"How to improve your tastings? This is a question every winery should ask itself. Discover the 10 commandments to make your tastings memorable and profitable experiences."
For a wine enthusiast, tastings represent the ultimate experience.
For this reason, improving tastings to lead a customer to purchase your wines ensuring the right reward for the efforts and investments made.
Here are ten useful tips to enhance your tastings
1. Promote the tasting experience:
A well-promoted event generates expectation and curiosity, enticing customers to participate. Utilize social media, newsletters, and collaborations with influencers.
2. Multisensory and thematic experience:
Amplify the scope of the experience to engage your customers. Integrate the tasting with visual, olfactory, and tactile elements, or organize tastings around cultural and artistic themes.
3. Online continuity:
Offer small previews of your tasting through online channels, creating a sense of continuity. Publish videos, photos, and stories on social media that reflect the in-winery experience.
4. Offer several tasting experiences:
Provide several tasting options to satisfy all types of customers. A detailed explanation of the different types of wines and their production is not appreciated equally by everyone.
5. Strategic information:
Distribute information about the products and the winery at strategic points, preparing customers for the tasting and encouraging them to learn more. You can use tools like QR code, brochures, images, and videos.
6. Not just elegance:
Elegance and style aren’t everything in a tasting.
Various studies have confirmed that, when it comes to purchasing a bottle, a product and communication that evoke concepts like “territory,” “tradition,” and “conviviality” will be more successful.
7. Strategic retail point:
Conclude the guided tour at the retail point.
After tasting the wines, customers will be more inclined to make an immediate purchase.
8. Leverage impulsive buying:
Encouraging post-tasting purchases should be a primary goal.
Studies on alcoholic beverage consumer preferences reveal that the majority make decisions driven by the impulse of the moment and the desire for well-being.
9. Collect customer data:
Use sales, tastings, and guided tours to collect customer data.
This allows you to understand their preferences and create targeted experiences.
10. No obstacles to direct sales:
The last commandment, but not the least important. Direct sales should be the goal of every tasting, especially if the customer is a tourist who won’t be able to repeat the experience soon. Post-tasting, all tools must be in place to maximize D2C sales (read our article on this expanding channel).
Having obstacles in this direct relationship, such as the inability to ship abroad or the presence of intermediaries, will undermine everything the tasting has created. Following all the previous advice won’t compensate for the efforts made to make this moment magical and fruitful.
After this overview of tips to improve tastings, it’s now up to you! Use the advice that best fits your winery and create an extraordinary experience for your customers:but remember… The last commandment is the most important!
