This is a guest post from Tammy Boatright at VingDirect. VingDirect helps family wineries grow their DTC sales through training, tasting room and wine club recommendations, educational webinars and tasting room dashboards. VingDirect’s Vin65 integrated dashboard provides wineries with real time tasting room results.
I was first introduced to the concept of wine clubs in 2004. I had just landed in California, working for Foster’s Wine Estates (now Treasury) and a very smart marketer with Beringer explained wine clubs to me. She said “it’s really incredible that consumers sign up for wine clubs… they don’t really get any benefits that other consumers don’t receive – just discounts”. She went on to tell me that she didn’t see a future for wine clubs because wineries didn’t understand how to retain those loyal “members”.
Fast forward to 2016 and we at VingDirect have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of wineries, helping them create memorable wine clubs and identify ways to retain their valuable wine club members.
There is no debate about the value of reoccurring revenue. You can bank on it! And, very few industries have as perfect a product for a club as does the wine industry. Why?
All these reasons point to the value of a wine club; whether you call it a wine club is up to you, but as long as consumers love your product you’d be foolish not to offer them a convenient, consistent way to receive it!
Occasionally we meet a winery owner who has decided to opt out of wine clubs because they don’t like the perception of a wine club or they don’t like the traditional wine club model. Wine club represents 50%+ of the profit for family wineries, so if you don’t have a successful wine club you might not survive to see what is next!
Who are the masters? Wineries who consistently achieve 5%+ club conversion and low annual attrition (25%-). And, by the way, these wineries are in the minority. Once your winery is consistently achieving these results we think you should explore other avenues to grow your consumer sales.
We don’t have all the answers, but we do have some good questions and thoughts about the next evolution for winery consumer sales.
The new pioneers of our industry will be those who challenge the status quo and look for new ways of engaging consumers.
I hope you are looking outside of the wine industry for examples of models that work for other consumable products. I hope you are asking questions, such as “what’s next”. I hope you are taking risks, trying out new club models, learning from your mistakes and moving forward.
If you are, you are a future pioneer and we want to hear from you!