Strategies local wine producers can use to boost income 

–The wine business is certainly demanding, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine how to outmaneuver larger wine producers in your area and the country as a whole. That’s why you need to awaken your entrepreneurial cr eativity and come up with new ways to sell more wine and keep your clients happy in the long term.

Statistics and analytical data are reshaping how many industries operate nowadays. Having an insight into the crucial stats, especially when it comes to online marketing channels, can be a source of competitive advantage for the players in the wine industry.

In this day and age, it’s not enough to have Google Analytics installed on your website. You need to find more advanced ways to track the performance of your business online. One of the best ways to do it is to create detailed spreadsheets where you calculate the number of sales of each type of wine you produce and see how these numbers are changing over time.

If you dedicate yourself to keeping meticulous stats, you will quickly recognize patterns and see the 80/20 rule in action (20% of products produce 80% of the sales). During specific periods of the year, there will be a spike in sales of particular categories of wine. Armed with this in-depth knowledge, you can now make smarter decisions about how to spend your marketing budget to achieve the highest return on your investment.

Besides developing a deeper insight into the numbers behind your business, you should analyze marketing approaches used not only by your direct competitors but also by seemingly unrelated companies. This will enable you to get a fresh perspective on what works and what doesn’t in the current business environment.

For example, you may quickly realize that many e-commerce companies currently use upsells and cross-sells in their customer acquisition process. An upsell is when you provide an additional product when the customer is already checking out. A special offer like this can be accepted with a single click, yet it can significantly boost the average shopping cart value (sometimes by 20% to 30%).

A cross-sell, on the other hand, is when you incentivize customers to buy complementary products along with their wine of choice. It might be something as simple as a wine lover T-shirt, or a branded corkscrew, but over a couple of months, these small additions can translate into serious extra cash for your business.

Besides that, you may experiment with new and inexpensive wine delivery methods (for example, by bicycle), which are already successfully implemented by wine producers in larger metropolitan areas.

These are just a couple of ways in which you can boost your income even if you’re a small player within the industry. In the end, it’s all about your creativity and willingness to try new things.