Whether you’re a seasoned wine club manager or just getting started, having the right software tools in place is key.
With a small wine club you might be able to get away with relying on excel spreadsheets, but eventually you’ll need a more robust solution. Manual bookkeeping and formatted sheets aren’t designed for taking the finer details of your club health and member preferences into account, for example. These types of records won’t give you details about member retention and attrition rates, and they certainly aren’t secure enough to store sensitive financial information from online transactions.
So, how do you know when you need to up your game and invest in new wine club software? Here are 5 signs to watch out for:
This is one of the most obvious: can you quickly and accurately extract information about your members’ club shipments, payment details, address and preferences? Have you sent out erroneous shipments because of bad data organization? If you’re having trouble keeping track of your data, and making costly mistakes as a result, then you probably need a new solution.
Manually processing a handful of club orders twice a year is manageable. Manually processing hundreds of club orders quarterly is not. If it takes you a whole day – or even half – simply to process your orders, it’s time to upgrade. With WineDirect’s wine club software you can easily process thousands of club orders in a matter of minutes with our batch-processing capabilities, leaving you free to pursue higher value-add activities.
As mentioned above, to keep your wine club going and growing, you need to be able to track if you’re actually gaining members or losing them. By being able to do so, you can pinpoint what you’re doing right or wrong in terms of keeping your members happy. Without this capability, the CRM side of your wine club software simply serves as a high-tech directory.
A declined card costs more than lost earnings: sorting out the error and getting in touch with each and every member whose card was declined is extremely time consuming. At the very least, good wine club software should allow members to easily update their personal details, including their credit card information, online. At WineDirect, we even automatically update out of date cards with each club run, saving you a significant amount of lost revenue and wasted time.
Your wine club software should integrated with your CRM and POS solution to help you identify club members when they are present in your tasting room. Depending on how big your wine club is and how popular it’s becoming, it may become a herculean task to keep track of who’s who. This capability allows you to provide your wine club members the VIP treatment they deserve and retain them as loyal fans.
A functional and easy-to-use wine club software is essential if you want to develop and grow your direct to consumer business. If you’re ready to graduate from excel spreadsheets or a clunky software solution, learn more about WineDirect’s wine club capabilities and how we can help you grow membership effectively.
