REthink Wine Blog

I’m relatively new to Inertia, having been here for about five months now.  My role is in fostering relationships with the many different types of vendors who share this space with us, with the ultimate goal of building a “partnership ecosphere” so to speak, one which will provide the most value to our clients.  And while I’m anxious to write about our plans regarding these operational partnerships, I thought I would write about a different sort of partnership today – the partnerships we’ve formed with our winery clients.

I’ve been involved in direct-to-consumer sales for many years now, and from what I’ve witnessed there are basically two different business models in use by winery direct sales platforms such as ours. 

The Investor Dictionary defines a business model as “the mechanism by which a business intends to generate revenue and profits.  It is a summary of how a company plans to serve its customers…….”  The way I see it, there are basically two models in use in this space:  1) a “Perpetual License” model, and 2) a “Value Creation” model.   The former involves a flat fee, while the latter involves a small share of revenue.  In looking at the rev share model, the provider or business partner doesn’t have a viable business UNLESS its clients grow direct revenues.   So while both models satisfy the first half of the definition above, in making that commitment to its clients, the rev share partner has gone much further in defining the latter half of the definition – developing a plan to serve its customers.

Let’s look first at the subscription or flat fee model.  In some instances they may build a website for you, in others they might simply host your shopping cart, charging a flat monthly fee in return.  Typically your contract will show different fees for services such as basic support.    Under this model, the focus is naturally on maximizing the number of websites which are turned out each month.  The model itself doesn’t provide incentive for the provider to work with existing clients to help them maximize revenue potential.

With a revenue share model, the focus by definition is on creating value.  I believe that this leads to the strongest possible relationship, one which is mutually rewarding and delivers an increase in creativity and high priority response times.   Since I’ve been with Inertia, I’ve had the opportunity to view the many ways in which we view our roles and responsibilities in terms of creating value for our winery partners, both in our current business model and in terms of our overall corporate vision.  While I won’t go into all in detail today, a few prime examples are:

Focus on quality not quantity:  We study best practices, usability, and conversion rates.  Each and every site is designed with one purpose in mind – selling wine.   Most importantly, as we develop the next generation of our platform, our focus is entirely on the ways in which we can leverage technology to connect our clients with demand, providing access to new markets and the opportunity for our winery partners to connect directly with both consumers and the trade, forging lasting relationships.

A passion for selling wine:  A perfect example of this is the Inertia blog and the enthusiasm with which our bloggers share their thoughts and tips for maximizing direct sales.  In addition to the blog, we offer quarterly workshops which focus on current trends in wine marketing, monthly newsletters loaded with useful tips, and a set of excellent training sessions.  In addition, our client development group is devoted to working with our existing client base to help maximize direct sales.

REthink Compliance:  Our free compliance tool is another great example of our overall vision at work.  By helping to remove the remaining barriers to direct sales and providing winery partners with access to an even broader marketplace, we enable them to tap into demand channels that were not available to them in the past.

You may have heard this already: Inertia is pioneering the enablement of wine producers to reach trade buyers directly, in an easy, efficient and fully compliant online fashion. As we ramp up our efforts to empower more wineries to sell more wine Direct-To-Trade, I want to take a closer look at the big-picture question of why direct trade sales must inexorably grow.

By now, the message is clear: the American system of wine economics is rapidly mutating. Not only have consumer habits made wine a much more popular consumer good and increased demand and supply, ongoing regulatory changes have made the marketing and distribution of wine a much more creative and competitive sport.

Innovation arises when things stop working. In our industry, innovation needs to answer many a winery’s dilemma: “I can’t find a distributor who’ll carry my wine; how can I get it to market?”. Whatever the answer may be, it also needs to answer the challenges facing wine buyers: “How can I buy this rare gem if none of my distributors carry it?”

The situation is familiar:
> There are more and more wine products hitting the market (both foreign and domestic).
> There are fewer and fewer distributors as they rapidly consolidate.
> Warehouses are full of inventory that is slow to move.
> Margins are rapidly being eroded by rising fuel costs.
> Traditional distribution systems have less incentive to build brands.

The American 3-tier system has been tremendously successful and continues to be. Yet it is currently not capable of efficiently absorbing all the new-comers to the market. A small number of brands represents a huge portion of what is actually consumed today and it is the 3-tier system that makes this possible. But how can smaller, high-end, boutique brands catch the attention of giants? How can a 10,000-case winery, making stellar wine (though not yet blessed with a sacred 94point rating), possibly catch the attention of large, bottom-line focused, distributors? Fortunately, many still do for the benefit of the consumer; but not all.

As Angela remarked in her recent post: there is distribution and then there is effective distribution. This is my central argument: going direct is about filling the gaps of the 3-tier system. Wine producers need to ask of their distributor: “are you the most effective way to get my wine to market?”. Most often, the answer is a resounding “Yes!” , but in certain situations or for certain brands, the 3-tier system will not work. Here is a short list of situations many wineries will recognize:

> I have a restaurant in Florida who wants my wine, but I can’t get a distributor to carry me because it’s not enough volume.
> My distributor in New-York does not service up-state, how can I get my wine to a buyer in Rochester?
> I have a retailer who really wants my Syrah, but my distributor only carries my Cabernet and Merlot.

All these recognizable barriers to sell are about one thing: Access
- State access: getting to certain states
- Geographic access: reaching all areas of a state
- Product access: getting all your products in a state
- Buyer Access:making your products easily accessible to all potential buyers

So how can innovation help solve some of these issues? A minority of producers is currently selling directly to trade, but technology hasn’t been fully leveraged yet and the scope of current direct trade sales is still geographically narrow. While I will not go in the details of our ‘secret sauce’, Inertia’s DTT program enables bonded wineries to transact sales to these 12 states:

Arizona
California
Connecticut
District of Columbia
Florida
Illinois
Ohio
Oregon
New-York
Vermont
Washington
Wyoming

As Corey commented, these sates represents a huge swath of American wine consumption. If any one of the above states, or portions thereof, have been closed-off to you, or if your distribution in any of those states isn’t as effiective as it should be, then you should take a hard analytical look at the opportunities and implications of DTT.

Inertia’s DTT program will allow wineries to transact sales from trade buyers in any of the above states (or a sub-set for 17/20s and importers). Inertia’s DTT program allows you to pick what you want to sell, where you want to sell it and whom you wish to sell it to, in a fully-streamlined way, all on-line. DTT also implies minimal over-head that frees up staff resources (that would otherwise be spent on order management, invoicing, collections, etc.) to do what is most important: selling.

Access is the first and most obvious reason for going Direct. This is why DTT can be an incremental distribution channel, supplementing the 3-tier system if and where it is not efficient.

Upcoming posts will shed more light on the other two compelling reasons for going Direct-to-Trade: Control and Sales.
Stay tuned.

Recently, I was asking a luxury brand winery about their distribution in key states. The winery pulled up their order history with a various distributors and noticed the impressive dollar amount that was sold in a key market place we were inquiring about.  The winery replied; I have great distribution.  With a closer look, the owner noticed that the distributor had not taken their allocation this year. After I left, he phoned the distributor and learned that only a small percentage had actually been sold of the PREVIOUS allocation. In fact, the distributor went into detail about the economy, they needed sample bottles and extra enticements to help push the wine and possible discounts applied. 

The next phone call I received from the owner, was “let’s talk about your direct to trade program.” The particular state is a top wine consumtion state and the owner learned that he was only in very few locations and not in the ”on premise” locations he had been promised. There is a difference between distribution and effective distribution and it’s time wineries pose the questions and take more control. I am not suggesting that all distributors are not effective; however, at the very least, wineries need to examine the options that are now available.

The North Bay Business Journal had this article yesterday and it spoke well to my recent experience and Inertia’s direct to trade offering; here is a portion of the article to share:

Napa-based Inertia, which has developed a system for automating order handling and regulatory compliance through the three-tier system, now is more actively promoting its program for direct-to-trade shipping, commonly called self-distribution, to a dozen U.S. markets with seven pending, according to Kristi Taaffe, vice president of marketing.

Previously, Inertia offered wineries that use its REThink system for direct-to-consumer shipping the ability to ship wine directly to trade accounts that place orders online, starting with New York in December 2006. Later, the company invited certain wineries to participate.

Now, Inertia has bolstered its salesforce to promote automated self-distribution.

Currently, Inertia offers direct-to-trade shipments to Arizona, California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming.

It’s 8am in Tahoe and I’m enjoying a cup of Peet’s French Roast on the deck overlooking a very calm lake. I’m thinking about topics to blog about today (yep – I’m on vacation, but the blogs never stop!). The last several months has seen a great number of exciting changes for us at Inertia: a new CEO, a successful Direct Sales Symposium, the release of REthink Compliance for all wineries, growth and expansion for our Direct to Trade program, the announcement of BRIX – Inertia’s open source CMS initiative, and the list goes on.

And there’s a lot more to come – the next year promises to be even more exciting for Inertia, with continued momentum and even more excitement on the horizon. 

Lots to blog about.  

But what’s most immediately on my mind is the recent addition of two new marketing superstars to my team. Indulge me for a moment while I call them out.

Jason Williams joined us in June as our Channel Marketing Director. He comes to us most recently from Lancaster Estate, where he was responsible for all Direct Sales & Marketing initiatives, including programs in support of both the Lancaster Estate and Roth Winery brands. Prior to Lancaster, he spent 5 years with Mondavi in both direct and traditional sales capacities.  He’s also been a wine educator for Opus One, managed a steakhouse in Arizona, and is a Marketing Steering Committee Member of the Alexander Valley Winegrowers Association.

Now at Inertia, Jason is leading marketing efforts for our Direct to Trade program. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the announcements we’ve made recently here on the blog about efforts our Channel Development team has undertaken to build the program. Jason is working closely with that team to grow the program – with both winery and trade participation. Jason will be a voice on this blog in the future, so I won’t steal his thunder on how we’ll be growing the program! Stay tuned ~ and welcome Jason.

Our 2^nd superstar joins us recently from Yahoo, having just completed a project in their London office launching the local reseller channel for Yahoo! Search Marketing in Europe. Jennifer Lemming rounds out our team as Inertia’s Corporate Marketing Director. In addition to her work with Yahoo, she has worked with various companies in marketing roles including new product development for 3M as well as brand management and sports marketing for Coca-Cola, Kodak, and Samsung via a boutique marketing agency. Jennifer received her MBA in marketing and e-commerce from Vanderbilt.

As our Corporate Marketing Director, Jennifer is responsible for building and growing the Inertia brand, as well as defining and initiating client development programs. Perhaps you’ve seen us blog about our quarterly client workshops – or most recently our direct sales symposium at Copia. And perhaps you’ve seen Inertia in the press. Or maybe you’ve noticed our advertising in Wine Business Monthly or Wines & Vines. Jennifer will lead these efforts – and then some. Look out for her on the blog as well.

As we continue to work diligently to provide solutions for our winery partners to sell more wine, much of our success in doing so will be dependent on the efforts undertaken by our marketing department. I’m thrilled to have both Jennifer and Jason on board to lead those efforts and look forward to an exciting future for us all.

Now back to the lake.

Paul posted a piece here yesterday introducing the brix CMS which we have released as open source. This is exciting news for the developer community, but what does it mean for the rest of us who may only access a CMS as a user? I’ve been using brix while it’s been in development and have appreciated some great features which I’d like to briefly describe here and which may be coming soon to a web application near you.

A Flexible Multi-Template CMS

Like many CMS brix allows you to run your site off a template that displays different content on each page. In the case of brix, you can set up multiple templates and associate each page of content with any template you choose. You can even have a template that contains other templates. This means that a single site can easily contain pages that have different layouts and designs providing maximum flexibility while maintaining the efficiency of a templated site.

File structure and page edit pane. Click image for larger version and description.

Tiles

In brix every piece of dynamic content is controlled by a tile and each tile is represented by simple tag in a page or template. No messy code, no java or php or xml to clutter up templates and pages, just HTML and tags like <brix:content> or <brix:tile id="foo">. This means that any page can contain any piece of dynamic content, and that content can appear anywhere on the page. In the brix demo there are tiles for display of the current time, and also for a form into which you can enter a ticker symbol and get the current stock quote. You could have both of these bits of content on a single page together, or on different pages surrounded by text or images or whatever. Because dynamic content is a simple modular piece you can use it where you want, how you want.

Creating a new tile in brix. Click image for larger version and description.

Menu configuration panel. Click image for larger version and description.

Snapshots and Prototypes

Ever make a mistake in a CMS? Or want to save the content and configuration of your site before trying out some changes? Snapshots allow you to save the current state of the CMS as a timestamped snapshot including all content, files, and configuration so that you can restore the site to that state later on. A prototype is a snapshot that you can name and that is shared by all sites running the same brix. This feature is great for creating “themes” to be easily installed through the CMS.

WebDAV Access

As good as any CMS can be, it’s still a web based application and the web is not the best interface for editing content. All files and content in the CMS are accessible via webDAV so that you can work in a desktop based text editor rather than a web browser text area. This feature alone makes brix many times more efficient than any other CMS I’ve used.

Those are just a few features that have made brix so great to work with. Although it was a thrill being one of the few people to be able to get my hands dirty working with this tool I’m even happier now that it’s been open sourced and others will have the opportunity to explore, experiment and find useful applications for brix. If you’d like to know more about brix or have any questions about it leave a comment and let me know.

Uh oh, the Inertia tech team is at it again - today we release our CMS platform to all as an opensource project. Why would we release a proprietary engine that can enable our competitors and others to use for making websites? Because we believe in a healthy ecosphere for people to help wineries sell direct even if they are not on our platform. We are firm believers in open source and take our lessons from http://bit.ly/3DMt5Z and http://bit.ly/wikinom - you have seen this displayed first with our free compliance tool, rethinkcompliance.com and now with Brix.

What is Brix?

BRIX is an Open Source Initiative sponsored by Inertia. Based on Wicket and JCR, it is the ONLY Wicket-based CMS framework available today. As such, BRIX was designed to aid our partners, designers and other organizations in accelerating development by allowing for easy integration of a powerful CMS into existing applications. BRIX was built on the idea of “Power versus Complexity”, providing for ease of use while at the same time allowing designers the highest degree of freedom in developing a rich user experience.

Web 2.0 has created a fundamental shift in end-user expectations, which in turn has resulted in a continually evolving set of business requirements as they relate to Content Management Systems. BRIX was designed to allow developers to meet those requirements, and delivers the tools you need to compete in the marketplace.
Brix can currently be found at http://code.google.com/p/brix-cms/ and eventually will be at brix-cms.net
BRIX TOOLS:

• The ONLY Wicket-based CMS framework: With a refreshing lack of XML being just one of its many benefits, Apache Wicket makes developing web-apps simple and enjoyable.
• Based on JCR (Java Content Repository):
• Based on Java: Use an enterprise-standard data repository.
• Extensible Plug-in Architecture: Create and publicly code extensions without having to roll those changes into the BRIX core providing a hack-free way of extending and customizing Brix to suit an extremely diverse set of needs of its user base.
• Tiles: Easily incorporate configurable, reusable blocks of dynamic content into your CMS.
  Templates: Easily create and reuse website skins.
• Prototypes: User-defined, clone-able site structures provide additional ease of use.
  Support for WebDAV: Allows for a collaborative approach to document creation, editing, and distribution. Also edit using your favorite desktop HTML editor.
• Site Snapshots: Provide support for version control and backup.
• Raw or Rich Content Editing: Incorporate rich text and the associated formatting.
  Ease of Use: Basic workflow/publishing support and flexible security infrastructure.

Delivery of BRIX via the open source community fosters innovation in Content Management.

At its deepest abstraction, BRIX is not a standalone CMS, but rather a CMS framework which allows for easy integration of CMS functionality into existing Wicket-based applications. This is its primary benefit and we are confident that it will become the CMS tool of choice for many organizations as a result.
BRIX is developed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Please enjoy our contribution and give us feedback, success stories, or challenges with Brix. Moreover, we hope that you will become contributors to this exciting project.

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!

Yup, you betcha! Here’s the deal, if you’re learning to play golf, have played in the past, or play regularly, you’ll understand. Maybe! Recall how frustrating the game can be? Not to mention humbling? How inconsistent your swing is? Or, my favorite, you “think” from time to time that you’ve figured it out because you shot at or below your handicap. And then, the very next time out, you shoot 20 strokes worse!! Yeah, you get it. Sorry for the bad memories!

Now how about those direct wine sales of yours, great brand, good purple, and little or no direct sales. Hmmm, you try and try, sometimes too hard, just like your golf swing. You thought you had all the pieces in place. You try harder and it gets worse right? Back in my college baseball days, one of our coaches had a little saying, he’d say “Try easier”!

Well, let’s see, do we try easier, work smarter, do we keep our head down longer? I’d say we try and do all the above. It has to do with the approach, attention to detail, proper equipment and most of all, consistency! Like in golf you have equipment or “tools” available to sell wine direct online. The equipment you use in golf can make or break your swing, or at least your swing potential and the tools or equipment you use to sell wine direct can also make or break your potential!

At Inertia we Humbly recommend a custom (club) fitting to The ReThink Engine, your very own tool box full of “Best Practice” gems to help increase your direct sales online. Yeah, that was a plug, but I am part of the sales team after all!

No practice and your swing will be inconsistent, and you can expect poor scores. Same for Direct Sales. Poor setup and a weak foundation, and your sales will be inconsistent and possibly nonexistent.

On the golf side it’s your grip, your stance and your setup to the ball. Then, it’s a smooth take away and backswing, a nice transition and a smooth downswing through impact. For Direct sales it’s the same, your grip on the reality of the industry, your stance on how you’d like to manage your Direct Sales, and then your setup to help create more Direct Sales. And remember, all of this requires the proper tools, right? For reference it’s tod@inertiabev.com.

Selling wine direct is like when you first learn to play golf. The biggest mistake new golfers make is not keeping their head down, they tend to look up and see where the ball has gone before they hit it. When wineries first start selling wine direct they have the same problem. They want to see how much wine they’ve sold, before they actually build the foundation, remember grip, stance and setup? Later, as a golfer develops, he/she tends to focus too more on their score, and not on the swing. If you concentrate on making a good swing every time you strike the ball, the good scores will come.

By the way, if you happen to be a golfer and also have an interest in our help with your Direct Sales, feel free to sign up for our annual symposium, party and golf tournament. It’s coming soon, this Friday is the symposium and party at Copia and Saturday, at the Chardonnay Golf Club is when we “grip em and rip em”! Interested? Go here rsvp@inertiabev.com and let us know. I hope to see you there!

Happy Direct Selling and “Keep em on the short grass”!

It’s only July 1, so you’re thinking you have plenty of time to get your site ready for the holidays – think again. Now is the time to plan and implement the changes to your site so that it is optimized for the traffic that is soon to come your way.

Do it now

Within the next month or so, rethink your keywords and keyword phrases with holiday shoppers in mind. Put holiday keywords in place months ahead – they can take time to propagate with search engines. “Christmas” is, undoubtedly, the most commonly used search term, along with “holiday gift”, “Christmas gift”, and “gift for dad”. Also try “wine-lover’s gifts”, “gifts for red-wine drinkers”, and “wines to go with Christmas dinner”. Be creative and use keyword phrases which are often better for SEO that just stand alone words.

To do in October:

Add seasonal categories to your store— they can be turned on as soon as you need them. Use categories that describe the recipient: “Gifts for Geeks”, “Gifts for Chardonnay Lovers”, “Gifts for the Connoisseur”. Do the heavy lifting for your customers. Many shoppers already have some parameters in mind when they get to your site: “I need to get a gift for my aunt and I don’t want to spend more than $50.” Help online shoppers find gifts for different budgets: “Gifts under $50”, “Gifts over $75”. Avoid generic categories: “Gift baskets”, “Wine and Food Gifts” etc.

To do on November 1:

If appropriate, Dress up your site for the holidays. This could be as simple as changing pictures but may also include a new home page banner. This tells holiday shoppers that you’re ready for them. Follow suit with an email template that echos the same look and feel.

Update your content with holiday shoppers in mind. As the holidays approach, your home page text can be updated with more specific material for shoppers. Use relevant titles and keyword-rich copy that search engine crawlers like. Make sure that changes on your site get transferred to tasting room and other marketing materials.Give shoppers what they want right away.

Most holiday shopping is done for someone else. So, use kickers to help shoppers locate gifts from your home page; don’t make them have to search for gift ideas. Give them shipping information, such as costs and delivery times, right away (on the home page, at the top of the shop page and in every email). Let them know what your return/refund policy is. Answer their questions before they have to ask … or before they decide to leave for the next site. If need be, update the information as it gets closer to your critical dates.

Getting a jump on the holidays necessitates that you start planning now. If you need design or content help you’ll want to get that on the calendar. Planning ahead can be the difference between a very profitable holiday season and one that falls flat.

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.