simply meant to jumpstart your creative juices and I hope to hear back from a couple of you as to what this leads you to.

Here is the setting… we live in a generation that lives and breaths online. We have companies that are being sold for a lot of money just to share videos of each other’s lives. For those of you who know Youtube.com, it has become a free median for anyone to use for their liking. My question is, what is stopping you from using it?

Here is where I hopefully get your creative juices starting… You have the ability to put together a video of any length to promote your winery to over 2 million views for no charge. A video that would lead these viewers directly to your website. For those that are not able to come to your tasting room, even though they might be a club member, you can send the tasting room to them. Think about virtual tastings!

Here is the example… Mi Sueno winery decided that they would like to get a video of their winery up, but not just on youtube.com, but also on their site for everyone to see. The beauty of youtube.com is that they provide you with an “embedding code” which allows you to “embed” the video directly into your site with out your customers having to deal with the typical load time that you usually experience with most websites. All that needs to happen is for you to cut and paste this code into a simple CMS block on your website. Check out Mi Sueno to see what the finished product looks like. (Be sure to scroll down the the video.)
Now here is the fun part, don’t stop at just one. Get a rhythm going, use you imagination and give your viewers a reason to come back time and time again.

I look forward to hearing how you have used this example to really step outside of the box for your winery!

Cheers and happy Youtubing!

This year I decided to step outside my comfort zone to see what the online world had to offer. In all honesty, I was very impressed by what I found. Every site I went to said SALE, SALE, SALE! and this was two weeks before Christmas! Everywhere I turned there was FREE SHIPPING, 60% OFF, BUY 1 Get 1 Free! I thought I was dreaming, but you really can save money when you purchase your gifts online. I know that I will never stop going out and kicking off the Christmas season with shopping downtown, but I do believe I will think twice about those larger purchases. I know now that I can make the same purchase, at a discount, online - and have it shipped anywhere, in time for the holidays.

This really started to make me think, if I’m getting these great deals on merchandise, I’m sure that I will be able to get some great deals on wine for the holidays. So I grabbed my hot chocolate, turned on the computer, lit the fire and went to some of my favorite wineries’ sites. As I was waiting for the site to appear I was imaging the great holiday sales and gifts that I could purchase as gifts and for my family. But to my dismay, this was not the case. Most of these sites had not changed at all. There was nothing that made me think about Christmas, nor purchasing anything for those that I loved. I wanted to be told what to buy and why, and instead I had to search for the wine I already knew. Eventually I just left - and with a true feeling of Bah Humbug!

This little life lesson left me realizing how much we are driven, as buyers, by incentives. During the holidays, people want to spend money. For any product, it is the producer’s job to capitalize on this time of year. To make the consumer feel that they are being gifted when they spend money. Send them a little something extra, it’s really not free, but it’s that added value that earns you repeat business. I urge every business to take note of who is selling this holiday season and why. Use their good ideas and make them your own, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner!