In our previous blog post, we explored the importance of capturing customer data and how wineries can leverage this information to drive direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales. Beyond unlocking invaluable insights—such as customer preferences, purchasing patterns, and lifetime value—a carefully built DTC customer relationship management (CRM) database allows wineries to personalize customer experiences (CX), launch targeted marketing campaigns, and build strong relationships beyond the tasting room.
A winery DTC platform, which integrates online booking, e-commerce, CRM, and point-of-sale (POS) systems, streamlines the process of automatically logging data from various digital gain points into a centralized customer record. While digital touchpoints like online reservations, newsletter sign-ups, and online stores are crucial for capturing customer data, they typically see lower traffic and create a weaker emotional connection with customers compared to personal interactions in tasting rooms. Furthermore, a significant portion of this traffic is attributed to consumers' initial visits to the tasting rooms.
Despite these insights, customer data collected through in-person interactions consistently falls short of that gathered via digital channels, highlighting a gap in the effectiveness of capturing customer information in winery tasting rooms. If essential details like email addresses aren’t recorded, the chance to engage with customers beyond their visit is lost. This limits the ability to follow up, offer personalized recommendations, or introduce future releases—critical touchpoints that can turn one-time visitors into repeat purchasers. Without this data, remarketing efforts fall short, and opportunities for building long-term relationships are missed.
A closer look at in-person acquisition data reveals that only 28% of point-of-sale transactions are completed with an attached customer record, leaving 72% of transactions anonymous. This means that wineries are missing out on 72% of opportunities to gather valuable contact information, resulting in a substantial loss of potential remarketing opportunities and direct-to-consumer sales revenue.
To make the most of the substantial expenses associated with operating a tasting room, it is crucial for wineries to optimize their customer data capture strategies to improve ROI. As tasting rooms gradually transition back to the walk-in model, the opportunity to capture customer data through reservations decreases. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for wineries to develop effective strategies that enable tasting room staff to collect customer information seamlessly.
Is the wine industry moving to the walk-in concept once again?
Tasting rooms have undergone significant evolution over the past few decades. Twenty years ago, most wineries offered free tastings on a walk-in basis to visitors seeking brands for home consumption. However, by the 2010s, the industry shifted toward more structured, seated tastings, which led to changes in fee structures. With COVID-19, tasting rooms faced restrictions, and tasting fees increased, with standard fees rising from $20 in 2018 to $38 in 2023, and reserve tastings increasing from $33 to $72 in the same period. By 2021, the U.S. experienced a strong year for DTC wine sales, but since then, the premium wine industry has seen a decline in visitation, with seven of nine U.S. wine regions reporting a drop in tasting room purchases by 2023. Numerous industry professionals believe that the move away from the traditional walk-in model may have contributed to this decline, particularly as more wineries required appointments, making it harder for spontaneous visitors to participate in tastings. In response to these challenges, many wineries are reintroducing walk-in tastings to attract visitors and recover lost revenue. This shift, however, is not a complete return to walk-ins but rather an expansion of tasting options. In 2023, 27% of wineries exclusively offered by-appointment tastings, 8% were walk-in only, and 66% provided a mix of both. For comparison, in 2016, 55% of wineries operated solely on a walk-in basis. Claudia Vecchio, President and CEO of Sonoma County Tourism, emphasized the importance of walk-ins, particularly in high-traffic regions: "With the Bay Area as our key market, the spontaneous traveler has always represented the lion’s share of day and overnight visitation." This resurgence of walk-in tastings reflects wineries' efforts to maintain their premium offerings while attempting to recover lost revenue.
Based on our experience, most wineries struggle with low capture rates, often due to a lack of a strategic approach. At Lithica, we typically recommend a three-step checklist to support tasting rooms enhance their data collection efforts:
In this blog post, we will explore each step, focusing on one of our recent projects in which we developed an email automation for a winery, simplifying the process for the tasting room team to capture visitor data while providing value to guests in exchange for the information.
Emphasize the importance of data collection to ensure they understand the impact it can have on overall revenue. Explain how the gathered data can be segmented—by geographic location, purchase history, or demographics—to create personalized and relevant marketing campaigns. Highlight that retaining a customer is more cost-effective than acquiring a new one, and with customer data captured, the likelihood of visitors placing an order online or joining a wine club will be significantly higher.
When processing tasting room orders, emphasize the importance of starting with the creation of a customer profile. Requesting the customer's email at this stage can be effective, as they are already engaged and more likely to provide their email address if they perceive value in it. If a customer has a reservation, it’s a also best practice to process the order from that, which will seamlessly incorporate the customer record and reservation details.
Offering a commission to team members for gathering comprehensive customer information is an effective way to incentivize data collection. For example, Commerce7 stores detailed information about each entry made by users. This capability allows wineries to track the specific contributions of individual team members. However, it is currently not possible to dynamically filter or sort this data to view the number of contacts each associate has created within a specified timeframe. As a result, managing commissions becomes complicated; each customer profile needs to be individually checked to determine the number of profiles created by each tasting room associate.
However, with a third-party integration it’s possible to create an automation that generates monthly reports on the number of customer profiles created by each associate. For this automation, feel free to send us a message; we’d be happy to set it up for you.
Based on our experience, the most effective way to encourage visitors to share their email addresses is by offering an incentive. This could be complimentary shipping on their next online order, free Wi-Fi at the tasting room*, or simply the benefits of joining your mailing list. A lead magnet can be anything that is relevant, valuable, and useful.
*By requiring guests to log in with their email to use the tasting room Wi-Fi, wineries can easily gather contact details. Art of WiFi, for example, seamlessly integrates with Commerce7 and automatically creates or updates customer records based on the data collected through the Wi-Fi registration form.
It’s essential for both the customer and the tasting room crew to perceive the offer as valuable. If the team doesn’t feel that the offer is beneficial, they may hesitate to present it. For example, asking a visitor if they'd like complimentary shipping on their next order can be uncomfortable if the associate doubts its value in that situation. By implementing best tactics that empower your tasting room team to confidently ask for a customer's email address, tasting rooms can significantly enhance their engagement and improve their database over time.
Such tactics, however, require customer journey automation to establish a seamless process that the tasting room team can rely on. Therefore, it is essential to simplify the process as much as possible. In the following section, we'll outline how we implemented such a strategy for a winery client.
One of our clients had already implemented a digital growth strategy with numerous gain-points on both their website and social. However, they faced challenges in efficiently capturing customer information in-person, particularly from walk-ins and guests whose details were not captured during the online reservation process. As Lithica has already worked closely on several projects with the winery, it didn't take long to identify a value that could serve as the lead magnet for the automation. The winery had a collection of recipes paired with their wines, making it a low-hanging fruit to create an email automation that delivers these recipes when a bottle of wine is purchased at the tasting room.
To implement this idea, we added the selected recipes to the wines’ metadata in Commerce7, allowing the winery to easily customize and modify the content of the automated emails at any time.
We recommend Klaviyo as our preferred email marketing provider for its robust features, including customizable customer journey automations. As a certified Klaviyo Partner, we can help you set up these automations seamlessly. We also offer long-term retention marketing support, from strategic planning to full implementation.
After setting up the customer journey automation, we added a "Recipe sign up" button in the POS system. When a customer purchases a bottle of wine, the tasting room associates ask if they would like to receive recommended food pairing recipes for that wine. If the customer agrees, the "Recipe sign up" button will trigger the automation, and the customer receives a beautifully designed email personalized to the tasting room order.
Since its inception, this tactic has evolved into a standard practice at the tasting room, with the team confidently requesting customers' email addresses, knowing they are providing valuable content in return. This automation has also proven to be highly effective, achieving a nearly 80% unique open rate, a 15% click-through rate, and nearly 500 subscriptions since its launch.
Are you wondering what else could be automated ? Here are a few examples:
Building on this success, the client decided to elevate their use of automations and further maximize potential touchpoints. One of the implemented emails was a post-visit email, to be sent four weeks after customers' visits. Based on the assumption that one month was enough time for visitors to have enjoyed the purchased wines, the email featured a free shipping promotion to incentivize them to restock their favourites. To ensure the email grabs attention, it also included a personalized product recommendation block based on the customer's purchase history. Therefore, if a customer purchased a bottle of wine during their visit, the email prominently showcased that product. Finally, we incorporated a review section at the end, allowing customers to easily click through and leave feedback on their preferred review platform.
Automations offer an efficient way to drive better ROI with minimal effort. Since these emails incur no ongoing costs, wineries can implement a profitable long-term strategy that continually delivers value by maximizing every step of the customer journey. As highlighted in the case study, effective automation strategies can significantly enhance direct-to-consumer initiatives, increase revenue streams, and strengthen customer loyalty, offering wineries a scalable solution to improve their overall business performance.
