With more wine clubs popping up seemingly every day, you need to take action to separate yours from that teeming mass of competitors. The solution lies in creating the ultimate personalized shopping experience for each of your valued customers.
Just what is personalization in the context of the wine club industry, how do you go about creating it, and what advantages will it bring to your subscription-based business?
Wine club personalization defined.
Personalization involves paying special attention to the individual traits and preferences of each of your valued customers. Accomplish it with customized recommendations, targeted offers, educational opportunities, and community interactions.
When each patron feels seen and heard as a unique individual, your wine club will go a long way toward retaining its membership for the long term. To that end, personalization involves a multi-pronged approach to making each month’s shipment and the peripherals that accompany it memorable and unique.
With the point of sale equipment furnished by your high-risk payment provider, you can glean a treasure trove of useful information about each client. To make this happen, however, you need to find creative ways to entice people to tell you useful information about themselves, including life milestones, wine preferences, hobbies and interests, etc.
Once you have these details, you can create one-of-a-kind emails for each patron while also being able to group several people into segments that can be used in future marketing and promotional campaigns.
When customers feel recognized and appreciated by virtue of the targeted offers and educational opportunities that you make available, they will naturally feel a connection with your brand.
In order to further expand your reach, you can also invite compatible customer segments to community events related to the wines you most want to highlight.
How to create personalization in your wine club business.
Curating each member’s experience involves several important aspects. They range from setting up a flexible and diversified payment infrastructure, to making each person’s ongoing experience with your brand special through small but highly appreciated gestures.
Personalization starts with the behind-the-scenes systems that streamline your business and optimize the buyer journey at every stage. Your point of sale system should be configured to make recurring billing easy and transparent.
This allows you to set up an arrangement with your customer enabling an agreed-upon monetary amount to be withdrawn from the customer’s credit card or bank account, on a prescribed day each month.
This can go on indefinitely or terminate on a predetermined date. Advantages of recurring billing include greater predictability, intelligent budgeting, enriched and more personalized communications with customers, and greater retention.
Additionally, personalization involves taking a little extra time to pay attention to the small things for your customers. Take a second to dash off a handwritten note of appreciation, or pass along details about this month’s wine selection that you know a particular member will love to learn.
Another tried-and-true trick is to make each person feel like a premium member with limited edition wine releases geared to their specific tastes.
Advantages of personalization.
Taking the time to personalize your wine club offers several advantages both to you and to your members. These include increased loyalty, higher levels of engagement, improved satisfaction rates, and an enhanced reputation for your brand.
In addition to setting your business apart from cookie-cutter competitors who simply distribute wines without much thought or attention to individual members, making a strong effort to personalize your club brings other benefits as well.
For one thing, your customers will become more dedicated to your brand. In many cases, they will reciprocate by buying memberships as gifts or by referring friends and social contacts to your website.
Loyal customers are active brand ambassadors. Not only will they tell their friends and family about your business, but also they may be willing to create their own organic reviews and testimonials that can be shared either on their social media pages or yours.
Customer satisfaction is the holy grail of any company, and offering a curated experience is one of the best ways to achieve it.
When your members are pleased with the monthly offerings you send as well as your transparent business practices, these individuals can become the bedrock of your member community that helps to turn your club into an established force to be reckoned with in the industry.
Important personalization considerations.
As you implement strategies to maximize the personalization practices in your wine club, there are three considerations to keep in mind. Maintain consistency, flexibility, and security at all times.
As with any campaign that you mount to improve your business and maximize the customer experience, personalization requires keeping a few precautions on your radar. Whether your clients interact with you online or in person, be sure that your personalization strategies are consistent across the board.
Also, remember that practices and preferences evolve. One of the best ways to keep your finger on the pulse of current trends is to ask your members what is working and what needs improvement. Then make it your mission to act on the feedback that you receive.
This is yet another way to demonstrate to your members that they are vital members of your brand team.
Finally, never lose sight of the importance of stringent data privacy and security protocols. After all, people are entrusting you with their sensitive payment details and expecting that you will protect their information at all costs.
Your high-risk payment provider should be furnishing you with systems and the accompanying expertise that will ensure that client details remain protected from digital bad actors.
Fostering, maintaining, and enhancing personalization in your wine club is perhaps the single most effective way to boost loyalty, satisfaction, and customer retention rates. At the same time, it is vital to elevate your brand above your many rivals and cement your wine club’s place in an extremely competitive industry.
