My Latest in Oregon Wine Press:
Bigger Slice
Wineries aim to capture more DTC sales
By L.M. Archer
Data doesn’t have to be dry. Recently, Kari Scott, marketing manager of WineDirect, and Cathy Huyghe, co-founder and CEO of Enolytics offered Oregon wineries some insights on how to increase a slice of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales pie, one delectable byte at a time.
Slicing and Dicing
With spring club shipments and the tasting room season underway, the dynamic duo’s Oregon Wine Symposium seminar “DTC Sales Report: Oregon Edition” proved especially timely. WineDirect delivered the data, and Enolytics provided the technology to analyze it. The two sliced and diced Oregon-specific DTC data from more than 2 million anonymized transactions totaling $700 million from 150-plus Oregon wineries over the past five years, broken out by 17 specific attributes like AVA, gender and generation.
With data as a backdrop, they directed a deep dive into Oregon’s dynamic DTC sales channels: wine clubs, events, tasting rooms (points of sale), telemarketing and websites, coupled with valuable takeaways and benchmarking strategies.
Superpowers and Opportunities
Compared to DTC sales channels in California and Washington, Scott notes Oregon’s “huge” growth in both website and club sales in 2021 over 2019. “They’re seeing just great performance of pre-pandemic levels,” she explains, “Smashing any kind of records set before — applauding the pivots that were made during 2021 — all of these new techniques, marketing operations and new strategies that were adopted are continuing to perform and succeed at bringing success to Oregon wineries.”
Conversely, telemarketing in Oregon dipped 36.8%. “Even though telemarketing is still a small piece of the DTC ecosystem,” Huyghe says, “We have seen other instances, and other geographies, where telemarketing has actually gone through the roof. So, it’s definitely an opportunity for Oregon to grow.”
Tasting rooms, traditional points of sale (POS) for Oregon wineries, also showed room for growth as tasting rooms evolve and change post-COVID. “What we’ve learned through COVID is that the experience needs to be different,” Huyghe says. “The offerings need to be different and even can get really specific around the profile and the generation of people who walk through your door.” READ MORE HERE.