2. Wine Reviews: Reviews allow customers to provide you with valuable feedback -- feedback that companies in other industries need to pay market researchers and focus groups to obtain. Reviews allow for transparency and honesty- in turn, building credibility. If you're not displaying wine reviews or allowing customers to submit their own reviews then you're missing the boat to success and greater sales.
3. Age Verification: A must. Before I get intothe shopping process, or while I'm going through checkout, my age must be verified. Hear's a great resource for Age Verification: Ideology
4. Google Tools: Make sure Google knows you are out there with Google Webmaster Tools. Then, figure out how people are searching for and finding your wines with Google Analytics .
5. Sitemaps: Have an XML sitemap and Robots.txt file. These enable website owners to list all pages that should be indexed in a given domain. First, XML sitemap : when the search engines find the sitemap, they essentially have a list of URLs they now know need to be crawled. The second file created is a robot.txt file. When a search engine spider finds a homepage it will check to see if a robots.txt file exists. This file points to the XML Sitemap file, essentially enabling the sitemap to be found automatically--once the spider finds the domain itself. If your store does not allow for this or is not search engine friendly, checkout Nexternal's Search Engine Friendly eCommerce System.
6. Marketplace Feeds: Having numerous channels to drive traffic from is crucial to any online business. Here are some marketplaces anyone in the wine industry should be using- Snooth, Wine Searcher, Google Product Search
7. Social Media Links/Pages: With the recent craze and adoption of social media, it is now recommended for wine industry merchants to have a Facebook and Twitter page, along with other wine specific social networks pages: Wine 2.0, Open Wine Consortium, Cork'd. Here are some tips for updating Facebook: Ways of Updating Facebook - http://bit.ly/9nApNi
8. Shipping Map: The added convenience of seeing where a winery or wine shop ships to is huge. I recommend spending a couple minutes putting together a US Map highlighting the states you ship to. It should look like this:
9. Mailing List Sign Up: Direct communication with new and existing customers is still very effective for generating future sales. Sending out coupons, event reminders and important updates or releases are great ways to continue communicating with customer's once they've left the store. Make sure you have a way for them to join your mailing list.
10. Wine Club: It amazes me that some wineries and wine stores still don't have or offer Wine Clubs. Everyone enjoys being a member of some exclusive especially when it gives them a way to save money. Whether it be a Case Club which helps raise the amount of wine customer's purchase or a Recurring Wine Club which ensures future revenue, give your customer's a reason to come back and have more of the wine you sell or produce. If you need a wine club management system check out Nexternal's.
11. Winery/Store Events: For some vineyards/wineries/stores events can be influential in generating sales. Tastings, Concerts, Dinners, and Meet the X events can be great ways to create new revenue streams or get customers in the door. Tell me if I need to: make a tasting appointment, schedule a tour, attend an exclusive dinner/concert/barrel tasting. Tip: Create demand and higher prices by keeping spots available or attendance limited.
12. Awards: An award telling a customer this wine is "best of" or "great" gives them a reason to try it out or pay a higher price for it. If your winery/wine/store has won an award show it to the customer. If you haven't won any awards submit your wines for review or make better wine.
These 12 don't say it all but they're a great starting point. TAKE YOUR TIME while implementing these. The time and effort you put in prove invaluable in the development of your unique and memorable BRAND and pay dividends toward the success of your online winery.
React Below :
1. Are there other factors or tools which you consider crucial to your online store?
2. On a scale of 1 to 5 rank the importance that a wine's Brand has to its online sales.
If you have any comments, questions, thoughts, or additions please let me know.
Bobby, your point about the importance of Brand is particularly relevant for winery websites where the story of the business is the story of the wine being sold. The picture is somewhat different for a retailer selling wine for hundreds or thousands of wineries. The Brand a retailer would promote would be their own and I'm not convinced it is as central to the shopping experience. The retailer certainly needs to make the case that they are legitimate and can be trusted with the customer's credit card information, but once wine has left it's source market factors like price and service may play a more important role.
ReplyDeleteYour business may be mainly winery websites, but I guess I wanted to make the point that there is another type of online wine store that has slightly different qualities.