Why Wineries Need to Track Customers' Second Purchase

Why are second purchase measures so important?  Second purchase tells you so much about your winery and your customers.  These are customers ready to build a relationship with your winery. They are the ones who justify all the hard work to get that first purchase.  Without these repeat customers, you can’t predictably grow.  In fact, without these repeat customers, you’ll struggle to grow, or at least to profitably do so.  In addition, understanding who makes a second purchase also creates valuable insight into your (expensive) customer acquisition efforts.  Let’s look closer at what you can learn from tracking second purchases, what to measure, and how to use it to strengthen your winery.

Time to second purchase

Tracking the time to second purchase turns new customer acquisition from an end goal into a leading indicator.

It informs the communication strategy you should use to cultivate a second purchase.  Specifically, you can time your outreach to encourage the second purchase.  This improves your ability to create relationships rather than one-off transactions.  Depending on your overall brand voice and communication strategy, once a new customer passes the date for an expected second purchase, you can put them into a “lapsed/recovery” segment, consider increasing communication frequency, or change the tone of your messaging to recovery messages rather than cultivation messages.

So understanding the timing of a second purchase allows your winery to convert more first time buyers into repeat customers, to understand the timing of that additional revenue, and to more aggressively “save” those new customers who might otherwise drift off after a single purchase.

% of customers making a second purchase

Combine this with the avg time to second purchase to forecast revenue off of customer acquisition rate.  This brings valuable stability and a quantitative way to forecast revenue for your winery.  It also allows you to turn new customer acquisition into a leading indicator for future revenue.  This allows you to more accurately project revenue 3 months and further into the future.

Second purchase value

You want to track this to create a more accurate forecast and also so you can try to lift the value of a customer’s second purchase.  If you understand the types of first time customers and what they buy the second time, you refine your messaging to maximize the value of the second purchase.

Second Purchase Informs Customer Acquisition

As you start to analyze your second purchase metrics, look for differences based on how the customer made their first purchase.  Take into account the buying channel (on premise or online), size of first purchase, variety of first purchase (did they buy merch and wine?), an digital attribution and campaign or messaging themes?  Yes, your acquisition efforts focus on getting a new customer, but not all customers are created equal.  You want to get those customers who make more than one purchase, who provide a chance to cultivate a long relationship, and a second purchase indicates the quality of a new customer.