Want to Get a Grip on Your Revenue? Data is Your Handle
Knowing your customer and tracking their buying helps you understand and predict changes to your winery's revenue.
Feeling a disconnect between your business strategy? Have you found you and your team pondering why perfect execution resulted in underwhelming results? This often comes from not having clear enough and deep enough visibility into what actually drives your winery’s results.
Here is a simple example. You track the number of new customers you get each year. Hopefully you also track how much they spend. So each month you can compare how you are doing on the total number of new customers and the total revenue from them. However, do you understand the type and quality of your new customers? For example, what percentage are also new club members? Clearly that impacts your longer term growth. Did they buy your wine onsite or online? Do you know the relative conversion rate and timing for a second purchase for those two groups? Where are they from and do you know the 18 month value of a new customer from California versus Kansas? The significant “signal” for your winery may differ, but you can find them whether it turns out to be the value of the first purchase, gender, age, where they live, etc.
Once you dial that in, you now get rich feedback on your marketing/advertising/branding activities. Which of your investments in this area helped acquire new customers? Is one campaign getting a higher value customer than others? If so, shift your efforts and investments to capitalize on it.
As you can see, this level of detail helps you strengthen your short and long term revenue forecast, your marketing, and more. You know who you want as a new customer, whether your marketing brings them to you, and could adjust and improve your customer acquisition efforts. In other words, you now have a grip on your business. You know the 12 month, 24 month and 3 year lifetime value of customers. You can accurately project future revenue. In that manner, new customers can serve as a validation of past actions and a strong bellwether for future revenue. You receive an early signal of changes to your winery’s revenue because you’ll see the leading indicators, whether it is new customers, lapsed customers, club buying behavior and more. Once you get these metrics captured and tracked at the right level of detail, you’ve closed the gap between your actions and your winery’s performance.
