There’s a lot of movement these days in the DTC wine + data space.

That’s got me thinking about vulnerability, because the most vulnerable moment in wine + data is maybe not what you’d expect.

Stay with me here.

The most vulnerable moment in wine + data isn’t when you start a data project and aren’t sure when to start. Feeling uncertain is one way to feel vulnerable, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

The most vulnerable moment in wine + data isn’t when you’ve just launched a carefully constructed campaign and — fingers crossed! — you hope that people respond the way you want. Feeling anxious about a response is a vulnerable moment too, but that isn’t what I’m talking about either.

Vulnerability, in the case of wine + data, is more technical than emotional.

The single most vulnerable moment in wine + data is when data moves from one system to another.

We call it data migration, and it’s vulnerable because it’s a transition when, inevitably, there’s a risk of exposure. We have a lot of architecture in place to manage that risk, including clearly defined rules to check and test against throughout the process.

It’s like vulnerability, but with a safety net.

But there’s another reason why migrating data is the most vulnerable moment, and it has to do with the future of your business.

To truly grow your business through data, you need analytics. To do analytics, we need as much data as possible, as far back as it goes.

Why?

Because the more data we can work with, the more accurate and confident you can feel about the results you’ll be putting to work as you grow your business.

The more data that’s processed by our algorithms, the more accurate those algorithms can be. The more data that our machines can learn from, the more on-target the results will be. We’d rather migrate ten years of customer data than two years, and fifteen years of order history rather than just the most recent sales cycles.

That’s why we migrate 100% of your contacts, 100% of your products, 100% of your club memberships and 100% of your importable orders. We also migrate your images, shipping rates, etc.

In other words, analytics work best when there’s a lot of data that’s thorough, clean and consistent. That’s hard to do when the data is moving from one place to another, when data is at its most vulnerable.

Data migrations are hard. But we’re good at them.

Please be in touch if your data will be moving around soon. If data migrations are on your roadmap, now or in the future, we can help.

Thank you, as always, for reading —

Cathy