Disingenuous Wine Club Members

Would like to know what other wineries are doing to avoid disingenuous wine club signups. We have had a number of instance whereby people sign up - get a discount - and drop out.

Differed discounts / penalty clauses / other???

Penalties don’t work because 1) they can dispute anything you try to charge; 2) you just piss them off. Never mind who’s right.

Find a carrot to offer instead to encourage them to stick around, something they won’t get today but will in the future.

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Our promos discount not by club membership but by contact type, which we only assign after they get their first club shipment. Adds admin overhead, maybe helps the margin marginally.

I believe it was Lord Tennyson who said “'tis better to have gained a wine club member and lost than never to have gained a wine club member at all”

I don’t like penalties because they hinder signups, and each signup is an opportunity. If they want to leave, they’ll leave.

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We remind the person that they signed up and committed to three shipments in their first year. A lot of times they agree to honor that commitment. If that doesn’t work, we tell them we have to charge them for the discounts they took. They usually agree.

Do you require that they take the first shipment on the spot? That seems to help on our end.

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I would recommend tracking this and then taking a good hard look at it to see if it’s really a problem from a statistical standpoint and having a material effect on your business.

To echo @danjimerson point, if they want to quit, they’ll quit and shame on us for not having a compelling reason to stay. We do have cancellation fees, but they aren’t daunting and we enforce them on a discretionary basis.