When do you process and ship your clubs?

Clubs
1

I am wondering if you guys have any insight on the timing and strategy of this.

  1. How much time do you give user choice club members to choose their wines?
  2. How much time do you plan for after processing these clubs before you ship them?
  3. (Bonus) How do you know that your way is the right way to do it? Any tips/tricks?

I’ll go first… I just started user choice clubs in January.

  1. I have been emailing about 7-10 days before processing clubs to inform members it’s time to make their choices
  2. Have been processing on ~Thursday and shipping usually on the following Tuesday.
  3. I wonder/suspect that I should give more time between processing and shipping. Just a hunch. I am thinking of testing out processing 2 weeks before shipping this time.

So, what has been your experience?

2
  1. I try to give members at least two weeks to choose their wines.
  2. Processing for us takes about 2 weeks from start to finish (from charging to shipping all completed). We have several user choice clubs (6 bottles, red, 6 bottle white, 6 bottles mixed, etc - we find this helps cut down on the number of people who change the default shipment). We try to pack a good percentage of the boxes ahead of time, knowing that only about 18% of people make changes to the default shipment. Once I process one of the clubs, I leave it for 24 hours before starting to ship out. I find that people might not make changes when you send them the email, but as soon as their credit card gets charged, they pay attention. It could be they forgot to tell us about an address change, or whatever, but at least you are sorting through packing slips, and not pallets of boxes.

Good luck.

3

I give our club members between 3-4 weeks notice on the upcoming club shipment. The first email I send them asks them to make sure their info is all up to date and states that shipment details will be sent the following week. I keep this email simple. The following week I send out the second email with the the shipment details and important dates. It includes what the default shipment is, how much it costs, what the other options are, deadline to make changes, when we are charging credit cards, when we are packing, when the pick-up window is, what day the wine leaves the winery, and includes the //ClubBlob// info at the bottom. This email gets sent out a second time less than a week prior to charging credit cards as a “Last Call” type email. I could probably shorten this time frame up, but for now it’s working.

From experience I wait at least a day between the time I charge credit cards and the time I print labels/pack. Notification of their credit card being charged usually reminds people they wanted to make a change or update something. Most people respond within a few days of getting emails. I start packing with all the odd shipments (~25% of orders) as those people have been in touch and are least likely to have last minute changes.

1 Like
4

anyone have a way to send a final follow up email to those members who have not yet logged in or updated info? Have built a list of club members who havnt opened said email but then there are some who would have had their orders skipped etc? sending to these people is not an option from club processing…

this is only my 3rd shipment from Vin65 so still trying to streamline everything and send as little as possible emails to members (no one wants to be bombarded with emails).

thanks :slight_smile:

5

If someone doesn’t open their email or doesn’t log-in I just send the default package that I set up. We are upfront about the default package being shipped out automatically if they don’t make changes or contact us and deadlines to make changes. Soo far we haven’t had any issues (knock on wood).

I don’t worry about sending emails to skipped members as I have usually emailed them confirming their order or change or spoken to them on the phone.