Using DTC Data to Drive Business Decisions

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel this week at the ShipCompliant conference in Napa focused on using data to drive business decisions. My fellow panelists were John Curnutt of Chateau Montelena, John Keleher of Community Benchmark and Andrew Adams of Wines & Vines. Here are some of the key takeaways from our discussion:

1. Start with your business goal

• Identify what your primary business goal is, or what question you are looking to answer. If you skip this step, you may end up with data overload, unable to separate the signal from the noise and identify actionable insights.
• For example, your goal may be to grow your online DTC sales or to increase your average order value (AOV) in the tasting room.

2. Identify your key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Decide how you will measure success. It’s critical to agree up front what success looks like. Otherwise, you won’t know whether your tests are successful or not.
• In the examples above, you’d want to track your total online sales for a given time period and your tasting room AOV over time.

3. Start with the data you already have

• Everyone has a lot of data, including:
  • Google Analytics: Take a look at your sources of traffic, how people are navigating through your site, and where they drop off.
  • Email: Open / click / conversion rates
  • Transactional Data: Purchase patterns, popular SKUs, channels, AOV
  • CRM Data: Demographics, geographic, club members, purchase history, notes
  • Social Media: Facebook and Twitter both offer many ways to analyze your fans and followers
• Then, consider whether you need any additional data sources such as broad industry data or customer survey data.

4. Be consistent and think long term

• It’s important to be consistent with the data you are measuring: pick metrics that are easy to track and can be looked at long term. If it’s too onerous to gather the data, your team won’t do it and you won’t be able to accurately measure your success. For example, you don’t need to get hung up about counting individual people in the tasting room. If it’s easier to track tastings (via your winery POS), use that.

5. Test, iterate, test again

• Based on your analysis of the data and your business goal, create a few scenarios to test. Focus on low risk, easy to implement measures and be consistent with your follow through!
• Continue to iterate and refine your strategy, until you find a successful solution.
• For example, if you want to grow online sales, take a look at your CRM data, create a few segments, such as prospects who haven’t yet purchased, buyers who have purchased 1-3 times, repeat customers with high lifetime value, and wine club members. Then design a few email offers to send to each group. Measure open, click and purchase conversion rates over time and see what performs best.

6. Rinse and repeat

• Identify your next business goal and do it again!