The Four Most Important Things You Can Do to Boost Your Ecommerce Program Right Now
Earlier this week I tuned into one of the thought-provoking Salons at Larkmead, a series of webinars organized by winemaker Dan Petroski in order to address future concerns of the wine industry. I noted a number of observations by panelists, including:
What happens if you test your crew for COVID three days before harvest, and seventy percent of them test positive? — Ray Isle, Executive Wine Editor at Food & Wine
The boosts in wine sales that we’re seeing during the pandemic are not helping all wineries equally. — Esther Mobley, Wine Critic at the San Francisco Chronicle
I’m optimistic but I’m trying not to be foolish about it. — Dottie Gaiter, Senior Editor at Grape Collective, on the potential for a sustained interest in BIPOC wine consumers
Moderator Kinsey Grant, Business Editor at Morning Brew, asked two questions about the “wakeup call” that COVID has delivered to wineries whose DTC and ecommerce programs were less developed or ready for the pivot online. What are the roadblocks to wineries adopting this more tech-forward approach, Grant asked, and will COVID shift the investment to where it needs to be?
Hmm.
If you’re reading this newsletter or this post, you will no doubt have an opinion about the nature of those roadblocks and whether or not the industry will be investing more in addressing them, moving forward. I would love to hear those opinions, and I encourage you to share them in the comments section below.
Here are a few ideas in the meantime about the roadblocks and also the strategies for addressing them, from our perspective helping wineries and wine businesses navigate the current circumstances.
There’s an entire, very fragmented ecosystem of different service providers at each step of the ecommerce process. There are a lot of moving parts, and they do not all “talk” well with each other. Wineries can understand the gaps or find someone who does, and follow their advice. You may need to adjust your strategy retroactively in order to improve and change the way you’ve done things in the past. (If you are in fact one of the service providers within the ecosystem, there’s an opportunity for you here too, to adjust and improve your systems to reflect our current reality.)
Segmentation is a hot, trending word right now and it should be. The way you communicate with a 30-something woman in Brooklyn who loves red blends is not the same way you communicate with a 60-something retiree in Dallas who’s recently developed a taste for Riesling. Do you know who’s who, within your very own DTC community? It’s entirely possible, and it’s currently one of our most-requested services.
Put the 80/20 rule to work for you. It’s known as the Pareto Principle and, applied to DTC, it means that, in general, 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your customers. Again with the segmentation: Do you know who those 20% are, and are they getting the lion’s share of your attention? For a precisely on-point video about this idea, check out Ben Salisbury’s talk at the Wine Industry Technology Symposium two years ago.
Most wineries understand they need to pay attention to email open rates and the kind of traction their email communications receive from their consumers, but we see fewer wineries pay attention to the more important factor of which email campaigns actually generated the most revenue, and why. It isn’t easy to visualize those kind of results (see point number one, above) but it’s another service we’ve built in response to exactly this challenge.
Have a look at the image at the top of this post. Each bubble represents an email sent by a winery to their list, and when you hover over the bubble in the interactive version, you’d see details like the name of the email, when it was sent, and revenue generated. The higher up the y-axis the bubble is located, the more revenue that email has generated. The lower down and further to the right the bubbles are located, the less effectively the emails performed in terms of revenue, even though it was sent to the highest number of people.
The takeaway for the winery? Create more campaigns like the ones at the top of this chart, and stop wasting time with the ones on the bottom right.
Focus your efforts. That’s the 80/20 rule. (Thanks, Ben.)
Segmentation is how you know where to focus.
And work with people who understand how to extract value from our fragmented ecosystem.
This is not easy. But it is well worth doing. And we can help.
Please be in touch, share your thoughts in the comments, and thank you as always for reading —
Cathy
UPDATE AS OF AUGUST 3, 2020:
Thank you for your comments and interest in this post.
In response, we created a movie that animates the screenshot image at the top of the post. You can find it on our Videos page: Mailchimp + WineDirect. The movie shows an integrated view of Mailchimp and WineDirect data streams: the graph shows exactly how much revenue is generated in WineDirect through a specific Mailchimp campaign.
To tell the story, we start with the cluster of best-performing email campaigns, at the top center of the image. We “lasso” them in order to be able to focus on that cluster specifically in order to understand what makes them so successful. Then we drill down to the best-performing campaign of all; when you hover over it, you’ll see revenue generated, number of emails sent, and open rate. When we drill further into the details of that particular campaign, we can visualize four quadrants of results: Varietal performance, the Generation of the contact (Boomer, GenX, Millennial or Unknown), Channel, and the Gender of the contact. We then segmented further by geography, in this case Boston.
As a result of this kind of visualization of campaign results, the winery can evaluate which of their wines perform best in which markets as well as the demographic profile of their biggest customers. It’s a clear message of what, where and who to prioritize.