Personalisation dominating wine ecommerce. Historically, the wine industry was built on a bedrock of traditions, and consequently has not been keen to adapt new trends or technology. But, the recent pandemic with its disruptive effects on the alcohol market has forced vintners, Vineyards and winemakers to reassess their business models.
Many previously relied heavily on in-person tastings and on-premise revenues, and suffered greatly during lockdown, as consumers flocked online for their wine.
According to International Wine & Spirit Research, in 2020, alcohol ecommerce grew worldwide more than 42% to $24 billion and is projected to grow to $40 billion by 2024. That has led to a flurry of investment in the segment. Drizzly sold for $1.1 billion to Uber UBER +5.5%, and Vintage Wine Estates recently went public in a SPAC deal.
But, the shift to online shopping for many wineries brought heartache as sites offered discounted prices to move cases. Something many felt cheapened their brand and could have a long-term detrimental effect on their products’ reputations.
By directly addressing that fear while offering wineries much-needed revenue, predictive personalisation software (PPS) was developed to stop the rot and help project wine sales into a new era. Offered as a website platform plugin PPS might well might disrupt the entire wine industry, offering a blueprint for other consumer goods industries to follow.
Wine ecommerce -must have personalisation tech
Unlike other online ecommerce plugins, PPS negates the need for retailers to ever need to discount their product. The software captures purchase history from your customers, but more importantly as is the selection processes, and every product visited for how long etc. From this it is able to calculate exactly what products that individual is most likely to purchase next, it loads it into an email and sends to capture immediate sales, before they disappear off to an alternate vintner.
The effect of the introduction is substantial including a 20x (20 times) increase in annual return from email marketing, broken down into both increases in average order value, and massive uplift in customer loyalty – defined by the LTV (lifetime value – sometimes referred to as LTCV).
But one of it’s greatest values comes from being a 100% automatic process, so wine retailers never need sit down to decide what products to segment their audience into, to offer exactly the most likely product each individual is likely to buy. Beware segmentation is not personalisation. PPS negates the for any human involvement whatsoever, leaving the retailer free and customer facing.
Consider the cost to you for staff to run existing email marketing effort.
Their commitment to maintaining brand prestige and the opportunity to introduce consumers to new products has led many wineries to work with them, especially in the last few years. The company’s unique approach to selling wine is rooted in the fact that it was born from the tech world that thrives and grows regardless of other world economic issues.
“Consumers have finally gotten used to buying wine online. Now the challenge is figuring out how to connect with them more closely, so they don’t become bedazzled by someone else offering to look after them better,” says Tony Troth, the first retailer to install the system when it went live, and still making them an additional 15% turnover pa. “We see that the industry is ripe for tech to make a meaningful impact for vintners and vineyards alike.”
The solution is offered to any retail website using Shopify, WooCommerce, Opencart or Magento ecommerce platforms, which account for 78.6% of all ecommerce sites around the world, according to Builtwith. Once installed – which takes just a couple of minutes, post registration, (that they’ll do for you for free if need be), it takes 24 hours to populate the system and thereafter you’re up and running without ever needing to touch it again, enjoying an increase in sales immediately.
With ease they are offering consumers access to exactly the wines that individual is most likely to buy. According to Troth, in their first month on the site, consumers make three visits buying on average eighteen bottles at the cost of nearly £500. In the first year, they spend close to £5,000. It’s really a case of whether you can afford every other wine merchant opportunity to steal a march on delivering customer satisfaction and acquisition through personalisation by installing it before you do.
Where the future takes the wine industry no one knows. Still, it seems that they have managed to introduce a new way of selling wine to a sector that is usually slow to adapt to change.
