With some wineries in California opening their doors again this weekend, I started to wonder about the visualizations within our ecommerce platform that capture the impact COVID has had on winery tasting rooms.

The first part of this week’s post shares a slice of that. They are interesting visuals for sure, though they are also not the most surprising or compelling insight. They inspired us to dig deeper, as you’ll see in Parts Two and Three of this week’s post.

PART ONE

The first place to look in our ecommerce platform is, naturally, within our Tasting Room module. That’s where a winery’s data is organized by easy-to-understand links, following storytelling questions like:

• What did we sell?

• Who sold it (as in, which tasting room staff member)?

• Who bought it?

• When did we sell it?

• Glass Pours

• Trends

• Lifetime Performance (of the wines, of course, and customers, geographical areas and age groups as well)

I opened the “When did we sell it?” link, and selected the date range of March 1 to August 31, 2019. Here’s how the visualization looks, of sales made in the tasting room only during the selected period.

It’s a heatmap showing the busiest times of the day and week. Saturday afternoon (not surprisingly) was the most concentrated activity of 221 orders in the tasting room of this particular winery.

Then, for comparison to a time period during COVID, I selected the same date range for activity in the tasting room from March 1 to August 31 but for 2020. Here’s how this one looks.

Saturday afternoons are still the busiest time, again not so surprisingly, but check out the difference in volume: 221 vs 52.

That's a first-layer visualization of your data.

How long did it take to generate these images?

About 20 seconds.

Could I have selected more precise date ranges?

Absolutely, and easily. March 2020 compared to April 2020, for example, or the COVID summer of 2020 relative to pre-COVID summers of 2019 and before, or etc etc etc.

You get the idea.

It’s a first-layer start, but there is so much more to analyze and learn. Which brings us to Part Two.

PART TWO

For most wineries, hopefully, COVID wasn’t all bad news. Those wineries with active online stores and telemarketing programs, for example, may have seen customers flocking to those channels. With retail stores closed initially, consumers were looking (as you know) for other options to buy their favorite wines.

Check out the visual at the top of this post. The pink bars are 2019 numbers for the March 1 to August 31 date range, while the orange bars are the numbers for the same date range in 2020. For this sample winery, POS (that is, tasting room) sales were down 43 percent while online / web sales were up more than 550 percent and telemarketing sales were up more than 50 percent.

In addition to the big jump in ecommerce sales during COVID, some wineries also saw significantly increased Average Order Values (AOV). That means customers were spending more money and buying more bottles per order. We saw another slighter move to web sales in October, the start of the “second wave” of COVID, after a summer of relatively low COVID cases. Check out this visualization (below) that illustrates the AOV increase, before moving on to Part Three.

PART THREE

Let’s wrap up with something to consider in terms of a troublesome trend about tasting rooms and COVID.

Most online purchases are made by existing club members. But with wineries closed due to COVID (and wildfires), obviously the tasting rooms have been seeing a dramatic drop in tastings and therefore a slower addition than normal of new members to their wine club programs. Many wineries are seeing an overall net decline in their club memberships, which means that the pool of customers buying through ecommerce channels is dwindling and will likely result in declining sales.

That’s the scenario, unless wineries can reverse the declining trend, or if they can find a way to use their data to their advantage and increase their pool of wine club members. Please see last week’s Enolytics 101 post for a deep dive into a first step in this process, and the case study two weeks ago of a winery who’s seeing success in this area.

Even before COVID, we saw a decline in tasting room visits. But this approach will ensure a maximum wine club conversion and a lower churn of your wine club programs.

It would be a pleasure to work with you on this. Please be in touch for how to get started.

Thank you, as always, for reading —

Cathy