How wine sales changed during COVID
A deep dive into the data behind the #SupportOurWineries campaign
Wine has faced a massive sales channel shift between tasting rooms and restaurants closing, and retail and direct-to-consumer (DTC) booming. Thousands of wine lovers have shown their support through the #SupportOurWineries campaign and we’ve distilled a few key takeaways from the data about those interactions:
- It’s hard for wineries to differentiate on promotions when everyone’s doing it… but then again, everyone’s doing it.
- Shipping deals, specifically free shipping, appears to be the industry’s anchor point for convincing consumers to purchase DTC.
- Usage of search filters shows that people were also most interested in shipping deals, but high % discounts drove the highest rate of consumers clicking to winery websites.
- Our 30% click through rate suggests there are high intent consumers out there, looking to connect with and discover new wineries. It’s just a matter of helping them discover your brand, and sealing the deal once you’re on their mind!
THE FULL REPORT
Background
We created #SupportOurWineries as a platform to collect the ways that consumers can help support the wines we love and the businesses that make them. Wineries were (and still are!) able to submit content and promotions they are running during COVID via a google form to be featured on the site. Each listing is completely free, and we ran a supporting campaign on social media to help drive consumers to a centralized place to discover and support wineries by purchasing wine.
The campaign was created as a way to help, and we’ve observed a lot of really interesting trends as a result of doing it. We wanted to share some of those findings here and hope this provides a new perspective into how both wineries and consumers are responding to COVID when it comes to buying and promoting wine online.
All data is as of writing on April 25th.
How has #SupportOurWineries been doing?
Since we officially launched on March 20th, the site has had 3,000 unique visitors, amassing 15,000 page views. We had 253 wineries submit content to be featured on the site. 221 from the United States, 32 from South Africa, and a few from other places in the world including France and Australia. The hashtag we started for this campaign #SupportOurWineries has grown to over 700 posts on Instagram and we’ve had influencers, wineries, wine associations, and consumers use it to share love and support for the wineries they are supporting during this challenging time.
The site has been promoted mostly via social media, making it no surprise that our users are mostly Millennials, followed by Gen X. 81% of page views have come from the US, mostly dominated by California.
COVID has been an all-hands-on-deck response.
We intentionally made the platform free and simple for wineries to share their content and promotions. We had wineries of all sizes submit content, and while we didn’t collect size explicitly, we can abstract a bit from what types of people were submitting the content. Anecdotally we saw that smaller businesses’ (less than 5k cases produced per year) submissions tended to be by the owners themselves, while bigger businesses had a PR contact managing the process.
How have wineries approached promotions?
We categorized promotions into: shipping, wine discounts, local delivery, bundles, virtual tastings, charitable donations, buy-X-get-X and other. 61% of wineries are running one type of promotion, 35% are running two, and 4% are running three.
Shipping promotions are most popular, but also vary.
It’s fairly common knowledge that the sticker shock of how expensive it is to ship wine deters a lot of people from ordering wine online. After all, it can easily add 20–50% more to a consumers’ total checkout price. Wineries know that, so it’s not surprising that we saw 72% of wineries offering shipping-related promotions. However the details of those shipping promotions vary a lot. 51% of all wineries offered free shipping, with either no minimum purchase, or a bottle/dollar threshold. Another 9% of wineries offered $1 shipping.
Discounts were the second most popular, ranging from 10–20%.
32% of all wineries offered promotions related to discounts on wine. Amongst those, 65% were giving discounts between 10 and 20%. The most extreme discount was 50%. 32% of discounts were tied to a minimum bottle or dollar value purchase. Interestingly, the average discount was slightly lower when it was tied to a minimum purchase (17% vs 20%). This likely reflects the size of winery able to provide steep discounts. Discounts are extremely expensive as a business, especially when they are offered in conjunction with free shipping.
What other types of promotions were popular?
20% of wineries offered local delivery, 98% of those offering it for free. It was interesting to see only a few wineries offering wine bundles, virtual tastings, buy-one-get-one or donation-based promotions.
How does it match consumer demand?
At a surface level, this breakdown matches consumer demand pretty well. Granted, the demand on the site is certainly limited by supply — nobody was offering “we will send you 2 cases of wine for free!”… otherwise surely that would have been the most popular.
The site has the promotion type organized by tags, and 17% of clicks on tags went to “Free Shipping No Minimum”, followed by “Wine Sale” (15%), “$1 Shipping” (10%) and “Free Shipping” (9%). 90% of impressions have been on winery pages offering a shipping-related promotion.
But that doesn’t necessarily drive sales. One major limitation of our site is that we are unable to directly track the sales that our website generates since we provide a link to the winery’s website on each page to shop and checkout. However, we do have one measurement method to understand interest generated: clicks.
Our site drove hundreds of clicks to wineries’ websites with an average click-through-rate of 40% each time someone visited a winery page.
For anyone pretty familiar with marketing, that’s quite a high click-through-rate. So high that we triple checked it. Yes, for every person that went to a winery page like this one, 40% of the time, they clicked through to the winery’s website.
Ok, back to the effectiveness of the different promotion types.
We compared the click-through-rates of winery pages that were offering shipping-related promotions, versus those offering discounts on wine. While listing free shipping did correlate to a higher CTR, mentioning discounted shipping did not. In contrast, listing any discounts on wine correlated to a higher CTR, and the higher the discount, the higher the CTR. This makes sense with the general consumer aversion to having to pay for shipping, even if it’s as little as $5–10. One major callout here is that it’s pretty reasonable to expect conversion rates to be lower for the discount-enticed consumers as they move to checkout and see a $15 or $30 shipping fee. It’s a challenging situation, and we’d definitely love to collect more data to understand the tradeoffs here.
Other interesting data points from this campaign
Device usage may be shifting during WFH-COVID, especially amongst millennials.
Mobile-friendly websites are incredibly important for e-commerce. 61% of page views on the site were via mobile devices. But desktop is still a highly important surface: users that visited the site via desktop had 47% more pages per session and 130% more time per session, on average.
When we broke device usage down by age group, we saw the majority of sessions were coming from mobile devices, except for millennials: 60% of millennial users visited the site via desktop.
Length of promotion had extremely high variance.
COVID and subsequent shelter-in-place regulations have rapidly evolved over the last few weeks in a pretty unpredictable way. We saw this same trend in the length of time between a winery submitting a promotion to the site, and the expiration date listed for that promotion. The average expiration date showed a clear trend of being later and later in the future for the first few weeks, but now has settled back down to sometime mid-May. While wineries seem to be getting more optimistic about the timeline, 20% still did not share an expiration date, and many wineries simply said “end of 2020” or “whenever this thing ends”.
A couple of limitations…
While 253 wineries is a significant number, we certainly don’t think we have a representative sample of all wineries, nor all consumers. We also are not controlling for variance in the actual quality and price of the wine in this analysis.
To study consumer response to wine promotions, we’d ideally be able to A/B test different promotion types for the same winery, and track actual purchases.
So what can we take away from this?
I think the response and stories themselves are even more meaningful than the data here. When we launched the campaign, we were hoping to be able to raise awareness for the disproportionate impact that COVID and shelter-in-place regulations were going to have on small wineries that rely heavily on foot traffic-based sales.
Our data echo’s the fact that there are high intent consumers out there that want to connect with and support small wineries and businesses, it’s just a matter of raising awareness and helping them discover those businesses! Promotions certainly help drive interest, but we would really like to study what helps wineries seal the deal and convince consumers to actually make a purchase.
Thoughts, comments or questions? We’d love to chat! Send us a note at hello@thewinenerd.io
Please also visit www.supportourwineries.com to shop and #SupportOurWineries!
