By Carin Oliver, fractional DTC CMO
Reading time: 3 minutes
One of the first questions that my new wine DTC clients ask is:
How Do I Get More Traffic Into My Tasting Room?
Unless you thoroughly understand your KPIs, it’s challenging to help drive better tasting room performance. And for 2023, we want to optimize the traffic through the tasting room door. But what to measure?
Wineries have access to more metrics than ever before. And all of that data can be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. And you don’t need every statistic on the planet. I will share with you the KPIs we most frequently recommend to wineries of all sizes. But if you want to refine your specific KPIs, the first step is to define your revenue goals. Be as specific as possible when defining those goals.
What are KPIs and Why They Matter?
KPIs stand for key performance indicators. They are a quantifiable measure of performance over time that provides insight into how a winery performs against its goals. They can be used in every winery’s operation, from the tasting room to human resource management. KPIs are necessary to ensure that the tasting room’s performance supports the overall goals of the winery. Healthy tasting room performance is a crucial indicator of future DTC success.
Tracking and analyzing your wine-tasting room’s KPIs provides visibility into your consumers’ journey with your winery and illuminates opportunities for growth. If your tasting room is in the enviable position of plenty of traffic, you will want to use your KPIs as you raise prices.
The sales and marketing strategies should support your tasting room revenue goals, and KPIs should align with those efforts.
Tasting room employee performance. Just about all of the below KPIs can be further refined by sales associates. But as the tasting room manager, you need to understand the bigger picture and if your whole operation is achieving its goals. KPIs will help your teams understand their role in the overall organization and better understand the value that they can bring.
The 11 Wine Tasting Room KPIs:
Total Traffic Into The Tasting Room
The raw number of people who walk through your door, whether they taste or not. There will always be a percentage of consumers who don’t taste, but you should count them anyway. Even if they don’t taste, they contribute to building a larger pond for your future fishing.
Additionally, you will need this number to back it out of the total impressions needed to drive in enough traffic to make your numbers and help manage flow and staffing.
Total Tasters
This is the total number of tasters. It is the combined number of new, repeat, comped, paid, and club members.
Percent of Paid Tasters To Traffic
Of all the people who walked through the door, what percent paid for a tasting? This closely aligns with #1, Total Traffic Into The Tasting Room, but it is also needed to help predict future revenue.
AOV – Average Order Value
Average order value is one of my favorite KPIs for wine-tasting rooms because it is a lever you can optimize to help grow your traffic. Offering the right-priced bundles can help increase AOV.
Average Order Volume
The average order volume is how many bottles of wine customers typically purchase while in the tasting room. This is another key point of optimization to analyze and improve upon.
Conversion Rate Tasters To Club Members
If you track nothing else, follow this. This is how many people who tasted signed up to be club members. You can also track which of your clubs are getting the most sign-ups. This is expressed as a percentage.
Conversion Rate of Tasters To Purchase
Both those who converted to club membership and those who purchased wine in the tasting room are key to the winery’s future revenue. These consumers are highly likely to become future eCommerce buyers. This is the number of people who came in to taste and then purchased wine to take home, expressed as a percentage.
Traffic To Website with Visit Intent
This is a bit more challenging to determine, and unless you have a web and analytics expert who can properly set up web tracking tools, it may not be available to you. This number will help determine if enough people are getting to the site to fill your tasting room. These wine tasters are at the top of the sales funnel and may be anywhere in their purchase journey. Wineries need to get enough consumers into the top of the funnel, i.e., to the web tasting page.
Conversion Rate From Visit Us Page
How many people who land on the Visit Us page convert into a reservation or walk through the door? Without a reservation system, this can be tricky to be completely accurate. But, look at how many people visit your winery website with visit intent and divide by the number of tasters who come through the door. It’s not ideal, but it will provide some direction.
Percent of New Visitors
Know how many people who walk through the door are new to the winery. This is a critical indicator of growth. Conversely, if the number of returning visitors is low, that might also be worth examining. Attrition right now is high, so if the winery is going to grow, it must have a constant flow of new customers.
Number of Email Sign-ups
This is simply how many people entrust your winery each week to leave their email for future communication. Do whatever you legally can to earn emails.
Alternately you can do it as a percent of total visitors, but that requires more math, and who likes math?
There will always be list attrition, so you need to make sure that the rate at which people are signing up compensates for those unsubscribing.
The goal with each of these KPIs is twofold:
- Know how your business is doing
- Learn where you can start making improvements in your funnel
The right tasting room KPIs help you identify gaps and opportunities to help you grow your business. By tracking KPIs, your winery can make the right adjustments to various processes, strategies, and budgets.