REthink Wine Blog

No one doubts that when it comes to electronic commerce and e-marketing in the wine industry, wineries with a tasting room have a significant advantage. The visitors that walk into the tasting room immediately become customers or well-qualified prospects that can be added to a winery’s “contact list” for future outreach. But if you don’t have a tasting room, building a contact/customer list is a much more daunting task. But if e-mail marketing and online sales is part of your direct sales strategy, then it’s a task you must take up and address.

Here are some creative strategies for building customer and contact lists that have been successful for other wineries without tasting rooms. 

1. Business Teaser Cards: A few wineries, when printing business cards for all their employees, have used the back of the card to offer the holder a 10% or even 20% discount on their first purchase. Often each card has a code on it that buyers can use to assure their online discount and to track who’s business card led to the sale. It’s a creative way to invite new acquaintances to the website when without the discount/invite you’d only be handing out a business card with no call-to-action.

2. Event Giveaways: One Sonoma winery with no tasting room but with a guest house on their property always brought a sign to the tastings they attended announcing that following the tasting a drawing would take place for a weekend getaway at the winery’s guest house. The sign carried beautiful pictures of the guest house and the property. All the attendees had to do was drop their business card in a fishbowl or fill out a simple slip of paper with name, state and email. Within a day of the tasting the winery did their drawing, contacted the winner and set up when they would visit. But more importantly, the winery would also contact via email every single person who entered the drawing with a “thank you” message and an offer of 15% on their first purchase. Their list continues to grow.

3. Contests: A number of wineries without tasting rooms have found that contests are a fantastic way to draw prospective customers to their website. The best contests should be easy to enter, but also give the entrants a feeling of participation or connect with the winery, winemaker or brand. One winery has used its back label as a canvas for the contest by inviting entrants to design their own 100-word back label on a specific subject. The winner had their entry published on the label when the wine was bottled! The contest was announced with a press release and an ad, and the winner was announced on the website and in a press release. They received hundreds of people visiting their site to participate, all providing their entry of back label copy along with their e-mail address. The winery grew their mailing list and customers were able to engage with the brand. Win-Win.

Prospecting and building your email contact list must be an ongoing project if increasing online sales is part of your marketing strategy. If you don’t have a tasting room, you’ll need to think creatively. The time and effort that goes into a very creative customer prospecting program will pay off in an enhanced email list, and ultimately increased sales.

The recent news that Amazon is looking to get into the wine retailing game broke like a wave a few days ago. What the impact of the multi-billion dollar company coming into the online wine selling market will be can’t be said at this point. And there is also great deal of speculation of exactly how they are going about doing business online with wine.

But this isn’t what was truly interesting about all the press on Amazon’s wine program. Down deep in these stories was an estimate by Barbara Insel of Stonebridge Research on the size of the e-commerce market for wine. Insel, one of the top analysts and business consultants in the wine industry, estimated for the reporter that $2.8 billion of America’s $30 Billion retail wine market comes in the form of direct sales. Although the article didn’t mention this fact, that $2.8 Billion is only winery-direct sales and does not include online wine merchants.

Also interesting was Insel’s estimate that seven percent, or roughly $200,000,000, of that $2.8 billion in direct sales occurs exclusively online. It’s not winery club sales. It’s not tasting room sales. It’s pure online transactions from winery to consumers. We think this is significant because it demonstrates just how large the upside is for savvy wineries looking to increase their sales. There is clearly a lot of room to increase the 7% to something more. It’s likely that this percentage will increase over time in an organic fashion. But for individual wineries that are hovering around that 7% figure with their own sales, they can find a way to increase it substantially through strategic online marketing and prospecting for qualified customers in every venue they offer their wines.

The fastest way, however, to increase your pure online sales is to talk more frequently to the customers in your data base. Consider your email marketing program, for instance. Are you leveraging your communications as best as you should be? Consider a few of Angela Sanchez’s Tips for Increased Email Conversion.

To get an indication of what it would mean to increase your online sales from 7% to 10%, imagine allocating three percent of your volume sales that had been sold to wholesalers, and selling it instead direct to the consumer. Amazon will have some sort of impact on overall online wine sales. But you can impact your own bottom line right now by shooting for an immediate 3% increase in direct sales through strategic e-commerce marketing.

If you haven’t already found it, Ablegrape is one of the best new Web 2.0 wine tools - it is the ONLY vertical search engine for the wine industry with a very cool methodology of searching for wine information (check it out - we at Inertia are very impressed).  Please go visit the site and fill out their survey to make it better.

At this year’s Inertia symposium I moderated a session on web site design in which we talked about the wonders of social networking and how it might benefit wineries. Facebook, blogging, twitter: we invoked these words in praise and wonder. But just two weeks ago our own Carole Loomis posted an article, So You Think You Want To Blog starting with the advice, “Think Again”. Two years ago Paul Mabray posted Wineries - to blog or not to blog - NOT whose title is self explanatory. I myself have never before encouraged wineries to blog, advising that blogging is a distraction from more important marketing efforts. So why was I bullish on blogging last week?

First of all, I blame Gary Vaynerchuk (pictured) of Wine Library TV. He delivered an inspiring talk at our symposium shaming the audience for ignoring blogs and social networking and saying that every winery had an obligation to blog or see their business go the way of the dinosaur. He exhorted wineries to stop whining about being defined by reviewers and the press and start defining themselves by expressing their own brand online through blogs and social networks. Gary’s persuasive talk had a lot to do with my attitude toward blogging all day, and has stayed with me since then.

Also, times have changed since Paul posted his warnings about blogging two years ago. Facebook is a multi-billion dollar business and has become a primary communication platform for many people. Barack Obama is the first serious presidential candidate to be able to turn down public financing largely because of his success raising funds online with the help of political bloggers. Bloggers have caught up to print and broadcast journalists as sources of news, analysis and opinion. Vaynerchuk has become a powerful force in the wine world thanks almost entirely to his online presence in video blogging and social networking. This blog has had some success in connecting Inertia to the larger wine community. The ways in which we connect to information and each other are more and more tied to networking services on the web.

So should wineries hop on the bandwagon? For the first time I now say: yes. But before you all go signing up for blogger accounts I have some words of advice on how to get started.

1. Start reading blogs: You wouldn’t sit down to write a novel without ever cracking a book. Read as many blogs as you can and get a feel for the craft of blogging. There may even be blogs unrelated to wine that you can learn from.
2. Be Promiscuous: Now that you’re regularly reading a bunch of blogs, join the conversation. Leave comments stating your point of view. Don’t explicitly promote yourself or your business - you won’t make friends by getting a reputation as a spammer. Instead use this opportunity to get engaged with the community and start finding your online “voice”.
3. Get Social: There’s a bunch of wine related groups on Facebook, as well as the Open Wine Consortium, which let’s you post blog articles, list your events and engage in community forums. One of the main benefits of blogging is community building and social networks give you the opportunity to do this with much less overhead than a blog you have to maintain yourself.
4. Do some research: One of the best things about the web is that there is so much information out there about the web. Problogger, Blog Herald and Copy Blogger are good places to find information on blogging and to get a sense of the issues that bloggers deal with.

Follow these steps and you’ll be engaging potential customers, creating a brand around your online presence and joining a growing community of wine consumers and producers and you haven’t even got a blog yet. When you’re ready to take it to the next level you’ll have to choose a platform, come up with a site design, get a domain and then put in the hours actually writing content day after day, all while keeping the rest of your business going. Yes, it’s going to require a bigger investment of time than emailing your current customer base or updating your website content every quarter and you’re not going to be able to let go of those old responsibilities either. Perhaps my point of view isn’t that different from that stated by Carole and Paul in their posts on blogging. They have a valid point: given the colossal effort involved, why bother blogging? All I’m saying is: when blogging gives you unprecedented power to connect with a growing audience on your own terms, why not?

Have questions on winery blogging issues? Let me know in the comments and I’ll follow up on this topic in the future.

At Inertia we believe that we’ve built the most complete online solution for selling direct to the consumer (and to the trade)—and we’re constantly dreaming up new ideas to enhance that solution even further. We’ve been busy building the next generation of our software platform, and so this is an exciting time for our company and its future.

However, as good as our solution is (and will continue to be in the future) we recognize that the typical winery has employed a variety of other technologies to help them run their business. These include solutions for vineyard, production and warehouse management, tasting room point of sale, and accounting/financial reporting, among others. Throw in the need to manage a wine club, perform state compliance, and send order ship notices to a third party logistics company (like WTN or Copper Peak Logistics) or a common shipping carrier (like FedEx or UPS), and you have a complicated web of data and processes. Each system has its own set of data and operational processes to manage.

Given the complexities of the individual systems, and the underlying data required to support them, many wineries are forced to resort to systems integrations patched together by the various software vendors—or even worse, manual processes to move the data from one system to the other. It’s quite a dilemma for most wineries, but it’s something Inertia has dedicated itself to helping our clients manage. My job is to live and breathe integration—to facilitate connecting our core systems with the technology of as many other partners as possible. Our goal is to reduce the burden wineries face in managing their technology—to allow them to focus more time on their core business—making and selling wine.

The dilemma of technology integration reminds me of something I’ve recently encountered in a hobby of mine, astronomy. While I’ve owned telescopes for many years, all of my experience has been in visual astronomy—out under the stars, looking through the eyepiece of the telescope. Until recently, taking pictures through a telescope was a difficult and daunting task, often requiring years of experience and dedication to produce acceptable results. The introduction of digital cameras (and CCD cameras specially designed for astronomy) has changed all that. Now, fantastic results can be obtained more quickly, and with a less steep learning curve.

My journey down the road to astrophotography began when I started renting telescope time via a network of remotely operated telescopes called Global Rent a Scope (GRAS), www.global-rent-a-scope.com. These telescopes, housed in remote desert locations in New Mexico, Israel, and Australia, are controlled completely via the Internet. This is very similar to the process professional astronomers use to control the world’s most powerful telescopes, like the University of California’s Keck Observatory in Hawaii, or the Hubble Space Telescope.

It’s simple. Buy telescope time with your credit card, select the appropriate telescope, choose the celestial object you want to image, provide parameters on the length and types of exposures—and poof, within a few minutes you have a series of raw images you can turn into a beautiful photograph. It’s amazing. Specialized software, like Photoshop, is required to process the raw images—but the techniques for doing that are within reach of the amateur astronomer. And despite their relatively small size, valuable science can be performed with these telescopes, and some ambitious amateurs are assisting professional astronomers with their projects. The most obvious example is searching for NEO’s (near earth objects) which one day might collide with the earth.

After using the GRAS system for awhile I was completely hooked.  Thinking it would be more fun to do my own CCD imaging, I quickly decided to buy the equipment necessary to do it in my own backyard. It’s certainly been an adventure. While I recognized this going in, I quickly encountered first-hand the complexities of the entire process that the GRAS system had hidden from the end-user.  Those complexities are many, including pointing a telescope at a very small patch of sky, focusing the CCD camera (which is much more sensitive than the human eye), accurately tracking the celestial object for minutes (or hours) as the earth rotates, managing an array of colored filters, dealing with a mess of wires and cables, etc. Whew!

The folks at GRAS have done what we at Inertia are striving to help our clients do—reduce the complexities of managing an interconnected set of technologies. They have stitched together into a seamless interface an amazing array of astronomical hardware and software. The “manual” processes that I must do now with my own CCD imaging rig, e.g. pointing the telescope, focusing the camera, etc, are akin to those manual business processes that many wineries now must do to operate their own array of systems.

My own personal goal is to help Inertia build a technology infrastructure that can help hide the complexities of the needed system integration from the winery—and to forge strong and cooperative relationships with other like-minded companies. We know that the wine industry in general and our own clients specifically, have been asking for solutions to connect their systems, and believe me, Inertia is listening!

Inertia’s 5th Annual Direct Symposium will take place on July 11th, from 9-3:30pm at COPIA in Napa. This year, we’ve expanded our agenda to include interactive sessions on topics chosen by attendees. Last month, we released a survey on what we were hearing from our clients and industry partners as the ‘hottest’ topics in the direct industry. Topics included:

• Website Design
• Website Merchandising
• Selling Direct to Trade 
• Direct Shipping Compliance
• Allocation Program Management 
• Wine Club Management
• Wine Blogging
• Online Social Networks

We asked attendees to ‘vote’ on their topics of choice for breakout sessions at our July Symposium. The results were tallied, and we have our winners… 

• Selling Direct to Trade: Access. Control. Sales. 
• Direct Shipping Compliance: A Dynamic Marketplace. Your Options.
• Wine Blogging: Brand Building, Customer Loyalty and Sales
• Online Social Networks: Consumer- to-Consumer, Peer-to-Peer Engagement
• Website Design: Designing for Best User Experience & Greatest Sales
• Website Merchandising:  Sell More Online 

Our Symposium agenda will allow attendees to participate in two breakout sessions of their choice: One in the morning, one in the early afternoon. During each of these sessions, panelists will lead an interactive discussion with the audience around a designated topic. Based on several workshops which we led earlier in the year, we know our clients are eager to engage and look forward to some good interaction.

Because of limited space in each of our breakout sessions, we request that attendees reserve their spot in the session of their choice as soon as possible. Signups will be taken the day of the Symposium, at check in, but to ensure you get a seat in the topic of your choice, send your request through today (along with your RSVP if you haven’t already!) to rsvp@inertiabev.com.

See you in July!

As the web has matured, this is a problem that has become evident in many industries.  And I believe it is especially relevant in the wine industry.  Wine marketers are increasingly finding themselves in the position of working with fragmented pieces of information from several different technology vendors in developing and executing their marketing strategies.  Consumers, on the other hand, are becoming more and more accustomed to the targeted and personalized attention they receive from some of the big box retailers who have made it their mission over the past several years to understand and master the art of multi-channel marketing.  And so for wineries, the issue of reconciling several separate silos of information (POS, ecommerce, and wine club) has intensified at precisely the time consumers are raising the bar in terms of heightened expectations.

As a wine marketer, there are several factors which are of vital importance to you in developing a multi-channel marketing strategy:

• A clear understanding of your customer’s purchasing habits and wine preferences, regardless of channel
• An understanding of customer loyalty as it relates to club membership and longevity, order history and VIP status
• The ability to reach customers when and where they want to be reached, with information that is personal and relevant

The solution lies in your ability to capture all information regarding customer behavior in a format which is “actionable” for you as a marketer.  I think Forrester Research has coined it best in explaining that the answer lies in the development of an “Online Marketing Suite”.   And while the Forrester research involves primarily “interactive marketing” as it relates to a marketer’s ability to integrate the myriad of online marketing technologies available today (email, search marketing, analytics, and Web 2.0 technologies), there are two aspects of the “Online Marketing Suite” that are especially relevant for the wine industry.  As Forrester explains, the “Suite” requires two core components:

1. “The central hub – the molten core of the suite that enables marketers to manage and integrate online data.”  At Inertia, our philosophy is that all customer data should be available to you in the cloud for purposes of segmentation and targeted marketing, because this is precisely where the superior tools you need in order to reach your best customers are available.  In developing a customer centric marketing strategy, we believe that you need a true 360 degree view of the customer in combination with advanced list management and email marketing capabilities.  And from the customer perspective, a wine club member or customer making a purchase in the tasting room should be able to visit your website, login and view tracking information and complete order history, regardless of whether purchases were made in the tasting room, online, or as part of a club shipment.   This is the approach we’ve taken with respect to point-of-sale integration and it is the reason we’ve worked hard to perfect our club and allocation packages.  Of course, we believe in making the data available to your tasting room personnel as well, as this is a must in delivering exemplary customer service.
2. “The network – a thriving community of technology and service partners”.    Again, I think Forrester is right on the mark here.  All customers win when complimentary technology companies work in harmony, and to that end we’ve made it our mission to develop a vibrant partner ecosystem, one which we believe will significantly enhance value for our winery partners.  By devoting resources to an expanded partner program, involving partners who are experts in their respective fields, we can continue to focus on our own core competencies, driving opportunity in terms of demand generation, CRM, and increased lifetime value of the customer.

We know that the ability to manage data from several different sources is a major challenge facing everyone in the industry.  By partnering with companies whose business models share important synergies with our own, we hope to change all of that.

Yesterday Inertia hosted another successful seminar at Copia. The topic of the day was ”How to Build and manage a Successful Allocation Program“. The attendance, content, and reception by the audience, exceeded our expectations.

Over 30 wineries were represented in the audience, nearly all were not current clients of ours. This is the first open workshop which we have hosted specifically for non-clients. We regularly host workshops and webinars for our client base, but have recently begun to open the doors to the broader wine industry.  We plan top hold more of these open workshops on a regular basis (topics may include Web Site Sales Strategies, Wine Club Program Management, Selling Direct to Trade and Compliance Management, among others). Stay tuned.

The seminar started with Dan Chapin from Inertia reviewing the “3 Principles of a Successful Release Model“. Dan reviewed the need for any winery considering an allocation program to focus on Exclusivity, Creating a Perception of Scarcity and Conditioning of Purchase Behavior. For more information, or to receive a copy of his presentation, email us at sales@inertiabev.com.

Susan Moore from Aptalent, then spoke on “The Care and Feeding of your Mailing List“. Susan discussed ways to reach key consumers, how to grow your customer list, and how to maintain your engagement with those new customers to help build loyalty and longevity in their engagement with your winery. For more information, email susan@aptalent.com.

The next speaker was Jennie Haug from Revana Family Vineyards.  Jenny is an enthusiastic and engaging speaker. She brought a great case study of how Revana switched from a simple mailing list model, to an allocation model this past spring; they ran their very first allocation release this April.  Jenny told of the learnings Revana
gained from managing their first release, and provided the audience with some of the implications she’s now bringing to their next planned release. For more information, email jennie@revanawine.com.

After Jenny, Barry Waite and Steve Gant from Vintrust led an engaging discussion on the importance of the packaging and presentation of any fine wine at the final stage in their path to the consumer. Most specifically, they addressed the different packaging options for shipping wine direct to the consumer, and how those packaging options are a part of the entire brand building process for any winery. The discussion generated several questions, and initiated good conversation.

The final speaker was Harry Parsley, owner of Silver Stag winery.  Harry has deep experience in the wine industry, starting with being the wine buyer for Lucky Stores, then President of Buena Vista, and now owning his own winery.  Harry gave great information to the group on how to manage your trade relations. He engaged the audience with his entertaining and informal discussion style - bringing years of experience in both buying and selling wines to the audience.

We look forward to bringing more of these seminars to the industry - and hope to see you there in the future!

Before joining Inertia, I was roaming wine country roads; I would hit tasting rooms and meet wonderful people, hug the vines and taste wines on all ends of the spectrum. Being on the road brings you closer to the actual consumer experience and reminds you of what selling direct is all about. As I’ve been diving deeper into the virtual world of wine2.0 and the challenges of creating a wine experience online, I’d almost forgotten the joys of being in wine country and tasting and connecting.

Sure, you can taste and connect at trade tastings and such events also really make the process efficient – 300 brands in one afternoon! OK, we can all admit that with the exception of the most prolific wine writers – or avid swillers – it’s not easy to see, hear and taste all at trade tastings. They are great, much like Costco, but you might miss a little something. So is there a middle ground? Can you find a single place where you can get the wine country feel, while at the same time go through the serious work of tasting dozen of wines?

The answer of course is, Yes - it’s in the multi-brand tasting rooms. As I was on a little tour of the Napa Valley with my crew to taste some of our client’s wines, we decided to go for efficiency. We hit the following tasting spots:

Folio Winemaker’s Studio: is home to many great brands, several being Folio brands of course. The studio artfully blends different experiences and is a great wine country concept from Michael Mondavi.

Silenus Vintners: also a custom crush facility for artisan winemakers, this beautiful tasting room is home to 13 boutique wineries that you may not have heard of before, but that you will surely remember.

Cult Wine Central: as the name says, this is where you go for the big guns. As all the wines go for a certain status – the odd effect in having them altogether is one of democratization – no single wine has a pedestal here so the wines are much more approachable.

In all 3, the staff was extremely knowledgeable on all the brands presented and very friendly – everything was perfect for an afternoon of serious tasting. Thanks again!

While technically we were in multiple tasting rooms of 18 inches in width, these felt a bit like a cozy farmer’s market. They were all extremely comfortable, while each had its own distinct personality, which, consciously or unconsciously, infused the wines. As a wine guy, I believe such wine venues are great for the industry and the consumer. They allow small brands to coalesce and reach economies of scale in order to create a space for a precious and crucial moment to happen: the direct connection between a wine lover, your brand, your message and your wine.

For wineries without a tasting room or for those dreaming of getting their own – finding a spot on that multi-brand bar is a great go-between. The most effective way to create a direct relationship with customers is to meet them while they are meeting your wine in a glass. From that initial contact, a relationship must be nurtured so it may flourish into lasting sales. As we focus a lot on managing your existing customers here at Inertia – it’s great to go out and be reminded how such relationships are created in the first place.

Think Again.

Many of our winery partners say they’d like to start a blog which can be a good thing if you know what you’re getting yourself into; your customers are out there, critics and supporters, and they want to talk about you and with you. A blog is a good way to connect and can help drive traffic to your site. As Jeff Stai from Twisted Oak and Clark Smith from GrapeCraft can attest, there are several good reasons to start a blog and many more reasons not to:

Blogging is a commitment. Most of the winery personnel I know do not only the job they were hired to do, but a few others as well. The perfect voice for your blog is a brand ambassador; someone who knows your message well, is reliable, a very good communicator, and has the time to post daily.

Blogging takes time. Linked to the need for regular updates is the fact that this takes time. The best bloggers, in addition to posting daily: moderate and respond to reader comments on their own site; read other blogs; and respond to commentary regarding their product or winery on other sites.

Blogging demands a thick skin. Not every comment or post is going to be positive. You’ve got to roll with the punches and keep your cool when responding to criticism.

One word… Spam. Are you and your IT department ready for the barrage of junk mail you’ll receive?

Blogging is as easy as writing a letter to two people; someone you know very well and someone you haven’t met yet. Which is not easy at all. Company blogs must be carefully written with those two audiences in mind, with just enough information to entice new customers without giving away the store, and something new and non-repetitive for existing ones.

There is no kiddie pool for bloggers - just the deep end. Your words are out there - thoughts, opinions, feelings - with all of the typos, misplaced prepositions, and missing conjunctions. Just like your website, a blog is a reflection of your brand, but in a much more visceral way. Make sure that you and your company are ready to take the plunge.