The global pandemic forced businesses to adapt and rethink the ways they approached their audience.
Alongside these changes, there was also a significant increase in alcohol eCommerce and digital engagement. Wine sales reports chart a massive explosion in online purchasing for the wine market in the last two years—a steep climb that was encouraged by convenience, limitation of physical contact, and COVID-19 safety precautions.
During unpredictable times like this, having the right tools to digitalise your wine club and take a tech-driven step forward seems like one of the best, if not the only, strategy to stay competitive in the market.
Enter, marketing automation for wineries.
Automation may be a novelty to beverage businesses that rely on specialised and traditional craft, but when you have the right tools and a tailor-made system, its benefits outweigh the frustration of shifting to a new form of carrying out operations.
Automation’s benefits are not limited to your production processes. By introducing the latest tools and strategies to your wine club, you can revitalise your marketing and sales efforts.
Here’s how marketing automation for wineries enables you to keep your loyal customers engaged, interested, and ensure business continuity amidst a global health crisis.
Build and promote loyalty programmes
One of the most celebrated benefits of marketing automation for wineries is the ability to segment your subscriber lists.
Advanced segmentation and personalisation—paired with real-time analytics that gives insights into your customer behaviour—can segment customers into different personas.
This means you can identify customers who:
- Are your most frequent visitors
- Are likely to revisit your store and make another purchase
You can reward these loyal customer groups by inviting them to join the exclusive VIP club or your loyalty programmes.
Using automated email flows, you can communicate with each of your club members depending on where they are in their buyer journey—new members, loyalty members, VIP members—and send them targeted emails that align with the needs and interests of individuals in each of those stages.
With automated sequences and streamlined segmentation, you can enhance the customer experience of every single club member and build personal relationships with them.
Maintain stellar customer engagement
By creating a wine club, incentivising your club members with loyalty programmes, and rewarding your most engaged customers, you’re driving your club members to engage more with your club.
Marketing automation for wineries promises advanced analytics capabilities. You can access cutting-edge reporting tools to track sign-ups easily, record important dates like customer anniversaries, and predict customer preferences—all the vital information you need to craft content and offers that appeal to each club member.
When you pair these capabilities with your CRM tools, the possibilities will be endless.
By integrating your wine club software with your CRM, you can contact your club members effortlessly—send them exclusive newsletters, create engaging emails that target individual club members, or invite them to special events happening in your club. These emails will prompt your customers to value their membership even more.
You can also send specific messages to specific buyer groups with the information that is relevant to them: reminding them of upcoming shipments, alerting them of expiring payment methods, or notifying them when certain club events occur.
Simplify your club management
As someone who runs a winery, you probably aren’t new to the responsibility of running a wine club.
When it comes to running a traditional wine club, in particular, you’re required to put in a considerable amount of time and effort—both resources that you may not be able to afford when you’re taking care of your other winery activities.
By automating your wine club, you can simplify all the processes related to the management of this aspect of your operations.
Here are some of the other tasks you’ll be able to optimise and accelerate:
- Batch payment processing
You’ll be able to streamline your payments and let go of some of the most
time-consuming elements of running your club like transactions that must be tackled one at a time.
By introducing features like batch payment, you can generate invoices for all your customers with a single click of a button and process multiple payments in one go seamlessly.
- Payment method management
Using automation software, club managers can also run a credit card updater service. If a club member’s credit card expires, your system can automatically run a process to identify the declined charges, notify the customer, prompt the customer to update their card, and re-run the payment.
Encourage members to customise and follow through with their order
Flavours and personal taste preferences are some of the most unique elements of your consumer audience that can’t be overlooked. When making a purchase, your customers will have their unique flavour preferences, may want to add more to their order, or may want to swap their order for a flavour they prefer more.
It can be frustrating for customers when they are forced to call you or wait for you to call them to customise and update their order—if your wine club is sticking to traditional methods, this may be a problem you’re facing.
In contrast, by using automation for wineries, you can send reminder emails to customers to complete their orders, set a standard email that can be sent if a customer fails to make any changes, and allow them to change their order online.
Take, for example, abandoned cart emails. If your club members have visited your eCommerce store, added items to their cart, but never completed their purchase, abandoned cart emails come in handy. Your customers are only one short step away from checking out, automation can encourage them to take the small step to complete their purchase.
Marketing automation for wineries—breathe new life into winery traditions
Nothing emphasises the need to move away from traditions like a global pandemic and its impact on the market that reshaped consumer behaviour.
By automating your wine club activities, you can improve your sales, expand your club membership, and keep your wine club engaged and active even during the hardest economic times. In other words, at a time when traditional industries are struggling in a market affected by the pandemic, automation can breathe new life into your winery.
If you want to learn more about how automation can help your wine club thrive, schedule a free consultation with Launchy experts.
