How to Grow Your Wine Club Part 1
How to Ask People to Join Your Club
Question: Should you ask anyone that buys your wine sign up for your wine club?
Answer: No!
There is a vast difference between a lead, anyone who buys your wine, and a qualified
lead, as someone who meets your wine club requirements (i.e. price points, wine
consumption amount etc.). Your job is to identify which consumer leads are qualified and
turn them into club members.
Qualified Leads
A ‘Qualified Lead’ is a sales terms you’ve probably heard over and over; let’s actually
take a look at what a makes a lead qualified for your wine club and where to find them.
You need to first start with a few questions about the makeup of your wine club:
1. How much does your wine club cost?
2. How many bottles do you sent out each shipment?
3. What features besides wine are included in membership?
4. What wines are you shipping (reds, whites, etc)?
From those questions you’ll be able to quickly establish a few guidelines that you should
keep in mind as you are seeking out potential wine club members. Next you should
consider the target market that your winery is going after (i.e. demographic, geographic,
psychographic and behavioral characteristic information) and use that to benefit your
wine club’s marketing efforts. You should start to have an idea about what potential
members look like.
It’s time to find your qualified leads and convert them to members. There are several
places where you should be promoting you wine club; I’ve split them into two categories,
direct and indirect.
Direct
The direct category encompasses promoting your wine club during all face-to-face
interaction. It’s common for wineries to have a sign up right in the tasting room but you
should also promoted it at your winery’s special events, off-site tasting, wine festivals,
marketing events and industry only events (even people within the wine industry such as
distributors and reps will join wine clubs to gain access to limited wines and be included
in member-only events).
Make it easy for your consumers to sign up! Also make sure that your staff doesn't come
off as pushy sales people. Two great ways to have a sign up is a kiosk or a paper form to
fill out.
A kiosk, in my opinion, is the better of the two options because you let the consumers do
the work. The initial cost of the computer is greater than having paper forms, however,
depending on the size and amount of members signing up a kiosk could save money in
the long run. It lowers administration costs because no one manually enters the consumer
information. A good wine club software platform should already have a kiosk mode.
The other option is to have a simple form your tasters fill out during or after their tasting
or other events. They fill out their information on the form and the winery would go
through them and enter the new wine club members into the system. This option would
save the cost of the computer but requires more time from your staff.
Another benefit for the kiosk option is that the consumer enters their credit card
information at the same time they sign up for a membership, one quick process. If you go
for the paper option, you’ll either have to process their card through as a purchase (or
keep on file if you charge at the time of the shipments) or get them to enter their
information at home online, not as quick and easy.
Whichever option works best for your winery make sure that your staff is trained to assist
the sign up process and promote it! It’s one thing if they have information about your
club and it’s another if they are passionate about it and believe that it benefits the
qualified consumer.
Indirect
There are a few options for indirect ways to sign up consumers to your wine club. The
main types are online, direct mail and the telephone. The telephone can be used as a great
tool to contact your consumers and still capture the personal touch they felt when they
visited your tasting room. It’s a good way to show them that you care and that their
business really means something to you and your winery. Direct mail is also a great
marketing tool to use to encourage your consumer to become members. In the next email
we’ll go deeper into the information you should use to identify the key consumers, which
would be suited for direct mail or the telephone.
Having an online wine club sign up online is an absolute must! It allows for your
consumers to sign up whenever they feel like it from the comfort of their home with no
sales pressure from the staff. They shouldn’t feel pressured if you’re promoting your club
right, but sadly too many wineries are pushing their wine clubs so much that it turns
people away and ruins their experience. An online sign up will also allow your raving
fans from out of town, province or country to buy your wine without having to search
extensively for it.
Don’t put your wine club sign up on your home page! Just because there are more hits on
that page doesn’t mean they are quality hits. You should place your wine club sign up
form on a clearly labeled section of your website. Have a page for the wine club
explaining its details. You should notice the quality of hits will be greatly increased and
you can measure your results with web analytics. The beauty of the online sign up is that
it’s effortless on your end. There are no administration costs to enter data (their
information should be seamlessly entered into your database) and it didn’t use your
tasting room staff’s time.
Numbers to Monitor
Here are some numbers that you need to be monitoring for your wine club.
* Attrition Rate – The number of members active at the beginning of the month who
are still active at the end of the month, expressed as a percent. (Calculated monthly)
* Conversion Rate – Sign Ups vs. Visitors. (I would recommend slitting it into two
categories (a) Sign Ups vs. Tasting Room Traffic and (b) Web Sign Ups vs. Unique
Visitors)
* Batch Failure Rate – The number of Successful Orders vs. Active Members