Do you want to go beyond a lifestyle choice and actually sell more wine and grow relationships?
Savvy wineries have started to recognize that Direct-to-Consumer is the best way to sell wine. Profitable, recurring e-commerce is a whole new line of business.
“The wine trade needs to wake up to online sales”, says BlackSquare CEO Matthew Protti in a December 2, 2014 article in Harperscouk.com. Matthew warns wine brands that they “must integrate online sales into overall route to strategy.”
We could not agree more! To be successful digitally, wineries need a step-by-step digital sales and marketing strategy.
Want to track where your Direct to Consumer business is and wants to go? Keeping track of your customer data can help your winery retain club members and find new ones.
Analytics Monitoring
Wine Business Monthly recently released the results of their first ever Technology Survey.
According to the survey, 28% of those surveyed don’t monitor their website traffic at all and 11% don’t know if it is being monitored.
45% of respondents said that they use Google Analytics to monitor where their website traffic comes from.
You can read the full article in Wine Business Monthly here.
Data will steer your ship in the right direction to achieve your sales goals.
Winery owners and C-levels need data driven approaches. There are hundreds of analytic measurements you can conduct on your website. Unique visitors, page views, top content, where people are visiting your site from, are all great things to look at.
The two most powerful, but often overlooked measurements are conversion rate and customer retention rate.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the total number of sales divided by the total number of people visiting your site.
Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention refers to the percentage of customers that continue to return as customers with you after a given time period.
For wineries, customer retention should be measured in two areas:
- Club retention rate: how many customers that belonged to your club last month and are still in your club this month.
- Ecommerce retention rate: the number of customers who bought from your winery website last month who are placing an order this month.
It’s far easier and costs significantly less to retain customers than to gain new customers.
Conversions to Measure on your Winery’s Website
Tasting Room Location Page
We recommend asking your website designer to set up a conversion point on your tasting room location page.
Conversions are when goals are achieved (wine sale). This is a very real and tangible metric to measure. You should work on increasing your conversion ratio. You want to be able to measure the conversion for “website visitor” to “tasting room location page views”.
Goal: Increase tasting room traffic
Marketing:
- Launch a Google Pay Per Click ad campaign for search terms related to your winery’s location.
- Put a Call to Action (CTA) on your homepage (above the fold) to visit your tasting room, with a link to the winery location website page.
Measurable Data:
After running the campaign for a few quarters, measure the following website data in your Google Analysis reports to see which marketing efforts received the best results:
Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign
- Monthly traffic via the PPC advertisement.
- Have a special phone number for tracking to measure calls from Google PPC ads.
How many calls did you receive? My clients have had great success with a special number created by Ifbyphone, a company that provides call tracking, detailed analytics and full phone lead management. With Ifbyphone, you can connect, measure, and optimize voice interactions with your prospects. Every lead is captured, responded to properly, scored, and then nurtured.
Homepage Call to Action
- View your Google Analytics report to see how many people clicked on the Call to Action.
We also recommend measuring the amount of tastings you provided this year to last year’s data.
Other Conversion Points
Your website designer can set up custom reports to measure the conversion percentage and sales funnel for online product purchases. This data helps you see what sources are sending you qualified buyers.
Do your email campaigns convert subscribers to buyers?
Are your PPC campaigns generating a Return on Investment?
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can provide your winery with metrics and customer data that you can use to make educated decisions. Google Analytics also:
- Helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.
- Shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. That makes it easier to serve your current customers and win new ones.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool. It’s very important to set up your goals correctly and track what really matters. Measure the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
What to Track
Besides monitoring your conversion rate, we recommend that wineries should start leveraging your Google Analytics data to monitor the following numbers:
* Bounce Rate –The bounce rate shows you how many people came to your site and immediately leave.
* Traffic Source –The traffic source identifies how people found your website. Do they find you by Search, Referral or Direct? Which Search Engine drives the most traffic to your website?
* Attrition Rate – The number of wine club members active at the beginning of the month who are still active at the end of the month, expressed as a percent.
Completed Orders– The number of web orders.
Desktop versus Mobile Traffic: Measure the amount of traffic that comes to your site from “mobile” (phone or tablet) versus traffic from a desktop.
Many wineries are designing their websites specifically for mobile. Does your website have a scroll feature that is not mobile-friendly? It might be time to create a better browsing experience by upgrading to a responsive design.
There are many additional ways to gather meaningful data that can steer your winery’s sales and marketing strategies. Using Google’s Conversion Tracking in your email campaigns is one of the simplest forms.
One of the main benefits of using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is the potential to start conversations with customers. You can use Google conversion tracking for Facebook Posts, Twitter Posts and more.
Google provides a free tool called the Google URL builder that allows you to create custom links for each product you are promoting – either in your email campaign, Facebook post or other online campaign. These custom links, once clicked, will populate a report within Google Analytics to show you the real time Return on Investment (ROI) from your campaign.
Creating a dashboard can revolutionize your business
Our winery clients turn to us to implement an easy-to-use dashboard to measure and monitor key metrics. Then we use those metrics to develop initiatives to confidently grow direct sales.
Profitability starts with you. What are your goals? To unlock the massive, untapped potential of your DTC business, contact us today!
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