Oregon Wine Symposium Marketing Notes

It was my first time at the Oregon Wine Symposium in Portland. This Californian felt welcomed! So thank you, Oregonians!?

With more than 1200 attendees, it was a dynamic group of growers, brands, marketing pros, and more. Oregon has a rogue vibe that is holding the industry in good stead. They are doing things their way and aren’t afraid to experiment with wine styles, marketing, and club benefits.?

Below, I have summarized what I thought was the most relevant information I heard from web, advertising, and marketing pros in the wine industry. There was a significant amount of macro trend data. However, it could have been more defined as actionable takeaways for the wineries.?

BUSINESS IS SOFTENING

The wine category is declining not just in Oregon but all over the country.? We heard similar data out of California at the DTC Wine Symposium.?

These category-wide declines should be a huge red flag alert that doing business the way you’ve been for the last decade will no longer work.?

Recession-era marketing requires a much more aggressive approach. And for small to mid-sized wineries who have traditionally done little or ineffective marketing, this is an opportunity to double down on your marketing, web, and advertising fundamentals. Challenging times can be a wake-up call to rethink how you approach wine sales moving forward.

Combining the reduction in demand with increased competition and rising costs across the board creates a dangerous position for wineries.? While I don’t believe you will be able to advertise your way out of these market forces, you can optimize your path to predictable revenue.?

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR & PROFILES ARE CHANGING

There was much discussion about how consumer buying behavior, expectations, and profiles have changed.? Here are some:

COMPETITION

• Competition is not just from other wineries but from an increasingly diverse number of products, including beer, spirits, functional non-alcoholic beverages, hard ciders, etc.
• Younger consumers are buying functional, non-alcoholic beverages at greater levels.?

CONSUMPTION

• Consumers are drinking better, but not more, even less in some cases.?
• Health concerns are impacting wine sales.??
• Abstainers are trending up.?

CONVENIENCE

• Convenience is critical now more than ever. This includes how they shop and buy as well as the particular package sizes and types to meet their lifestyle needs. Increasingly consumers live alone and buy accordingly.

BRANDING

• Consumers are seeking authentic brands with authentic stories.?
• Consumers value experience.?
• Transparency about what they're eating and drinking has risen in importance

DEMOGRAPHICS

• Wine drinkers are diverse in age, gender, socioeconomic status, lifestyle, and values.?
• Only 18% of the adult population is driving the wine business. These are people who drink wine once a week or, more often, are referred to as Core wine drinkers. They account for the lion's share of volume. The second group represents 15% of the population and is referred to as Occasional wine drinkers.?
• Since 2017, both core and marginal wine consumers have declined.?
• Younger and more multicultural customers are where the wine industry lags.??
• Wine shipped directly to consumers over age 60 has continued to grow. It's now responsible for almost 40% of the total DTC shipments in 2022 versus around 25% in 2007.
• Although 21 to 40-year-olds account for roughly 37% of the US population, they only represent about 20% of DTC shipments, and that gap isn't closing.?

TELESALES

Telesales is a fascinating tactic that few DTC brands outside of wine utilize. As Lesley Berglund from Wine Industry Sales Education (WISE) reported, telesales must be a core component of your winery’s overall outbound marketing program. She noted that this is a critically underutilized tool to generate revenue. She also mentioned that the double-added bonus is that reaching out via phone is a fantastic customer service benefit that can lead to longer membership tenure and reduces your reliance on tasting room revenue.?

Equated to a personal concierge, it works well for brands with a high average order value(AOV) and an older clientele.?

Some Tips

• Doesn’t necessarily need to be a sales call; it can be an engagement call
• Training a phone sales team is vital to the success
• Works well with an older demographic who still answers their phone?
• Younger consumers may not be as receptive to a phone call
• When buyers enter your ecosystem, ask them how they want to be contacted.?

Why telesales for wine works but rarely performs as a primary DTC tactic for other verticals:

• The buyer segment that it works best with is older 60+ consumers. This is not a primary demographic for many DTC brands.
• The AOV on wine may be sufficiently high enough to warrant the outreach costs.?
• The volume of product that needs to be moved is considerably lower than the volume of many other DTC brands. This is because phone sales simply don’t scale.?
• The cadence of wine club shipments leaves product gaps that can be filled with a phone sale order.
• Although buyers across all demographics increasingly buy online, older buyers are familiar with buying over the phone.
• It’s not a cold call; they are already in the winery’s ecosystem either as a member or existing eComm buyers.
• The winery doesn’t need to get any credit card information over the phone if you already have it on file, reducing the scammy feel of many telesales calls and the opportunity to earn the veto vote.?

I included a few tips on best practices for telesales, but please comment below with what works for your winery:

• Position the offer as unique, scarce, or new and unavailable to anyone else. Consider calling buyers before the product is publicly available or when you are about to run out. Telesales is an opportunity to use your segmentation. If you know a customer likes a particular wine, by all means, let them know if it will be out of stock soon.?
• Close the call by asking them to let you know if they need anything, maybe a reservation at the tasting room.
• Make sure you read the prospect's notes before jumping on the call. For example, know what they’ve purchased, where they live, their anniversary, etc.

If you are the owner/gm/winemaker, assign someone to get trained! If you are considering incorporating wine sales into your marketing mix and plan to do it in-house, WISE has an outbound telesales certification course.?

Inbound Calls

While no one specifically discussed the importance of inbound calls, I wanted to drop it in here.

Inbound telephone calls to book tasting room reservations and purchase wine have increased with the rise of mobile usage. Sometimes it's easier to hit the click-to-call button on your website with your mobile device than to type in the data needed to complete the desired action.?

Some tips:

• Make sure you have click-to-call on every page of your website
• Staff your phones with people trained to help with orders and reservations.?
• If they need something from another department, HELP them. Don’t make them call back.?

CUSTOMER CHOICE

Customer choice occurred several times in both the sessions and the DTC breakout roundtable.? Let customers decide:

• How do they want to be contacted
• Which products do they want in their shipment
• A general manager from a mid-sized winery reported that most customers don’t use the customization option but that it is a huge selling point for club membership.?

SEGMENTATION & PERSONALIZATION

Segmentation and personalization allow wineries to take a more strategic communication approach. By carefully selecting and targeting specific customer segments, wineries can craft more personalized communication that increases revenue. I covered this extensively in this article:??

EMAIL CAPTURE

Building clean first-party data (web visitors, eCommerce buyers, social followers, etc.)? is vital to achieving your sales goals. At the Oregon Wine Symposium, we learned that many tasting rooms do not capture all visitors’ emails.??

While you can use your geofencing advertising for retargeting after they leave the property, it’s much less expensive to incentivize customers when they have their experience. For example, at a Fortune 500 brand I worked with, we activated incentives around what we called the customers’ ‘happiest moment’ to keep them in the ecosystem.? For wine, the happiest moment can be in the tasting room.? Make the most of that experience for them and for your winery!?

The tasting room experience is a brand trial, not a genuine customer yet. Much of the selling will take place after that moment.? You don’t want them to remain potential customers and not valuable community members. The image I think of is water streaming through a colander. As few tasting room consumers should slip through the holes in your colander as possible.?

At the DTC Wine Symposium, WineDirect shared a 2022 statistic that 22% of onsite sales were from guests who gave no details and are now untraceable.?

Incentivize both your staff and the consumer.? Make it worth the consumers’? time and privacy invasion to give you their email. Think outside the box on this; wineries need to differentiate their incentives.?

GIFTING

Every month a small percentage of revenue is sales with gift intent. However, as gift sales begin to rise into the holiday season, that percentage can increase up to 25 percent.?

Gifting is a year-round opportunity with peaks around the major holidays. But, again, this is where segmenting and personalization can pay off. If you know who your gifters are, you can create activations around this group for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, etc.?

DATA, DATA, DATA

In both the Oregon Wine Symposium and the DTC Wine Symposium last month in California, there was a significant amount of data. I heard from a couple of consultants and wineries that they don’t have enough data. And I don’t think that’s the case. ? Wineries don’t know which data to flush down the toilet and what questions to ask the remaining data points.?

Much of the data is super macro, and there was little in the way of what actionable steps individual wineries should take to make the best use of it. And, confusingly, at first glance some of the data negates other data presentations.??

My recommendations:

• Focus on creating actionable tasks for your team based on your own data. Certainly, listen to the more extensive macro presentations, but understand how your specific winery is performing?
• Identify the gaps in your winery’s performance
• Take a course in fundamental analytics analysis and hire someone to evaluate the data objectively. We all have data bias regarding our own businesses.?

Data is only as good as the questions you ask, how it responds, and the actionable insights you can create from it. It is one of the most sought-after services that I do for both wineries and other verticals. Knowing your baseline metrics helps build confidence to take the next step for your business.?

These are my broader recommendation for the wine industry:

1. You need an industry-wide aggressive campaign that addresses the double-digit rise of your competitive set and the reluctance of younger alcoholic drinkers to pick wine over other products. A couple of creative agencies have successfully tackled the importance of place and how that makes products desirable. However, wine will continue to slide in relevance without a better-funded and coordinated campaign. Somebody work on this!
2. Work more closely with the Oregon Wine Board, the Oregon Wine Growers Association, your local travel bureaus, and other partners. Neil Ferguson was offering to help and to reach out to him. That man should never have to pay for another lunch again because you should all be taking him out and picking his brain.?

Let’s connect if you have some questions!? Thanks again Oregon!? Let’s dig in!