The WineDirect Blog
For the latest in Direct-to-Consumer sales. Featuring posts on compliance, direct sales tips and trends in the wine industry.
Getting to Know Your Customers
Stanley Marcus, who was an early President and later Chairman of the Board of luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, was once quoted as saying:
“Consumers are statistics, customers are people.”
For the wine industry, where the customer experience is vitally important, I think his words are especially meaningful. The customer experience reaches across dozens of different touch points: your product, your packaging, sales, marketing, wine club, retail tier, tasting room, and your staff (not just customer service but rather everyone involved, from your winemaker to your bookkeeper.) And don’t forget third party providers like WineDirect. We’ve been entrusted with your customer experience as well (to deliver your orders with care, provide information via email, to make sure the web experience exceeds their expectations, and to build upon your relationships through Call for Wine.)
Delivering an exceptional experience across all of these different touch points requires a deep understanding of your customers.
There are a lot of great tools and resources available today which allow us to see a broad picture of the typical wine “consumer”. Demographic information is used to understand the average age, gender, and household income of consumers. Transactional data like average order values and products purchased can be analyzed to understand aggregate consumer preferences and behavior. And all of this data can be invaluable, if used in the right way.
But it’s important to remember that customers don’t live in a data warehouse. This brings me back to Stanley Marcus’ quote: “Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.” I think the message in that quote is that in order to deliver a great experience, you need to understand the “people” behind the data, i.e. the individuals who interact with your brand and buy your wine. A solid understanding of the meaning behind the data provides one piece of the puzzle.
The other piece comes from getting to know your customers personally. What are their motivations, goals, and expectations? How do you begin to understand your customers? The easiest way that I know of is to go to them, through whatever channels you can. Talk to them on the phone, in the tasting room, at events, or through social media. After a while, you’ll begin to develop a better understanding of what their needs are and start filling in the rest of the puzzle. Some marketers develop personas as a means of gaining empathy for their customers - remember Constellation Wines’ Project Genome. Personas are a great way to focus and direct the conversation away from analytics and toward what is really important….the customer.
May 17, 2012 at 8:00 AM
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Engage Customers with a Great Winery Video Campaign
The use of video (both for ads and as content) is way up this year according to comScore. In March, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 37 billion online content videos, while video ads topped 8 billion for the first time on record.*
I think customers have become a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content on the web, and video provides a better way to connect through use of sight, sound and motion. But your campaigns should be well planned, because if done right, video can be a highly effective marketing tool.
What Makes a Great Video?
- Research and Preparation: Before attempting your first video, it’s always a good idea to do some research. What types of winery videos are more popular with your target customer and which of those appeal to you?
- Connection: Think about who your customers are and how you can use video to engage with them in a manner they will appreciate. Your video should be tailored to your audience.
- Personality and Authenticity: A great video will give the audience a feel for who you are and what makes your winery special. It’s a perfect way to convey your value proposition.
- Humor: People love humor, so if it fits, don’t be afraid to use it. I’m a big fan of the Gundlach Bundschu videos.
- Length: Your video should be somewhere in the 2 to 5 minute range, no longer. To accomplish this, try to limit the video to a single message. You’ll want to put thought into the objectives of your video before production time.
How Should You Market Your Video?
Remember that success is not just about collecting views, butrather, it’s about generating interest and gaining customers.
- Use video sharing sites: You’ll want to host your video on a site like YouTube and embed it on your own website or blog. And if you’re committed, consider starting a channel for your winery on YouTube and perhaps Vimeo.
- Prepare your video for the search engines: When you upload your video to YouTube or another video sharing site, be sure to populate all informational fields including meta-tags and descriptions.
- Share your video: Use all of the social media channels you actively participate in to really expand your reach: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ for example.
- Engage with your audience: Respond to user comments on all channels and communicate with your followers through social media.
- Measure your success: In order to measure you need to start with a set of clearly defined goals. Are you trying to educate your audience about your winemaking or green practices? Are you interested in generating brand awareness? Or is your goal to improve sales?
Depending on your goals, success can be measured by the number of views, by clicks to your website, or by specific user comments.
Sources for Video Creation
You can start with a Google search for video production companies in your area. A couple that I would recommend:
Resources
5 Things Every Video Marketer Should Know…Before Production Begins!
By G. Christie
Examples of Wineries That Have Done a Great Job with Video
Actively Grow Your Wine Club!
At Call for Wine we understand the importance of Direct-to-Consumer sales, and particularly Direct-to-Club sales. According to MKF Research approximately 24% of all your wine sales will come directly from your club. In fact, this can be the most consistently profitable part of your business. Therefore, it makes sense to nurture the club customers you already have, and make concerted efforts to increase your numbers.
How do you grow your club?
Approximately 85% of your club will come from the tasting room*. A great tasting room experience will lead to a strong, loyal club.
If you don’t have a tasting room, your next best option is to create a memorable wine related experience and sign people up at the event - wine dinners, wine tasting festivals and in-store wine tastings are a great way to gather followers. Collect as much data as you can at these events. Electronic tablets are a great way for people to enter their details. Make sure that there is an incentive for them to sign up with you on the spot. Don’t forget to build your mailing list as well!
Send out invitations to your mailing list once or twice a year. Motivate people to join with a generous, exclusive sign-up offer.
You’ll also want to make sure your online experience is attractive and easy to navigate. The club sign-up process should be enticing and straightforward.
And now….
A new club builder tool!
At Call for Wine we are excited to offer a brand new club builder and retention program. We’ve been successfully helping wineries to gather loyal supporters with carefully crafted relationship marketing telephone campaigns. And what’s more, we’ve managed to make these customers the wineries most loyal brand ambassadors year after year.
Get active, build your business.
Club customers are a vital part of a winery’s business. If you can effectively create a fan base and keep their adoration your winery can be a rock star of the wine world!
*DTC Wine Symposium 2012 – ‘Winery Check-up’
A Brilliant Alternative to the Gift Card
The gift card industry has been growing tremendously over the past decade or so. According to research firm the Tower Group, it should reach $100 billion this year. But there are problems with gift cards: they’re impersonal and they’re not exactly convenient. You have to go to the store to buy one, figure out the correct mailing address, and then run to the post office to send it. Another big problem with gift cards is that we tend to forget about them for weeks or months before finally redeeming them, or worse yet they get tucked away in a drawer, never to be seen again.
With the digital age, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a really good alternative. One that I really like is Karma Science. Lee Linden and Jen You from the Karma team came into our offices a while back to show us their new app and to talk about offering wine through their unique new service. Since that time, I’ve had an opportunity to download and explore Karma.
Karma is a “mobile social commerce app”, or to put it another way, it’s a really fun way to send someone a gift from your phone. The idea in creating Karma was to come up with an easy way to let you “capture the moment in the moment.” No more worrying about your gift card not being redeemed for months.
Here’s what I like about Karma:
It’s Different
Buying a gift online has become pretty predictable. Gifts are almost always arranged into standard categories like “by occasion” or “by price”. Karma adds more meaning by using verbs like thank, celebrate, surprise, inspire, indulge, pamper, congratulate, entertain, delight, or impress to help you find the perfect gift.
It Offers a Nice Selection
They’ve carefully cultivated the product selection and are working with some great partners like Barnes and Noble, Spotify, Gund, Chandon, Jonathan Adler, MOMA, Kate Spade, and Vosges Haut-Chocolat. This tells me that when I’m in a pinch, I know they’ll have gifts to suit the occasion.
It’s Social
This is where it gets interesting……brilliant actually. When you login to Karma, you can choose to login via Facebook, which means that they are able to tap into a treasure trove of data and deliver up gift suggestions based on that data. Better yet, they go beyond the standard profile information (like dates for birthdays and anniversaries) and conduct a semantic analysis of your newsfeed to pick up keywords like “congratulations.” They then offer suggestions based on what they find. And, to make it even more viral, your recipient can easily post on Facebook “I just received this gorgeous Napa Valley Cab from Jake.”
It’s Easy
To send a gift, you pick from either your address book or from Facebook. Karma then sends your gift recipient a message via text. The real beauty in this is that people tend to read text messages right away, whereas with the mountains of email we all receive each day, messages can easily get lost. Your recipient then fills in shipping information so that you don’t have to fumble through your address book to find it.
It’s Personal
The gift giver can really have fun with some of the personalization features – creating a special and unique gift message using photos, voice or video.
Special Delivery
Imagine receiving a text message that says “Charlie has sent you a gift”. As the gift recipient, you get to actually “unwrap” your gift on your phone or desktop. You also have the opportunity to either exchange your gift for another same-priced item or donate the value of the gift to charity if it’s not just right. And don’t worry; the giver doesn’t need to know.
Personality
I love the Karma personality. The app design is clean, yet a little playful and the gift packaging is young and fresh.
If you are interested in learning more about Karma, you can visit their website to download the app (currently available for iPhone and Android phones).
And if you’re a WineDirect fulfillment customer and would like to learn about participating in Karma, please feel free to contact me or your Account Manager.
Aliens Abducted My Wine!
Sometimes that is what it feels like in that time between placing the order online and receiving the wine at your door.
The average weight for one 750ml bottle is 3 pounds. Shipping twelve bottles totals to around 41 pounds including packaging…which is equal to a small child! Unfortunately shipping heavy items can be pricey. Small children are pricey but that is another topic. For the savvy winery, there are ways to minimize shipping costs. Unless there is a pressing need such as a birthday party tomorrow night that you absolutely positively have to have that specific cabernet, the most economical shipping method is Ground.
Yes, Ground does take longer than 2Day or Overnight but with a quick check on weather conditions in the destination state, Ground shipping can maintain the integrity of your wine at a lower cost. The WineDirect Fulfillment Portal offers a nifty weather hold management tool. You can place a state on hold for a specific period of time with just a couple clicks. If hurricanes are causing havoc in the south east, put those states on weather hold. If the New York has declared a snow day, you can easily hold your orders. The Portal also offers a quick link on the landing page to see the temperatures across the country to help with your shipping decisions.
Your Account Manager is available to walk you thru placing a state on hold on the Portal. We have not figured out how to control the weather but we do have ways to control costs. It should be noted, and our legal counsel will be pleased with this, neither WineDirect nor the carriers can insure against alien wine abduction. We will have to take our chances that the aliens prefer beer.
Spring Clean Your Customers
Spring is the time of year when your consumers are starting to think about everything summer: outdoor barbecues, baseball, and a glass of wine. It’s also a perfect time to call your customers to check in and make sure they have some of your whites and reds on hand to last them through the hot summer days. Making this call now, whether you outsource or do it in-house can also greatly increase your end of year Direct-to-Consumer sales.
At Call For Wine we call it “Spring Cleaning.” Here are two simple strategies for success:
1. Clean up your customer data
The most important part of Spring Cleaning for us is calling every lead in a database. Once we have made a full pass we have two very important piece of information:
- Which customers want to buy wine over the phone
- Which customers have incorrect / old information (phone, mailing address, and email)
Those are your two database segments.
Over the years, one of our focuses has been providing a complete list cleaning and data-sourcing service. We take the customers with incorrect data, get updated addresses, emails, and phone numbers for you – it’s an instant boost to your callable universe. This is a process you don’t want to be doing during the high conversion months from September through December.
2. Find your customers’ likes
One of the greatest things about a phone call to your own customers is the impromptu information you are able to discover. We use a contact manager that allows our reps to take copious (and more importantly, actionable) notes on anything from frequency of visit, anniversaries, or just what wines make them really excited.
Spring is the perfect time to get this information. What you are doing during this call is not only about brand building and sales at that moment, but strategizing for the end of the year.
From September through December, we find that our most successful clients have run a spring campaign. Why are they so successful? Because we have the tools we need to make every call relevant to that individual customer. Every contact becomes a high-probability sale because we don’t have to spend as much time probing.
On average, clients who run at least a spring campaign to clean up information and find customer likes perform at two times the conversion rate of clients who don’t.
This can be a big project and the sooner you start, the more successful future Direct-to-Consumer sales will be.
Everything Changes, Nothing Stays the Same
Last week Bloomberg.com published an article entitled “Retailers Shut Facebook Storefronts amid Apathy” in which they painted a pretty bleak picture of Facebook as a vehicle for online sales. GameStop, a company with 3.5 million fans, opened a Facebook store only to shutter it six months later. So did Gap, J.C. Penny, and Nordstrom. Of course, this begs the question – Should I have a Facebook store?
My answer is an emphatic “It depends.”
Here’s what we know:
- Social commerce in general is still relatively new when you think about how long it took for eCommerce as a sales channel to take off. The people who do buy on Facebook could still be considered early adopters. This indicates to me that it’s way too early to abandon ship.
- The examples above are clearly not representative of the typical winery who maintains a Facebook presence. These are large retailers with a strong Internet presence and substantial traffic, not to mention very large product catalogs. For them, the line is more distinct. Facebook probably should be more about building community, leaving the shopping experience to the website. For our customers that line is fuzzier. Facebook offers an engaged audience, some of whom found your page through friends. You could send them back to your website to make a purchase, but should you? Once again, it depends. My inclination is to say no. It’s an extra step and you run the risk that those visitors will become distracted along the way.
- Social media is on the verge of becoming the dominant driver of online content. According to a recent study by comScore, it represented 16.6% of Internet time in 2011. While the benefits of maintaining a storefront are still up in the air, the benefits of maintaining a strong presence clearly aren’t.
“All things are difficult before they are easy.” Thomas Fuller
I built my first eCommerce store in 1997. To put that date in perspective, Google was incorporated in 1998. While it was never easy, both my husband and I made a nice living from that business and I still look back fondly at those days. ECommerce is a whole new ballgame today, but the one valuable lesson that I learned is that everything changes – not just from one year to the next, but rather from one week to the next. I found that once I learned how to optimize my site for one search engine, its algorithm would change, or another search engine would enter the scene. The key to success online is perseverance, patience, and a relentless quest for knowledge. Some things will work. Others won’t. But you never know until you try.
So, to go back to my original question, “Should I have a Facebook store?” - If it were me, I would go for it.
Expand Your Domain: Protecting your company from those who want to use, or abuse, your good name
Your Space
The word “domain” has several definitions depending upon the context of its use. The common thread is however, it represents a range of territory or scope of characteristics over which one maintains ownership. In the internet world, the space your company occupies is your domain, your cyberspace territory. It represents that space on the web you own where you can present your company message and products. Whatever you name this space is your domain name.
Most companies give their domain a name that represents what they do or identifies them to the public. The most obvious is to give the domain the same name as the company; WineDirect.com being a perfect example. It says who we are and what we do. If the preferred name is unavailable, the company may invent variations using hyphens, abbreviations, similar terms or creative spellings. “Vin” is a common alternative to “Wine”, for example. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
In addition to the name selected, domain names consist of the top-level domain; familiar as suffixes such as .com, .gov, .org, .biz and so on. Between the variations in the name selected and the variety of top-level domains, a multitude of combinations of potential domain names is available, as well as many opportunities for others to exploit or trade upon it.
Threats to Your Space
So what happens when a company acquires its preferred name? Or even its second choice? Often they stop there. They feel comfortable they’ve secured their domain space on the web. They’ve got their own registered .com and no one else can use it. However, this sense of security is really an illusion. And it’s a mistake.
A recent presentation by David P. Branfman, Esq., "HOT Trademark & Copyright Issues For Non-IP Lawyers", discussed threats to domain names and the most expedient and inexpensive way to protect your space. He points out that with the explosion of the internet many companies spend significant dollars securing the rights to that one domain name they covet most, yet leave themselves vulnerable to “cybersquatters” who trade off their good name or worse, disparage it.
Mr. Branfman notes that if you own only the one domain name associated with your business you are leaving yourself exposed to other parties who acquire the rights to any or all of the domain name variations still available. A competitor could acquire a variation on the spelling of your name, or an alternative top-level domain with your exact name, creating confusion for your customers and potentially stealing away some of your business. Worse still, an unhappy customer, a disgruntled former employee or just someone with an axe to grind could snap up a similar name strictly for the purpose of attacking your reputation online. They could even create a “nasty” variation of your domain name for such purposes.
Defending Your Space
Branfman’s solution is easy and inexpensive. Domain name registrations are cheap, usually in the $10-$15 range per domain through a registration service. Once you’ve landed on a name you like, protect yourself by spending a little extra money by buying up the rights to the most common variations, including the possible “nasty” names that make you look bad or confuse your customer. Although you won’t be actively using these domain names, no one else will either. It’s inexpensive insurance against someone exploiting or sullying your good name and reputation. Expand, and thereby protect, your domain. It’s cheaper than a lawyer!
The information conveyed in this blog post is made available for general informational purposes only and none of the information provided should be considered to constitute legal advice.
Are you testing your email messages before blasting?
Given the number of mailing lists our Client Services team has joined, we too often experience that “oh no” moment when we receive an email that was clearly sent untested. And, recently, at the ecommerce workshop I attended at the DTC Symposium in San Francisco, the topic of email testing was discussed at length. This has prompted me to provide some tips to follow before sending out marketing emails.
I think many of us have been there, right? Rushing to meet a deadline and feeling like a quick preview of the email will be a sufficient enough test.…….but then you send the email and WHAM! It hits you like a ton of bricks as you sink down into your office chair, burying your head into your hands…….your email has typos, broken links and the merge tags are inaccurate so users can't easily place an order on your website, which was your point to begin with. You could be faced with customer service calls and now need to send out the dreaded apology email with corrections. Your customers may have lost faith in this important communication from you and it makes you really wish you had taken the time to test.
Our ecommerce team can’t stress enough how important email testing is as it provides the opportunity to catch mistakes in advance and ensure the email is sent with accuracy. If desired, we will gladly review our client’s emails and make suggestions for improvement to help ensure it is sent without error.
Our client, Alexana, does an incredible job of not only creating emails with rich content and images but segments their list to ensure it reaches the proper audience. Including extra time for testing will help ensure email success as well as a positive customer experience. I’ve attached a recent sample email they sent which speaks to their attention to detail.
Some tips to help you check your email prior to sending:
- Proof your content by reading it out loud to ensure readability. Or, ask somebody to proof your work.
- Create an email address at Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, MSN, etc. and send the email to this test group. Preview your email in both a web and outlook client.
- Check for typos, broken links and proper tags.
- Don’t save images with spaces, dashes or characters in the name or they may not render in some email clients. Check that images are sized properly and aligned with text.
- Check email on a mobile device, IPAD, etc., more and more users are reading email on handhelds.
- Ensure your list segmentation results are what you expected.
- Join other winery/brand mailing lists that you think highly of to see how they communicate with their clients.
Testing is an email marketing best practice that not only helps you avoid errors, but improves the overall effectiveness of your email marketing program and how your brand is perceived.
Vision and Mission
As we begin the New Year, it’s customary to reflect on the events of the previous year and to look ahead to what lies in store. This was a big year for our company, as we acquired the WTN Services division of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and became WineDirect.
The process of bringing two companies together provides a unique opportunity to reflect on our vision for the future. The landscape for the wine industry and Direct-to-Consumer sales is constantly evolving. For us to help our customers succeed in this ever changing market, it’s important to look to the future and understand the trends that will shape our industry over the next several years. With that thought in mind, our team has used the merging of our two companies as an opportunity to reflect on our Vision and Mission. These two important statements capture the essence of who we are and provide guidance in everything we do.
So here are our new Vision and Mission statements. Please enjoy. I welcome your thoughts and look forward to working together as we see what changes the coming year will bring.
Vision
We aspire to be the leader in winery direct sales. To that end, we must fully support our customers with products, services, and information to help them succeed, and build a positive culture by encouraging and rewarding employees for delivering on our promises.
Mission
We make Direct-to-Consumer easier by providing responsive and efficient winery fulfillment, eCommerce, and telesales services. Our commitment to technology and a strong team allow us to deliver peace of mind to our customers as they build their direct sales programs.
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