The Skalli family hopes that its 20% to 30% growth mandate will have American wine drinkers seeing red — specifically, the Cabernet Sauvignons or Merlots its three California vineyards produce.
For the Napa Valley, CA-based St. Supery Vineyards and Winery, a Skalli family property, this meant focusing on its direct-to-consumer sales. The overwhelming bulk of its sales come through retail outlets. But the 10% generated from direct-to-consumer represented both larger growth potential and higher margin sales.
The database had to coordinate data from a variety of sources, including visits to the winery's tasting room, its Web site, activity within its two consumer clubs, subscription requests for its newsletter and off-site events.
It's an ambitious project for the winery, which had limited its formal segmentation efforts to targeting customers hand-chosen to form its Halo Club. Due to the scarcity of the vintages offered to Halo Club members, St. Supery limited the club's enrollment to 100 individuals, and even customers with higher worth are kept out until there is an opening, although they are able to join the vineyard's Wine Discovery Club. Both clubs are continuity programs that offer regular wine shipments, and have been mailing for 10 years.
The database is being designed by Carolyn Goodman, managing partner of Goodman Marketing Partners Inc. in Marin County, CA. Charlotte, NC-based Quaero was chosen as the database hardware provider. For 2004, Goodman anticipates creating a win-back message campaign, which she hopes will reduce the clubs' 2% attrition rate. It will also allow members of both clubs to occasionally skip a shipment “like the Book-of-the-Month Club,” she said.
Additionally, the database will track a new direct mail program for its clubs. Plans call for a 20,000-to-25,000-piece mailing at the beginning of the year, with an expanded follow up tentatively scheduled for April or May.
The mailings will target a combination of food and wine magazine subscribers and customers from wineries that have permission to share customer names. Also included in the mailing are compiled lifestyle files that mirror a profile of existing customers, which is being generated through a 375-point package of overlay data from Experian. The effort will tout the club memberships in hopes of encouraging ongoing sales. It is not cost-efficient to use the mailing to generate single-bottle purchases.
But a club member is likely to buy a lot of wine: The 1,726 members in both St. Supery clubs have spent $1.5 million during the past decade. That's nearly $870 in wine sales apiece.
