How to Sell More Wine or Spirits Using Your eCommerce Customer Data
Winemakers and distillers have mastered the art of nurturing living, bubbling concoctions. Why, then, when it comes to our customer data, do we not apply the laws of fermentation to growing our businesses?
The same way yeast consumes sugar and converts it into ethanol and CO₂, sales are the natural byproduct of our eCommerce dataset consuming our customers’ behaviors over time — in the hands of a capable marketer. That might sound creepy, but in the right hands, eCommerce data is the secret sauce that successful wineries and distilleries use to sell more online.
Without customer data, all of the marketing dollars you’ve thrown at Meta and Google have nowhere to go; they might accomplish a temporary objective like driving traffic to your website, but if you’re not capturing your customers’ and prospects’ behaviors, there’s little hope of reliable improvement over time. The same goes for your email marketing efforts, and every channel you’re leveraging to try and sell Direct to Consumer.
The Flywheel Effect
Every new brand begins at a disadvantage in that there’s no “sourdough starter” to work with. That is, it’s hard to know what actions to take when there’s no data to base those actions upon. In other words, it’s hard to make informed decisions without information to begin with. Data sources take time and resources (usually ad spend and/or labor) to mature.
In the beginning, every decision about which channel(s) to prioritize, what messaging & creative to use, and who to target is simultaneously blessed with beginners luck (i.e. hundreds of thousands of dollars have not yet been “wasted”) and cursed with the necessity of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks (i.e. seeing what kind of data comes back as a result).
According to Jim Collins in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, this process “resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”
Without belaboring this point, it’s worth a word of caution – if you’ve accumulated customer data through your eCommerce and/or email marketing platform already, protect it. Cherish it. Do not get your winery or distillery into a situation where you’re starting all over again, because it’s going to be costly and time consuming to build back up.
The Gold Standard: First Party Data
Not all data sources are created equal. Brands with a huge social media following can develop false confidence over their ability to reach large audiences when, in reality, the rug could get pulled out from under them anytime. When we’ve invested so heavily in these social media ecosystems already, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to their relative fragility.
Imagine you’re getting massive traction on TikTok. That’s all well and good, but do you really want your brand’s longevity in the hands of Donald Trump, long revered for his even-keeled temperament and predictability?
Social media platforms track your customers’ behaviors online to build an extremely robust profile, but at the end of the day your business does not own that data. Pixels are great for tracking user behavior and feeding that data back to your paid ads for better performance, but Meta can be notoriously temperamental, disabling ad accounts for policy violations both legitimate and illegitimate. Any data you gather through these platforms belongs exclusively to them and remains inaccessible & encrypted. Your social handles can vanish at any time, for any number of reasons.
The key is to instead focus on accumulating and leveraging first party data – your email subscribers (and all of their behavior) and your eCommerce customer data. This can even include data from your POS system in the tasting room.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Customer Data
Whenever someone brings up the topic of data, eyes tend to glaze over; it all feels so abstract, and far less exciting than releasing a new product or hyping up tasting room events with jam bands and $11 grilled cheese sandwiches.
Consider the following a checklist of all the times you should consult and leverage your customer data for maximum impact on your business.
Audience Targeting
In paid advertising, there’s really two giant buckets that all audiences fall into: “cold” and “warm.”
Cold audiences are people who may have never heard of your brand or interacted with you in any way before. Cold audiences use whatever audience targeting options the social platform has natively available, like users who are interested in “Honda” or “vanilla ice cream.”
Warm audience targeting is a “retargeting” or “remarketing” strategy that leverages whatever data you already have at your disposal. If, for example, you wanted to promote an event at the tasting room, you could just upload a CSV of everyone who came to the same event last year and target them with your ads. You can even build what are called “Lookalike” (Meta) or “Matched” (LinkedIn) audiences, which takes your source list and identifies users on the platform who closely resemble your original audience in any number of behaviors and traits.
While cold audiences can be used to grow or build up your warm audiences, whatever customer data you already own could prove invaluable in getting the right message to the right audience faster & cheaper. Promoting a case sale on your unoaked Chardonnay? Login to your eCommerce platform and export a list of everyone who has purchased that SKU previously and upload it as a “custom audience” (a warm audience) and aim your ads at the people most likely to purchase again. Use Lookalikes and Matched audiences to acquire new customers and grow your fanbase of unoaked Chardonnay lovers.
Customer data also informs email segmentation. Whenever possible, it’s best to integrate eCommerce data with your email subscribers so you know exactly where to send that next email offer or event promotion. Short of a direct integration, simply uploading a CSV and bulk tagging those subscribers with the “red drinkers” tag works wonders every time you need to sell the most relevant products in the future. Your open and click rates will soar as your email marketing happens on a much more 1:1 level. Your audience will experience less fatigue and respond in turn with fewer unsubscribes when you spare them the one-size-fits-all newsletters and “eblasts” and send only the content you know that they’re interested in.
Refine Your Club Member / Subscription Experience
eCommerce data also helps us calibrate wine clubs and subscriptions according to what has performed the best in the past. It tells us which programs are missing the mark and which ones resonate with our most loyal customers.
Which membership is selling the best? How many of my members are drinking red only vs. white only vs. mixed cases? Do I see any spikes on purchases when there’s a new/limited release, library wine, or does my revenue mostly just come from a steady flow of old favorites?
What time of year do I see the most signups? How can I align marketing and sales with these natural seasonal rhythms and my ideal customer’s intrinsic behavior patterns?
eComm Data Informs Everything from Production to Marketing
Every new business owner can be forgiven for creating a product they think people will love and bringing it to market. For all but the luckiest, however, it’s not good enough to stop there and blame external factors when there’s a slump in sales.
Purchase history tells us which of our offerings are the most popular, and that informs whether or not we should make more or less of any given SKU. What’s the best packaging option for my customer? At what price point and in what quantity does this product sell the most? Customer data tells us where to speed up and where to pump the brakes on production and promotion. Our marketing budget needs to reflect the channels, brands, and products most responsible for the highest amount of revenue.
Inherited Data Makes Acquisitions a Breeze
If your winery or distillery is fortunate enough to acquire another brand (or several brands), taking extra care to migrate, study, and integrate the data that comes along with that purchase can make the transition (and future sales) so much smoother.
More than likely, you’re acquiring a new set of customers right along with whatever producer(s) you’ve added to your portfolio. Don’t just lump those subscribers in with your own and call it a day. Their preferences, behaviors, and buying habits are going to look completely different from what you’re used to.
Taking the time to segment and create target audiences from any customer data you inherit ultimately allows you to keep on selling your new inventory without interruption. If you’re good enough at this, the customers should hardly notice a difference since their favorite brand “sold out.” You’ll preempt and maybe even ward off inevitable negative comments on social media about how “it’s a shame” to see their favorite whiskey “go downhill” under new ownership. By getting to know them deeply before making any sudden moves, you can win those loyal customers over until they turn right around and evangelize on your behalf.
Multiple Data Sources, Multiple POVs
Rarely in wine & spirits business do we really stop to consider that each of our customer data sources represents just one point of view – whether that’s our email subscriber behavior (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Constant Contact, etc.), eCommerce purchase history (Shopify, Commerce7, VinSuite, Speakeasy, Barcart, etc.), retail account depletions (RAD data), Google Analytics or Meta ads. Consulting any one of these data sources is just like asking one person’s opinion; one customer might look very engaged and active from an email marketing standpoint, while that same customer doesn’t quite belong among the upper echelon of loyal, high lifetime value (LTV) customers judging by their eComm purchase metrics.
That’s not to mention the fragility of any one of these data sources. Just like social media platforms, eCommerce providers come and go. You may decide to switch platforms for whatever reason, or – as many wineries have recently experienced – your eComm provider may consolidate with another or cease to exist altogether, forcing you into an unforeseen data migration.
More opinions is not always better. An expert analyst consults multiple sources, but is able to weigh them accordingly, cut through clutter, and draw out the actionable insights that drive our businesses forward. If we want to truly understand our customers, we need a way to draw from these traditionally siloed data sources to develop our own point of view (POV) – a lighter lift now, with modern AI tools offering pattern recognition and assistance building our own data models.
Piece Together the Holistic Picture
Data warehousing is a surefire way to truly own all of the data associated with your business: to keep it safe, sound, and centralized no matter the spaces you choose to operate in – so nothing falls through the cracks and we’re not too dependent on any one POV.
Data visualization helps us separate signal from noise and pull actionable insights from what appears to be chaos on the surface. Investing in a good business intelligence solution allows you to take full control over the big picture of what’s going on across all of your sales channels. Instead of relying on the relatively pedestrian reports native to your eCommerce provider, third party analytics providers can pull from otherwise siloed data sources to visualize the interplay between your 3 tier sales and DTC sales, for instance.
Instead of relying on mere conjecture when your on-premise sales are down in Tampa, FL from a typical month, you stand a chance of answering why that happened; perhaps that same SKU was on sale in your webstore and more of your customers were drinking at home. This informs the timing/seasonality, pricing, and messaging behind all your future promotions.
Take Control, Act From a Place of Clarity
A fully customizable solution like Andavi Analytics ensures that all of your customer data is kept securely warehoused, ready to offer critical insights at your beck and call. If you have the data, every purchase from the day you opened your winery or distillery’s doors to now will be forever yours, carved in stone and ready to inform your sales & marketing decisions moving forwards.
The brands standing the test of time decades from now will not have arrived there by accident; taking full control and being intentional/targeted in every area of your business is critical for success in today’s environment. At Andavi Solutions, we understand doing this on your own can be overwhelming; we exist to help you lay the foundation for superior decision making that delivers ROI across the value chain. If you’re ready to climb the crow’s nest and gain 360° visibility of your business, reach out to dan.salisbury@andavisolutions.com.
