Let me start this week with the not-so-surprising news:

It is hot out there.

As in, too-hot-to-ship-wine hot.

“Wine loses its original freshness and aroma when exposed to light and temperature fluctuation,” reports Wine Folly, in their article about the best time for shipping wine. Exposed to temperatures above 90 degrees — as it is right now in, um, most of the country — a wine will “cook” and taste strangely acidic and nutty.

Which is not what any of us are looking for.

So, what can wineries do instead, as high temperatures persist for at least a few more weeks, to boost the value of their DTC (and especially Wine Club) programs?

Here are three suggestions that will keep you plenty busy as we all wait for temperatures to cool down.

Increase Tasting Room Traffic

We don’t know any winery who wouldn’t want to see more people (and higher-value target customers) coming through the doors of their tasting rooms. The question is, how do we get them there?

It sounds simple, but try inviting them.

Here’s the catch: By “them” we mean not just inviting every single person in your database or on your mailing list or in your Wine Club. By inviting “them” we mean to invite the people who are most likely to welcome an invitation, and to actually come. People who live nearby, for example. (Using the Enolytics software, you can easily identify customers who live within 10 or 20 or 50 miles of your winery, and any distance in between, or nearer or further away.) Or people who live nearby who are Wine Club members. Or people who have purchased in your Tasting Room before, who are not (yet) Wine Club members. Or people who are in your databse but for whatever reason have never visited your Tasting Room.

Now, more than ever, is the time to get them in the door.

Minimize Wine Club Attrition

The most-clicked-on link of our entire software is “Who Is At Risk of Leaving the Club?” Click on that link, and you’re brought to a visualization of your very own customers who are at various levels of risk of dropping out of any of your winery’s clubs. You can easily see who is at High Risk, Medium Risk, Low Risk, and different levels in between. The point is that, in just a few clicks, you can see which of your very own Club members are teetering on the verge of dropping out of your Club.

This is not the time to lose them. Figure out who they are. (We make it very, very easy to see who’s who.) Then, reach out proactively. Show them you care that they are a part of your winery’s community. Keep them in the fold.

Find Non-Club Members to Transition to Club Status

We wrote about this in Enolytics 101 a few weeks ago, but here’s the net-net: Fish in your own pond.

Every winery’s database includes customers who are Current Club Members, Past Club Members, and Never a Club Member. Within our software, it takes literally a few clicks of the mouse to see who’s who. Obviously not all of the customers on your “Never a Club Member” list are ideal candidates to join a Club, but segmenting the "Never a Club Member" list by certain variables will help, such as top customers, for example, who spent a certain amount of money in the past year, or who placed a certain number of orders.

Those customers are already there in your very own database. The question is whether or not you’re seeing them.

Each of these three suggestions are low-hanging fruit within the Enolytics DTC software, and we’d like nothing more than to show you how easy it is to boost the value of your DTC program even while temperatures are too hot to actually ship wine.

Drop me a line any time, as always. Yes, it’s hot out there. But it doesn’t mean your DTC business needs to cool down.

Thank you for reading, and for your ongoing interest —

Cathy