Educational webinar series, in partnership with WISE (Wine Industry Sales Education).

Panel: Liz Mercer (Instructor, WISE Academy) · Ivy Thompson (DTC Manager, Center of Effort Wines) · Ken Morrison (President & Proprietor, K&M Wines) · Joey Sheldon (Brand Ambassador, Simpson Family Estates — Aurora Cellars & Good Harbor Vineyards) · Chris Huyghe (Enolytics, platform demo). Moderated by the Enolytics host.

Cathy: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being here for another in our educational webinar series, in partnership with WISE — the Wine Industry Sales Education — and our friend Liz Mercer.

I see people coming in, and since we're recording this webinar, as always, we're gonna start out of respect for your time. We'll share the recording afterward. Give me one second — I'm going to switch over to the slide I want, and we'll start with introductions.

The Wine Sales Multiplier is our topic for today: Enolytics in partnership with WISE, here to talk about top tips to multiply your sales.

We've queued up an exceptional panel, and we'll go through their sections one at a time. Liz Mercer, instructor at WISE Academy. Joey Sheldon, brand ambassador for Aurora Cellars — if you haven't heard of Aurora or Simpson Family Estates, they're in Michigan, and we're excited about the geographic diversity we're bringing to this panel. Ken Morrison, president and proprietor of K&M Wines. And Ivy Thompson, DTC Manager at Center of Effort Wines.

It's a dynamic panel, especially in the mix of people new and not new to wine data. Ken and Ivy are newer to Enolytics, and they'll talk about how new or not they are to technology and data in general. Joey has been with us for a while. So we've got a nice diversity of participants.

Today we're going to talk about tips to multiply your wine sales — using your own data to do so. I'm gonna jump right in with Liz. Liz, there have been significant changes within Enolytics that were inspired, guided, and influenced by WISE. I wondered if you could start there.

Liz: We started our conversation several years ago from a WISE perspective — here's what we should be doing, and here's what top-performing wineries are doing. But we lacked a way to see that on a day-to-day basis, a regular way to coach our teams.

When we started, Chris brought up the idea: "What if we had a WISE button, where on a daily basis you can see how your team is doing?" From there, it exploded — the WISE Triple Score. Are we asking for the order? Are we asking every guest who isn't an existing club member, with that warm invitation to club? And are we using data capture to grow our mailing list and fill our pipeline?

I was so excited. We already had the sales summary and the KPIs, but when we added that button, it became actionable so quickly.

Liz: Some of our areas have traffic down, some are flat. Let's do a quick handful. Ivy, are you up, flat, or down? And then Joey and Ken — a barometer on traffic.

Ivy: We're down a little. I did my reporting for last month, and we're down — enough to say that we're down.

Cathy: Joey, you're flat?

Joey: Surprisingly, our traffic's a little up — it's shifting. The weekdays are quiet, but overall we're holding in there, even though it doesn't feel that way.

Liz: And the WISE Triple Score gave us that opportunity. No matter what was happening with traffic, we could coach in the day, for the day — instead of waiting for the month or the quarter to end.

Liz: And then we took it a step further. Beyond the WISE Triple Score, we said—

Cathy: Excuse me, Liz — let me interrupt and point this out. What we've highlighted on this screen are the three components of the WISE Triple Score: guest account usage, wine club conversion, and wine order conversion — and how they show up in the data. Because the data's refreshed every 24 hours, you're keeping your finger on the pulse all the time.

Liz: And not only average order value — my other favorite is average bottles per order. Are we moving the needle because we took price increases, or because we shifted our mix and brought in higher-price-point wines? Or is it because our team is selling more bottles per order? Looking at that in a multi-layered view was critical.

Cathy: Joey, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to Liz's question — you're pretty flat in terms of traffic.

Joey: Up in northern Michigan, we had a pretty horrible Q1 for weather. Our season traditionally starts around Memorial Day, but we consider Father's Day the kickoff — and that's this week. Here we go.

Cathy: Happy Father's Day in advance. Let's go.

Liz: Then we looked at how this overlaid. A lot of wineries look at the end of the day: How did our servers do? How many tasters did they have, how many orders, maybe how much revenue? And that was it. One of the things I always appreciated about Enolytics is that you took it a step further and said, "Well, it's a ratio." If you have a part-timer who only works weekends, or one weekend a month, it creates a level playing field for them against people who work four or five days a week.

When we go to the next slide — and I love that I can move all these columns wherever I want. I drag and drop the ones I like; that's my personal view. I move those conversion rates closer together so I can see them all and see the team. In our sample set here, it's a level playing field now.

Cathy: Here, Chris is highlighting different parts of this screen. The theme of this webinar is to multiply sales — keeping track of them, literally keeping your finger on the pulse — and this is one of the ways to do that. It's super easy, super visual, right here in front of you, and, to Liz's point, it's equalized. It's not skewed toward somebody who works all the time versus somebody who's there on a partial basis.

Liz: And it lets managers pivot their coaching, so you're not giving a blanket conversation to everybody on the team. It's targeted and personal. And daily — let's catch people doing things right.

Cathy: There's a lot to celebrate. And this is a dummy data set — nobody's actual data. But what we can also do here is say, "This person's doing an incredible job."

Liz: Let's find out what that person's doing so well and use it to train their colleagues. Maybe buddy them up with somebody who's struggling or isn't as strong — all kinds of ways we can work with the individual on a level playing field.

Cathy: Multiplying sales from within your own sales team. Anything else on this, Liz?

Liz: Keep an eye on the DTC Snapshot.

Cathy: Yes — let's see how everybody else is doing. The DTC Snapshot, if you haven't heard of it, is our monthly update on the entire industry. It goes out the first or second day of the month, and WISE has a component and analysis of the Triple Score that month. It's an up-to-date finger on the pulse again.

Cathy: We're gonna shift to our first co-panelist, Ivy Thompson from Center of Effort. Welcome, Ivy. I'd like to invite you to talk about defining your objective — and this is coming from Liz: we're not talking about your goals per se, but your objective. I'll hand the mic to you.

Ivy: My name's Ivy. I'm the DTC Manager at Center of Effort Winery in the Edna Valley, San Luis Obispo, California. The exciting thing when I was asked to be on this panel was realizing how much it aligned with a project I'd done for my MBA program.

My project was initially to look at all of our systems, audit them, and see their different capabilities and scalability. When I went into it, I thought I'd be asking for an entirely new CRM — but I found more than that. A lot of people on this webinar probably have very similar systems, or variations of them. I've talked to a professional at every single one of these systems and done several meetings, and I learned that we already have a lot of the systems in place.

A lot of it was figuring out how to maximize them, and ultimately getting to the objective: having a single source of truth. I'm sure most everybody wears a lot of hats. I can speak for myself — we're a smaller winery, running wine club, hospitality, events, and the tasting room. You want your reporting to be easy and all of your truths in one place.

The last eight weeks I've also been trialing Enolytics, and we're right there. I've been talking to Chris every week, and they've been incredible. That's ultimately how I landed. The next slide shows where our systems were. The way it made sense in my brain: OrderPort's great. We run club and all of our sales through it. But there wasn't a linear way that our data was funneling. I wanted all of our customer information to exist in one system, ultimately to make those sales.

When I came into this job, everybody has a lot of exciting ideas. I went to the DTC Symposium in January and sat in on all these marketing meetings — learning about A/B testing and wanting to do all these exciting things. Then I realized I needed to identify the root cause of where the fragmentation was happening in order to scale, hyper-segment, and target our guests in a more automated way — another thing I've been working on with Chris and Enolytics.

Cathy: Ivy, I want to advance, but let me hover here for a second. Congratulations — I don't know that you took this job knowing you'd be auditing a tech stack. Good for you. And I want to underscore that you're not necessarily an engineer or tech person—

Ivy: No.

Cathy: —but you're wearing many hats, and this is possible. What I especially appreciate is the effort — getting in there, jumping in with both feet, and look what could happen as a result. Also, everybody, Ivy is a scholarship recipient of WISE. Liz, can you talk about that for a second?

Liz: WISE launched our scholarship program last year, and Ivy was one of our first recipients. We segmented — speaking of segmentation — who are the frontline leaders, the rising stars in our industry walking into their first roles. And then we identified managers, Ivy among them, who are leading the charge and are the next generation of leadership we wanted to develop. We launched the scholarship last year and presented at DTC Symposium.

Cathy: Getting back to your narrative, Ivy — all of the information is available, all the resources are available. It takes somebody with initiative, like yourself, to get in there and put these things together.

Ivy: I appreciate you saying that. It all ties in. The first class I got to take with WISE this year was the DTC Metrics one in February — all while I was also in a change management class in school, doing a socio-technical systems change project. Everything in my brain was like, "This all has to connect somehow." That's ultimately how I was able to do this project.

To your point, the resources are there. The customer service at OrderPort — this is my plug — I'm getting consistent help. Whenever I have a question, bless Alyssa, she's the best person in the world. She helped me build the whole club, because I'd never run a club with OrderPort. The resources being there, and the people willing to help — I can't express how many people I've asked, "What if you hopped on a call with me and showed me how to do this?" It's been a great journey with a lot of help, and these systems we use are awesome. There's a reason these are all the systems a lot of us are seeing. This is where I want to see us moving at Center of Effort — all of our information funneling through one single source of truth.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, I'd scratch the surface and then things would start funneling. When we first started working with Enolytics, I realized while importing our data that our SKUs were not all the same. When we were doing the mapping, I was like, "Why?" It wasn't something I planned on doing, but data standardization is ultimately going to help me multiply sales by being able to automate within Enolytics. If this person bought this Pinot, I don't have to wonder which Pinot it was, even though they're all the same.

Cathy: This is a journey, and that's the friction point people sometimes get frustrated by — if the data's not visualizing the way they think it should, and they don't understand how to go back and correct it so it's correct moving forward. That's absolutely a friction point. It takes effort to correct, and once you do, you're good to go moving forward. Hats off to you for getting in there and making those changes.

Ivy: That's another one — I called my girl at OrderPort, and she said, "We can do a mass SKU update on certain parts of the SKUs." Asking for help and identifying the issue. My team is awesome. When we've noticed data discrepancies, I've had a pile of papers and said, "Today we're cleaning up all of these birthdays," or whatever it is. Specifically on Super Bowl Sunday, when we weren't busy — as most wineries aren't — we sat down and a lot of us were checking boxes and fixing things. Shout out to my team; they've put up with me, but they've also seen the light at the end of the tunnel: "Does this mean people are going to say they're getting our emails?" And I say, "Yes."

When you have people who are customer-facing and you give them the ability to see that what I'm asking them to do directly helps their communication with the guest — that's been another great resource for relating to them. It wasn't that long ago that I was on the floor. My first tasting room job was about eight or nine years ago, so I remember being on the front line.

Liz: I love that you said you're sharing the objective — yes, people will then read our emails, and we'll have more engagement in more channels with more fans. If that's our objective, it becomes the litmus test: does this technology decision, does this activity, support what we're trying to do? And when your team starts coming to you and asking those questions — that's nirvana. It's awesome.

Ivy: Going off that, it's back to goals versus objectives. The goals, I'm sure a lot of us have the same ones — lower attrition, higher retention, more sales. A lot of people probably listened to the SVB report last week. The way we're going to do it, especially if traffic is staying lower or flat, is—

Cathy: Unpredictable.

Ivy: Yeah. Anything after COVID has been really hard to predict in terms of traffic. So the excitement is around how we generate sales when people aren't coming in — corporate gifting, segmentation of guests. I tell my team, "The data you put in helps all of us." You're signing them up; I'm doing the part where I want to keep them here. You learning that their son is at Cal Poly, that they live in the Bay Area, that they love to golf — all these little things are going to help us send better communication to them in the future.

So the objective is that we want to see this through, and the goal is always that all of us want to sell wine and make money at the end of the day. The next slide shows what I learned through all these audits. When I went in wanting to maybe switch systems — which feels naive now — what we really wanted was clean and easy. We're moving toward more automated marketing communications so we have more consistent communication, and toward a better product and SKU structure. Those are the unsexy parts of marketing, but having really good SKU nomenclature that transfers well, plus really clean data on our guests, is ultimately how we're going to hit our objective.

Cathy: I love that, Ivy. There are a lot of unsexy, unglamorous parts of this — but guess what? It leads to sexy results.

Ivy: It does, and there's longevity behind it. Once you have those standards and SOPs in place — "This is how we make a SKU. This is how we enter a guest. This is why we enter a guest this way" — giving the why has been a big win for me and my team. The good email you put in for this person is a win for all of us, because then the follow-up is there. The why translates well to the objectives. And the key takeaway: it wasn't a systems failure by any means. We had a lot of things we needed to do on our end to be able to scale. We all want to sell wine.

Cathy: Thank you, Ivy. The theme again is multiply your DTC sales — and you need a foundational multiplier. That's great data.

Cathy: We're gonna shift to Ken Morrison from K&M Wines. Ken, can you introduce your winery?

Ken: We're a small winery with a very small vineyard — about four acres, which represents about 25% of the wines we produce and sell. We've been selling wine since 2009, although our vineyard was planted in 1983. I've had a tasting room for the last 15 years. It's in a small town in Oregon, Carlton — kind of the epicenter of wine. Ninety-nine percent of our sales are direct-to-consumer. My background is more in marketing for larger consumer brands.

What's exciting about the wine business for me now is all this wonderful technology — things we were able to do 15 years ago only with a whole stat team and crazy stuff. Now it's accessible. I'm a one-person marketing show, but all these tools — RedChirp, Enolytics, Commerce7, Klaviyo — are very powerful, and it's something we couldn't do even five years ago.

I'm a new Enolytics customer. I ran into Liz at the Oregon Wine Symposium and she said they were partnering with Enolytics, and I'm an old WISE customer — at least 15 years. 2011 was my first WISE class; it was tasting room selling tactics. For me it was a little expensive — my internet's unstable, I'm on Starlink, so if I drop off, that's why — but I said, "I'll invest the money," and the payoff was immediate. So when Liz endorsed Enolytics as a great tool, I believed her and decided to take the plunge. I'm relatively new, but there are some exciting things I'm seeing.

Cathy: When we were talking about the panelists for this, Liz said, "Ken is all in on the technology." I appreciate that you came into the wine industry with all these tools available — you know what's possible, you know what can be done. And to underscore what Ivy was saying earlier, these tools are here, they're available to us, and the bar's been raised in the past few years about what these wine-specific tools can do.

Ken: It's incredible. We had 60 people in direct marketing doing things, and now I have so much hands-on access to data and understand my customers so much better. The Triple Score and the prominence of the reporting have been elevated. I'm not at 100% on guest account usage, but the tool is there to train my people or to work with the people who help me.

And there are some great tools — guest check-in. I have the little NFC tag; guests can scan a QR code, scan a tag, or scan a card. It makes it so much easier than it's ever been.

Cathy: Excuse me, Ken — this is a RedChirp feature that was also largely inspired by Liz and WISE, where the guests themselves scan the QR code. The idea with guest check-in is wanting to make things as easy as possible for teams, especially in high-volume tasting rooms — or in Joey's situation, where in the summer months you've got a line out the door, but we're missing all those people. We're not capturing their contact data. How can we make that easier for wineries? RedChirp came up with a technology solution Ken has adopted, called Guest Check-In. If you're a RedChirp client, it's already in your system — you just turn it on and set your parameters for how strict you want to be with double opt-in, and what language to use. It auto-loads the information from their phone when they scan the code or tap the near-field button — however you want it to look, a sticker or whatever — which are insanely cheap, like pennies, to have a little sticker that you put your phone on. Right, Ken? That's what you're doing.

Ken: Yeah, it's incredible. And then you don't have any data errors — the person's information auto-populates, and you have a new contact while they're there. When they go to check out, they flow right into the POS system as well as RedChirp, and you can give them an incentive. We give a special pour for the people who opt in that way. Then you have automations — you can get them on a Klaviyo welcome campaign. Or you can move them into "they purchased but didn't join the wine club, let's start that communication." And it's instant. We don't have to think about it. You don't have to have a team of 15 behind you anymore.

That's something we're working on with my coaching — I feel like it's coaching with Chris as I get onboarded onto Enolytics. There's tons of potential for automations, things that are complicated to do from Commerce7, such as a club anniversary. Welcome emails are pretty straightforward, but you can add as much complexity as you want. You can make the anniversary time-specific, so someone who's been in longer gets a different message than someone who's been in a year. Our club members are so valuable that that appreciation and acknowledgment is key. I'm working on a lot of those automations, but anything you can think of, if the data's there, you can make it happen.

Cathy: Chris, I'd love to ask you to take yourself off mute, Coach Chris, and see if there's anything you'd like to add on the automations or hyper-segmentation. That may be the first time you've been referred to as a coach — consultant, yes — but is there anything you'd like to add?

Chris: Ken is right, and Ken is at a small winery — like he said, a team of one for marketing. Being able to automate is going to save so much time. He automates it, and it runs in perpetuity until he stops it. The smart thing is to make sure you automate the right way and the right things. Hyper-segmentation is important. When you have club members who already got a discount, sending them a coupon isn't the right thing to do. But you can start looking at club members who live close — maybe you invite them for a free tasting with friends, and you add more people to it. For club members who live far away, maybe you do loyalty points. You can automate all of these things and start thinking about maybe 30, 40, 50 automations running. But be smart about it, and don't over-communicate with people. In Enolytics, you have all these filters that say, "Back down a little — you're over-communicating." The frequency risk, as we call it, is too high, and Enolytics will make sure you're not sending it. I'd absolutely encourage everyone to start thinking about automations. You can put that in the background and start doing the things you need to do, and that you're good at, instead of rerunning the same campaigns over and over manually.

Cathy: Ken, you'd said once that one of the outcomes is that it saves you time, so you have that extra hour to be creative.

Ken: On the hyper-segmentation front — an example. We had a big club event this past weekend. Maybe five days in advance, I was meeting with Chris, and we said, "Let's look at people who are likely to buy our two new Rosés." We looked at that in the Sell More Now feature, and then paired it with people who made that list and were also attending our upcoming party. There were maybe 25 of them eligible for the new Rosés. We found those people, sent them to RedChirp very easily, and I did a text campaign to about 17 people. I only sold one case directly from that text, but those 17 people at the party bought a lot of Rosé — one of the Rosés was our top seller for the weekend. It also put in the customer's mind that there were going to be great opportunities at the club event to get some extra savings. That was something I could do very quickly.

After the party, I met with Chris again, and we said, "Let's see who made a purchase at the party." That was about 46 people. I could have found those through my normal Commerce7 data mining, but it would take time — I'd have to create a custom tag and upload it, or it syncs with Klaviyo. In this case, I found the people, sent it over, and could easily split my message: "Thanks for buying at our party" for some, and "Thank you for coming to the party — we're extending the savings throughout the week, since you might not have wanted to take wine on such a hot day" for the rest. That was about 15 or 20 minutes of thought, sent over and done. People like that acknowledgment.

Cathy: We're effectively adding another layer here. Starting with Ivy and the foundation of clean data and the right systems for the right people at the right time, and now layering in what you're talking about — using that data. It's ready for you now, ready to go. Anything to add?

Ken: Relevancy is what comes up for me as you talk about hyper-segmentation. I'm on a lot of mailing lists — winery lists, other CPG — and it's always shocking how other companies get it right. They know what I like, and the emails generally feel targeted to me: "Oh yeah, I do need that," or "How do they know?" It's honestly a little creepy. But then I get the wine emails, and it's the blanket email, and I think, "I don't feel like you know me." It can be better. Seventeen people, to my earlier point.

Even some basic things — you send out an offer, I respond to the offer, and then I get the offer again. It's like, "Did you know that I bought?" It's little subtle things you can do to not send the offer again to someone who already took advantage of it.

I don't know if everyone got it, but today Cathy sent a great email: "It's Rosé season — here's how to find your Rosé buyers." I have a situation I was talking about with Chris. I have this sparkling wine we haven't done since 2020, and now we're doing it again in 2025, and I'm excited about it. We haven't sold 20 bottles in the last month. The tool was a little different, but I easily went in and said, "Anybody who's ever bought sparkling Rosé in the past," then ranked them all. Within that, I could see people who tend to buy cases, or people who've bought 84 bottles of sparkling Rosé in the past. I have a pretty small list — I think about 350 people who bought sparkling Rosé — but 50 are case buyers who bought more than 12 bottles, and those people are ripe for "our new sparkling Rosé is out. You've asked for it." It's things like that that are so quick. And the customer will be excited, because they asked about it — it's relevant, and they feel like you know them.

I know them when they pop into the tasting room, usually. But to be able to know them in a different way is such a powerful tool.

Cathy: That's the power of the technology. I want to segue to Joey Sheldon — and thank you, Ken, for mentioning that Rosé email today. If you didn't receive it, you can find it on Enolytics 101 on the website. Chris called out two different pathways to sell more Rosé: one if you're hyper-segmenting to a short list, and one if you're building the list yourself and widening the net. It's a step-by-step process for how to create that list. Ken, thank you.

Cathy: Joey Sheldon, shifting gears to you. Can you tell us about your winery in Michigan and what's happening there?

Joey: I'm smiling because I realized my name on Zoom says Joey Simpson. I tease the owners of the winery that they need to adopt me — I'll say it officially happened. I work for Simpson Family Estates, which owns both Aurora Cellars and Good Harbor Vineyards, both up in the Leelanau Peninsula in northern Michigan. I'm grateful to be asked to speak. When I heard this relentless focus on conversion, my head immediately went to wine club — that's often what we mean when we talk about conversion. But then I started digging deeper, thinking about all the people who might be on this webinar and where we might each be.

So I have a question — if people are willing to put answers in the chat, that'd be great. Cathy, would you mind going to the slide with all four options? Right now at your winery, is your primary focus for your wine club acquisition (getting new members), retention (keeping current members), monetization (getting existing members to buy more wine), or reactivation (winning back lapsed members)? Depending on where you're at—

Cathy: Maggie said, "All of the above."

Joey: It's easy to say that — yes, please, to all of them. Depending on where you are in your wine club journey, these things can all look different. For us, in the past couple of years, one and two have taken the front seat: getting new members in and trying to keep them, bringing down our churn rate, and making sure people stay in our club.

What I want to talk about is number three: getting existing members to buy more wine. Our club is a two-allocation-per-year club, but we've stopped looking at it as a two-allocation-per-year revenue stream. We now treat our club as a pre-qualified pool of our highest-intention buyers. So instead of asking how we get people into our club or how we keep them, we're now asking, "What else do our club members want to buy?"

Cathy: Joey, can I ask — is that strategy a reaction to inconsistent traffic?

Joey: Yes and no. The reality up here in northern Michigan is that both wineries are essentially 100% walk-in. The industry up here hasn't really moved toward reservations, and the consumer up here doesn't love reservations — which is fine, that's great. But it creates inconsistency. If we say, "Every year we want to sign up X number of wine club members," but 100% of our traffic is walk-in, we don't know day-to-day what that's going to look like. So part of it is just the ecosystem we're living in, and part of it is that, the past couple of years, who knows where our traffic's going to be.

Another big part is that our teams at both wineries are really great at signing up club members, so acquisition is fantastic, and retention is always something we're looking to increase. But the monetization element brings the whole picture together. To throw out numbers: at our wineries, club members make up almost 40% of our tasting room sales — and this is not including their allocation; this is straight-up tasting room sales, about 30 to 40%. And 85% of our web sales come from club members. They're not a two-allocation-a-year revenue stream for us. They're a backbone for all our different channels — our most active omni-channel buyer.

Chris: That's not too different from the average winery in the US, by the way. You've got to think about your club members as gold. It comes back to that retention thing — they're all linked together. Currently, when you look at what's going on with clubs, the acquisition percentage is about 20%, the attrition percentage is about 25%, and the average club in the US is declining by 5% a year. We have to focus on both: bring acquisition up and attrition down. By doing that, you're playing into number three, monetization, because those are the people who buy on the web, who bring others as guests, who make your winery flourish. What you're doing makes a lot of sense.

Joey: I want to distinguish — retention and monetization go hand in hand, but with retention, when you focus on keeping current members, at least on our team, our brains kept going to deeper discounts or bigger sales: "How can we keep them?" Whereas with monetization — thinking about what they want to buy next — it's a finer-tooth comb. We go, "Hey, this person bought Rosé last year and hasn't purchased it yet." I'm not offering them a deeper discount; I'm reminding them that they liked Rosé last year, and they probably still like it this year. It's a shift in perspective.

Liz: And I'm going to drink more than one bottle from my shipment with that Rosé. We're often asked to go mystery shop as a wine club member — go into a tasting room, see what the experience is like as a member, and report back. And we're almost never asked to buy wine when we're an existing club member. It's like, "Oh, they're a member, they'll buy wine if they want to," or "I don't want to pester them, they already get our shipments." And I say, "No, no, no." Wine club members are pre-qualified consumers.

I love that you looked at your tasting room revenue, Joey, and realized how much of it is already existing members coming back, bringing their friends — birds of a feather flock together — and asking their friends to join the club. Having a value proposition in place for them, too: "Hey, if your friend joins, you both get..." And I love that you said it doesn't have to be discount-based — it can be experiential: experiences with the winemaker or the family, a VIP hour before a club event, or the velvet rope that only certain club members get to cross. All these things we can do that aren't discount-driven. I love that you bring that up, knowing how much of your revenue comes from wine club members.

Chris: You're absolutely right, Joey, and this is also why we built Sell More Now. If you go to Sell More Now and pitch these wines, they're very high likelihood to convert — and it's not because you're going to sell them, it's like you said, you want to remind them. A lot of people, if they already have the previous five vintages and haven't bought your last one, will be happy you reached out: "Oh my gosh, yes, I definitely want it." It's not always a sale. Sometimes it's the relationship — knowing what they want and presenting it to them.

Cathy: Joey, I want to get back to you and underscore a point Chelsea made in the chat: make sure you aren't running your well dry, and be intentional about the touch points — which you are.

Joey: I lean toward worrying about bothering people or sounding too salesy, and there's merit there. But people are getting sold to constantly, and they're good at saying, "Eh, that email doesn't apply to me." We've seen in our wine club surveys that people aren't mad about the amount of contact we give them. If anything, for us it's about getting down — to Ken's earlier point — to only communicating with the people we know want the things. We do a promotion called Case of the Mondays, where it's a library release, and maybe we only have one case — when it's gone, it's gone. We don't send that email to everybody; we only send it to people who have purchased library wine. And those lists are so easy to find on Enolytics. You guys make it too easy for us.

Cathy: Thank you — "Case of the Mondays," I love that.

Joey: I give Erica Walter full props for that one — that club is an Erica club. She and I were on a Zoom call, she came up with it, and I said, "Yes, I'm stealing that."

Cathy: There's a question from Mark Thompson in the chat, but please finish, and we'll go to Mark's question for everybody afterward. And if anybody has other questions, please drop them in the chat.

Joey: Great question. How many people pay focused attention to geographic proximity — day visitor, weekend visitor, vacation visitor — and treat them differently? This is something we've done for off-season events. In the winter, we don't have as many people up here, so we've sent an email for an event to only people within a 200-mile radius. We're definitely a destination, as I'm sure a lot of wine regions are. A future thing I'd love to implement: all our wine club members who are seasonal residents — here from June through October — I'd love to give them a special tag in our system. We have a lot of them, and being able to grab them as a group would be helpful. Mark, I love that question — geography is a fun thing to play with. We're doing events across the state this summer, and we'll send emails; for example, when we're in Grand Rapids, we'll email all our wine club members in Grand Rapids: "Hey, we're going to be down there — come hang out with us." Those things are easy to do with the tools.

I have one more question for everybody, more food for thought: if you don't know how many purchases your typical club member is making outside of their allocation, you're missing an opportunity. Figure out — are club members making three extra purchases? Are they all web? Are they in the tasting room three extra times? It depends on how your model works, but that's a question to ask yourself, to see what opportunities it presents.

Chris: And that's easy to answer with Enolytics. As this WISE–Enolytics partnership tightens, we're working on a lot of these things — creating cohorts and groups for you that are very easy to find. Stay tuned for a lot of that. If anyone has questions about that or would like to see it, by all means drop us a line.

Cathy: Drop it into the chat. Joey, anything else for your section?

Joey: I think that's it. I'm happy to take questions if anybody has more.

Cathy: We're coming up on time, but we have time for a couple of questions. The idea today was to generate some ideas, to share what we think is some of the creative thought leadership we're seeing right now within our community, and to hear from you. In the meantime, Ivy or Ken, do you have a response to Mark's question about geographic proximity — are people treated differently if they're a day visitor, weekend visitor, or vacation visitor out of state?

Ivy: As people visit, the first thing — whenever I'm walking by, it's expected that our team asks, "So tell me about table whatever." They're visiting their kids at Cal Poly — that's the textbook thing. We had grad weekend, and every person visiting was a Cal Poly parent. It doesn't necessarily change the experience, but it's easy — especially move-in weekend, that's a person who's going to be coming here three times a year, so emphasize the taste. Not necessarily treating them differently, but the way you communicate with them might be a little different in terms of keeping them coming back.

Yesterday I used the map — where are our customers in Enolytics — screenshotted it, and brought it to a P&L meeting. I said, "Look." I'm looking at offsites and where we're doing activations, because we're a small team and want to hone in on where we're going if we're going to go somewhere. I used that yesterday, and it was very helpful.

Cathy: Nice — and visually convincing, right?

Ivy: Visually so easy. "Here are our people. Here's the map."

Liz: Speaking of Cal Poly — they're going to be there for four years. When I managed a tasting room down there, it was, "Oh, you're a Cal Poly parent?" Even if they weren't ready to join the club today — they were so overwhelmed, and all the crying moms (I was one of them; I've dropped mine off at college) — getting their contact data matters, because even if they didn't convert to a club today, I know they're going to be a captive audience for the next four years. Keeping in touch with them, keeping those conversations going. We had a dedicated emphasis on those who didn't convert to club: let's convert them to our mailing list.

Cathy: Ken, any thoughts on what you've found?

Ken: We don't treat them differently, but by asking a lot of questions we find out where they're from and what they're doing, and that helps guide what we offer. If they flew in from California, there's a good chance they flew on Alaska — we can ship a case of wine for free for each person, or they can take it with them and check it for free. We then communicate with them later based on where they're from.

Cathy: I like the question about a day-tripper or overnight visitor from within the state versus someone who walks down the street. We haven't gotten to that granularity, but I think it's a great suggestion.

Cathy: Joey, I wanted to underscore — Lee in the chat said your comment about Michigan rejecting reservations is also seen in California, but wineries seemingly continue to ignore that trend. Any thoughts, Liz?

Liz: Having been in highly regulated counties, sometimes it's beyond our choice — we have to be by reservation only. But the shift we're seeing is, instead of the seated formal 90-minute experience (which is always more than 90 minutes), is there a splash-and-dash type? Is there something we can do to meet them where they are, for spontaneity, and have that experience with them? I agree — what was a necessary evil in years prior has now become a crutch. We're so stuck on the way we used to do things, instead of guests telling us, "No, we want more spontaneity. We want to have our vacation on our terms."

Cathy: I totally agree — we need to meet them where they are.

Cathy: Mr. Huyghe, we're about at time, but anything else you wanted to say?

Chris: I wanted to let everyone know that if you're an Enolytics and WISE customer, you can always ask to have a workshop with Enolytics and WISE for an hour, at no charge — we're happy to look at your data together. And for others, we invite you to check out WISE and Enolytics. I also dropped into the chat: anybody who wants to give Enolytics a try, we have an ROI guarantee happening right now, where it's literally at no cost to you to try Enolytics. It's enolytics.com/demo to find out more. It's popular, and people are seeing results.

Cathy: We're going to wrap up, because it's time and I want to be respectful. Ivy, Ken, Joey, Ms. Mercer, Cathy, and Coach Chris — thank you all very much, and we'll see you next time.