What does everyone do to reward loyalty in their wine club? We’ve been discussing putting less emphasis on signing up club members and more emphasis on retaining members with a potential loyalty reward, birthday reward, anniversary reward…a surprise to keep them excited about their membership outside of their regular benefits.
On that note, does any one have an opinion on the new Loyalty Points program and if that would be something worth paying for?
Thank you!
I think you’re on a great track! There are a lot of things you can do to keep your wine club sexy for long-term members. My biggest recommendation, though, would be to make sure you have the systems in place to execute it consistently and simply. Too much complexity will ultimately be a bad experience for your customers.
WineDirect’s new loyalty tools are awesome! Just make sure you have cleared everything with your legal and compliance teams, as this is a bit of a gray area still, depending on your implementation.
I have had a variety of experiences that have made me really careful about this, with what I think is an interesting example to share. I have come down firmly in the underpromise and overdeliver camp, as well-worn as that idea is. I am hesitant to offer rewards that are directly “transactional” like spend x get y points, or similar reward systems that i know others have had success with.
Our club used to have a few of these benefits. You would get a free bottle of wine for every 36 bottles you purchased, and you would also get a free bottle of wine each time you renewed your yearly membership. Honestly, both of these were a huge, huge burden and there were many mistakes made tracking our members’ rewards.
Just as importantly, “free” didn’t mean “whatever you want” and negotiating these “rewards” with the members was very tough. Our staff had every incentive to give away wines that were above what we intended just to keep our members happy. So yeah, I inherited this and maybe these rewards could be rehabilitated but I decided to end both. This is where it gets pretty interesting.
The “free bottle for every 36 purchased” I just ended on the 1st of the next year, and that was that. I gave everybody who had accrued wine a limit of one year (a limit I did not enforce) to pick out their free wines at their next visit, and was pretty generous with what I let them take.
I decided for the “free bottle with each year’s renewal” to buy our members out of the program. I sent a $20 gift certificate to every member of our wine club earlier this year in a letter that thanked them and explained that the program was ending. I have had ZERO complaints, and our membership LOVED receiving an unexpected club bonus in the mail.
This has even acted like a sort of a stimulus. Obviously there is a cost to the company but the average order using these certificates is more than $20 over our typical order average. Many people placed their first online orders. The response to me wiping out these rewards with an unexpected bonus has been pure enthusiasm, and gotten me out of a program that I couldn’t administer effectively.
My advice is to be careful about what you promise, because even if you are being generous- you need to execute these rewards with German precision or it is going to negatively affect your club experience. I think you are asking the right questions. I’m not jumping on the Loyalty Points just yet but am watching closely.
Thanks for the great insights on your strategy for ending these programs. How did you execute the $20 bonus for extending membership? Was the $20 a promo code or a gift card? Did you proactively call everyone on their anniversary to ask if they were going to stay and then surprise them with the $20? Do you still offer this anniversary incentive? Thanks again for the great insights.
So about 80% of my club is composed of members who have one year, annually renewed prepaid memberships. They don’t all renew at once, but some each month through the year. I stopped offering new prepaid signups early in 2017. Then when I decided to stop offering the extra bonus bottle at each member’s renewal this recent spring I did a batch-create to generate the gift card codes, and used MS Word’s mail merge to print the info on paper to send in the mail.
The intended point of all this was primarily to convey “Sorry we’re ending the program, here’s a gift to say we appreciate you and it’s not about the money”. This is just a one-time gift and I’m not planning to do that every year.
In my comment above I wanted to share that the takeaway was really that even when you put aside the fact that I was ready to call it a big win for me just to end a program that had a lot of problems (and pull it off without my customers complaining), I had the bonus effect that sending a gift certificate to our membership was good for our members’ club experience and directly pretty good for business.
Since I already kind of flooded our membership with gift certificates already this year (and many are still not yet redeemed) I am not sending more out for any reason this year, but will very much consider it in the future for a variety of reasons, and hope to create more unexpected ways to delight our wine club members.
