Recent statistics may have some experts predicting a less-than-rosy outlook for the global wine market this year, but since 2020, DTC sales have been bucking trends and innovators like RedChirp® are the primary reason why.
RedChirp, founded by a team of SaaS entrepreneurs dedicated to helping small and medium businesses compete, specializes in helping highly regulated companies realize the efficacy and power of text messaging.
Last month RedChirp released a jaw-dropping report that documented a staggering $50.6 million in non-club wine sales was generated as a direct result of SMS bulk messaging promotional campaigns in 2023.
“To get that number, we analyzed data from 174 wineries that sent 4,894 bulk text messages to 4,338,837 recipients and calculated the non-club sales that resulted within 14 days of receiving the text,” explains RedChirp Founder Jennie Gilbert. “It underscores the importance of adopting this type of technology. Wineries who don’t will quickly be falling behind.”
According to Gilbert, understanding the astounding success that wineries are realizing through RedChirp’s text messaging platform isn’t exactly rocket science. Customers want to text with you, she insists.
“Text messaging spans a wide swath of demographics,” Gilbert emphasizes. “People hate to pick up the phone. And there’s so much spam email overwhelming everyone’s inboxes, it’s hard to get your emails seen. But with texting, it’s instantaneous. Customer response time is really impressive.”
To bolster that customer connection even further, RedChirp offers a fresh new take on webchat. Consumers ask a question online, from your website, and wineries then transfer that conversation to text messaging when your representative can reply.
Because texting is asynchronous, that flow is so much more convenient for everyone; consumers don’t have to sit around your website and wait, and busy DTC teams don’t have to dedicate resources to answering immediately.
RedChirp has found, in a newly released 2023 study, that of the 58.9 percent of wineries using their platform and one of several leading wine industry POS platforms RedChirp integrates with, webchat alone generated nearly $12 million in sales. These wineries received a total of 99,900 webchat requests in 2023, resulting in a whopping $119 for average sales.
Gilbert notes that there are immediate benefits to signing on with RedChirp:
- Efficiency – opening up a new communication channel may sound like more work at first, but because texting is faster and more succinct, DTC teams find they actually save time previously wasted on phone tag and unreturned emails.
- Automation – RedChirp integrates with all the major wine industry POS, reservation, email, and fulfillment platforms allowing wineries to completely automate important notifications and reminders.
- Fast ROI – wineries can get started in less than two weeks and see meaningful sales and results right away.
“There’s so much doom and gloom out there about the future, but clearly, wineries who are using this exciting technology are more than bucking the trend, they’re thriving.” Gilbert points out.
For more information about how RedChirp can assist wineries with sales, compliance, communications & relationship building, or to request a demo, go to: https://redchirp.com.
RedChirp will also be hosting a session on Texts to Transactions: Proven SMS Strategies to Generate Revenue at the Wine Sales Symposium on May 16, 2024 in Santa Rosa, CA.
