“Don’t bring a tennis racket to a golf game.”

That’s how I almost titled this week’s post, because it’s my favorite line of all the ideas I heard for ways to segment your customer lists in order to sell more wine.

You all are a creative bunch!

We got the ball rolling with five ideas in last week’s Enolytics 101, from anniversaries and holiday gifting to first-time buyers, loyal customers and also customers at risk.

Today’s post shares five more cool customer segmentation ideas from within our community, that have the potential to shift things into a whole other gear.

But first, let me reiterate real quick something I expressed last week, because it bears repeating. We know segmentation is hard and we know it’s frustrating to hear that we should all be segmenting, especially when current technology makes it cumbersome to do. That’s exactly why we developed our segmentation tool. Here is the video about it. Please have a look.

Now let’s get to those cool new ideas from our community who responded to my questions, if you could easily segment your customer lists, what would you focus on? If you had a tool that made segmentation painless and effective, what sorts of campaigns would you create?

Here are five more cool ideas, with our thanks for your ongoing feedback –

Match the Varietal with the Season of the Year

Consider segmenting seasonally. That is, segment your sauvignon blanc customers and reach out to them as we head into summer. Entice your pinot noir customers with romantic dinner pairing ideas in the fall, or your cabernet sauvignon customers with a wintertime glass of wine by the fireplace.

Geography Matters

Closely tied with the varietal-by-season idea is geography: hot summer (sauvignon blanc) weather comes earlier in Miami, say, than it does in Seattle. So in addition to segmenting according to which varietal your customers have purchased, you can further segment by where those customers live. Then “phase” the outreach or time your campaigns accordingly.

Culinary Pairings

Here’s another twist on the idea: seasonal harvests from the farm or field. Let’s say your sauvignon blanc pairs well with crab. First segment your sauvignon blanc customers, then segment them by geography: Dungeness crab season in November on the west coast, and Blue crab season on the east coast. Send the outreach, with the appropriate offer to purchase, to the right people at the right time.

Segment According to the End Result

Here’s where the “Don’t bring a tennis racket to a golf game” idea comes in: You’ll want to segment differently, depending on the intended use. The segmentation that a winemaker wants to do is different than the segmentation that a wine club manager wants to do. Most of the examples you see in these posts are particularly relevant to wine club managers and their outreach/communication efforts. But another application of segmentation also helps winemakers understand the forecasted demand for, say, zinfandel in the tasting room over the next eight to twelve months. That’s entirely possible too, and available within our system.

Segmentation + Basket Analysis

You may have noticed that “segment” can mean multiple things, and that it can be used in multiple ways. One of those ways involves basket analysis, or the product mix of what customers have bought from you. Let’s say you’ve segmented a list of customers who purchased zinfandel in the past year. A next step could be looking at our basket analysis functionality, to see what other items customers purchased most often when they’ve also purchased zinfandel. (This is the image at the top of the post today.) If that happens to be petit sirah, then you could create a campaign around petit sirah to offer to zinfandel customers.

How do those ideas seem to you? I’d love to hear.

I get the sense, very much so, that we’re just at the beginning of things here. Each new person who looks at our system “sees” it in a different way, with a fresh set of eyes and a fresh interpretation, which leads to new, exciting possibilities.

We’re grateful that you’re with us on this journey. Please let me know if you’d like to explore these and/or other ideas.

Thank you, as always, for reading and responding –

Cathy