The value of that customer relationship is typically 5-6 times what they spend during their tasting room visit, and it takes some effort to ascertain this value, but this is critical to understanding how much can a winery spends to attract more customers.
Direct-to-consumer sales continually grow in importance for small wineries in the face of distributor consolidation. Wineries now have a greater range of options for eCommerce and POS systems, but few wineries effectively harness all the data they have to grow sales. A good financial team can help capture, organize, and analyze this information to support management and sales to increase revenue.
This data collection and analysis should start even before a guest arrives. Hotels use pace reports to judge how well they are progressing toward their occupancy goals, and tasting rooms should use them, as well. Your tasting room seats are like hotel rooms or seats in a restaurant – if you don’t sell them, you will never have a chance to sell that same seat again. Of course, if you don’t sell a bottle of wine today, you will still have a chance to sell it tomorrow, but you will have missed the opportunity to use that perishable seat to develop another customer relationship.
The value of that customer relationship is typically 5-6 times what they spend during their tasting room visit, and it takes some effort to ascertain this value, but this is critical to understanding how much can a winery spends to attract more customers. If you know the typical customer arriving at your winery is going to spend $3,000 and generate $2,000 in marginal profit over the next three years, you can justify a fairly healthy marketing budget to find more customers.
This process does require a few steps to develop actionable information. The winery needs to track customers over time in order to determine the customer’s lifetime spend. Fortunately, most CRM software will provide sufficient historical transaction data that your accounting team can download the transaction history, clean up the data to provide a year-by-year summary of each customer’s purchases. From this, you can determine a customer’s spend over a certain period. Then, combining this purchase history along with good costing information on the wines the customer has purchased (see previous post on costings), and a good understanding of the operating costs (credit card processing fees, shipping costs not borne by the customer, commissions paid to sales staff, etc.) allows the winery to determine the marginal profit from a customer. That provides guidance on how much a winery can spend to acquire more customers. If the cost of acquiring a customer is less than the customer’s lifetime marginal profit for the winery, the winery will see a steady growth in DTC sales and profitability.
Once the customers are on-site, it is time for the hospitality staff to shine, but the financial team should be helping the hospitality staff refine their efforts by looking at conversion rates, data capture, and order sizes on a routine basis. An aggressive marketing effort to attract more customers isn’t effective if it increases visits, but the staff isn’t capturing visitor data (so you can sell them more wine in the future) and converting them into customers. Given the difference in value between a visitor and a customer, the financial team should be able to help management develop an incentive plan that will reward staff and help the business turn more visitors into customers. In some cases, we have seen simple sales incentives more than double a tasting room’s performance.
