Customer Data is Key to Future Sales, Yet Wineries Struggle to Gather It. Here Are Best Practices

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Ready for an unsettling statistic?

Between two percent and seventy percent of winery DTC sales in the US are “unlinked orders,” which means that there’s no customer data associated with the transaction.

Which means that there’s no way for the winery to follow up with the customer, no way to enter them into your sales funnel, and no way to sell to them in the future.

(Curious to see if your winery is closer to the two percent, or the seventy percent? We can show you. More on that below.)

Gathering data can be tricky, especially in a busy tasting room on a summer weekend afternoon. But it’s possible, certainly, and today I’d like to highlight best practices from two Enolytics customers who do a particularly good job, Scott Harvey Wines in Amador County and Pence Vineyards & Winery in the Santa Rita Hills of California.

• Take your time, advises Andrea Wiegand, Tasting Room Manager at Scott Harvey’s Sutter Creek location. “It’s really important to stay composed, remain calm, and do that transaction,” she said. “No one’s in that much of a hurry that you can’t get that email.” In addition, Wiegand advises staff to make sure they are staying aware of exactly what they’re doing in order to lessen mistakes.

• Ask for the customer’s email so that you can send them a receipt. This was a top tip from Hannah Creason, Tasting Room Manager at Scott Harvey’s Shenandoah Valley location.

• Once you have the customer’s email, ask if they want to stay updated on events. “It’s a lot less pushy than asking if they want to join our ‘newsletter,’” said Melissa Caccia of Scott Harvey, underscoring the effectiveness of a slight change in language and wording.

• For the Scott Harvey team, first name, last name and email are priority pieces of data to gather. Customers who also share their birth date will receive a small merchandise gift of their choice to celebrate their birthday.

• Listen for cues throughout the customer’s visit. Asking for their information doesn’t have to happen at the very end of the visit. Staff might overhear that the guest is planning a poker night, for example. “You could say that it sounds fun,” Caccia advises, “and you could email them some suggestions for food pairings or something similar.”

A key factor in gathering customer data is understanding why it’s important, and communicating it to the team.

Claire Pruett, Pence’s Hospitality Manager, said that the team has been working hard to collect data particularly since they now know the importance of why the winery needs certain information. “Many of the team members are having the guest fill out our order form,” she said, “which contains first and last name, address, phone number, email address and birth date.”

At Enolytics we help wineries to communicate to staff the importance of customer data, since the sales results are measured, tracked and reported. Results are visible in weekly Data Quality emails, which owners and managers reference to hold team members accountable.

“A year ago, we weren’t pressing so hard to collect the data,” Caccia said. “Since we’ve started to track it and watch the results week after week, we’re amazed how important it has become. Now we check in at each weekly staff meeting to see how well we did with it. People understand that it’s their job to do this and we’re expecting it.”

Do you have a sense right now of how well your staff is doing, in terms of collecting customer data? Are you curious whether your winery is closer to the two percent or the seventy percent of unlinked orders we mentioned at the top of today’s post?

We can help with that, starting with our 30-day risk free trial. That’s how you can find out, quickly. You’ll start receiving daily performance updates, and the weekly Data Quality emails as well, as soon as your trial begins.

When we onboard a new winery, we also run your data through our data cleansing process, which identifies the customer accounts that have a missing or invalid birthday, for example, or missing emails, phone numbers and addresses.

Knowing what’s wrong is the first step to fixing it.

Let me know if we can help you too.

Please reach out through the website or you can always drop me a line. Or just give me a call at 702.528.3717.

Thank you for reading, and for your ongoing interest —

Cathy