Wine Customer Insights Guide: Five Simple Ways to Capture Insights That Will Help You Grow Your Wine Business
WRITTEN BY ASHLEY DECARLI
(5 MIN READ)
Every exceptional wine business has an intimate understanding of their customers. They know exactly who their customers are, what drives their interest in wine, what kind of wine experiences they desire and what their lives look like outside of the context of wine. This level of closeness is what allows them to connect with their customers in a meaningful way.
But how do wineries get there? How do they uncover these deep customer insights and cultivate a brand experience around them? Well, some foundational work is undoubtedly needed, but it’s really about implementing simple, customer learning practices into your winery’s day-to-day operations.
Let’s briefly talk foundation. When a winery is in the brand-building phase (just getting started or undergoing a refresh), we recommend working with a brand consultant to conduct a consumer research study that will provide you with a solid customer insights foundation. You want a partner who will go beyond general trends and statistics, and get to the emotional drivers influencing customer choice and behavior. While it’s tempting to lean on knowledgeable leaders within your business for these insights, proximity creates bias and blind spots. You need someone to explore objectively, ask the hard questions and push past any assumptions that may be holding you back. The learnings gleaned from this research will clarify exactly who your target customer is, provide detailed profiles/personas of them and identify their underlying emotions surrounding wine (which should inform and inspire the direction of your brand).
When you stop learning, you stop growing. Learning about your customers’ wants and needs must become a constant endeavor if you hope to deliver memorable wine experiences and build lasting relationships.
Once you have solid insights to stand on and a brand in place, don’t throw in the towel and call it a day. When you stop learning, you stop growing. Learning about your customers’ wants and needs must become a constant endeavor if you hope to deliver memorable wine experiences and build lasting relationships. Don’t worry — continued formal research isn’t necessary; this is about naturally integrating customer learning into your winery’s everyday habits and practices.
Here are five easy ways you can garner customer insights by simply listening, observing and connecting the dots.
1. Take “Tasting Notes.”
Just as you encourage your customers to keep a tasting journal, encourage (or even require) your wine staff to do the same. But rather than taking notes about the color, aromas and flavor of the wine, your staff should be taking notes about what they observed while customers experienced the wine. Take notes about the aspects of the tasting that delighted customers, surprised them or maybe even confused them. Document the questions customers asked — common questions, unique questions and unexpected questions. These recorded questions and observed behaviors will tell you a great deal about your customers’ wants and needs. They’ll also reveal how well your current tasting experience is delivering on them. ProTip: Avoid relying on memory recall; our minds tend to blur and blend. The exercise of note-taking is a critical part of capturing accurate and meaningful insights.
2. Reflect on Social Posts From Customers.
When customers post about their experience with your wine, you’re eager to repost their kind words and beautiful photos. While of course you’re reviewing the post to ensure it’s a sentiment you want to share, are you also reflecting on it? Learning from it? Customer posts are a peek into the impression you’ve imparted upon them. Based on what they share, you can glean what aspects of your wine experience were memorable and meaningful — in another word, postworthy. If your customers aren’t sharing what you hoped they would, you probably need to evaluate the actual experience. ProTip: Ask those responsible for managing your social media to provide a weekly recap of the sentiments customers are sharing about your brand and what that says about the brand experience you’re actually delivering.
3. Review the Content Your Customers Are Engaging With.
This is a bit more technical, but not at all complicated. On the back end of your communication platforms — your website, social media, e-newsletter, etc. — review the content analytics to see what your customers are engaging with. Identify exactly what kind of content they gravitate to, how much time they’re spending on it and the actions customers are taking as a result of it. You should want to know what blog posts they’re reading and the topics/subjects that tend to draw more interest. You should explore announcements customers are paying attention to — special events, wine releases, new experience offerings, etc. — and then check to see how they impact event attendance, booked tastings and wine club subscriptions. Connecting the behavior dots between your communication and customer actions will reveal how to optimize your efforts in order to best to serve your customers’ on their wine journey. ProTip: While this can be done manually, there are many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms that make this very simple to manage.
4. Look for Clues in the Sales of Your Non-Wine Merchandise.
Sales of non-wine merchandise shine a light on what customers value beyond the wine in their glass. If you offer non-wine merchandise, those items were wisely chosen to reflect your brand and provide value to your customers. Customer purchases will tell a story — they will showcase the impression you made on them, the desire you sparked within them and the kind of value you can continue to deliver long after they’re gone. If they’re purchasing educational wine books, your experience was likely enriching and it sparked an eagerness to become more wine-savvy. If they’re purchasing books about your wine region, you likely did a great job highlighting the uniqueness of your location, so much so that customers are thirsty to expand their connection to it. If they’re walking away with vineyard postcards and apparel, you likely delivered an experience they want to remember, keep close and put on display. Now, not every item will tell an insightful story — buying a branded wine key may be all about utility — but some really do. ProTip: As your team reviews your non-wine merchandise sales, don’t just report the numbers — reflect and report on what those numbers tell you about customer values, wants and needs.
5. Have Conversations With Your Customers.
Saving the most obvious, and arguably most important, for last. Make a concerted effort to have conversations with your customers. By simply talking to them and asking questions, you can learn so much about their interests and needs. Whether these conversations are happening in person or digitally, keep them informal but always show you value their time and input. Consider integrating customer questions/polling into your social media content. You can also have conversations digitally through social media live chat/story features. Periodically, send short surveys (5–10 questions) to your wine-club members and/or newsletter subscribers for their thoughts and feedback. And when customers are visiting your tasting room, simply spark a conversation while conducting a tasting, serving a glass of wine, opening a door, etc. Ask them questions about what brought them in, how their day has been, what they were surprised to learn, what they valued most about their experience. ProTip: Be sure to take notes in this instance as well to accurately capture insights.
When you begin integrating these everyday practices into your wine business, make sure the process of gathering and sharing customer learnings is as frictionless as possible.
When you begin integrating these everyday practices into your wine business, make sure the process of gathering and sharing customer learnings is as frictionless as possible. Don’t ask your staff to put together reports, presentations or anything of the sort. Instead, create a weekly forum where customer insights are shared. We suggest a short, 30-minute weekly team meeting (online or in person) where each member of the staff creates only one slide to be dropped into a deck that highlights the customer learnings for the week. The one slide forces everyone to keep things summarized and simple, and the deck will give your business a running record of customer insights. Before you know it, you will have created a customer-centric culture that is sure to keep your brand on track, your customers happy and your business growing.
