Vin65 Blog

Don't forget the personal service

It's pretty easy to spend an entire day hiding behind technology and forgetting personal service.

When I was in high school in the late 80s I worked for a local realtor who really understood technology. We were using multiple databases to target specific areas (a combination of phone records, tax records, and real estate records). In our mail campaigns we were monitoring the message, the frequency, and overall effectiveness. We had our systems pretty well tuned.

We were data mining the real estate board and finding listings about to expire and then mailing them. We were testing out different phone technology. We were constantly testing out different mediums. We once sent out a newspaper like piece, and the recipient's name appeared in the headline of the top story - remember this was late 80's before stuff like this was common place.

My boss was a good realtor but despite our huge technical advantage there were several guys around town who consistently outperformed him. I once asked a top realtor how he got his business, and he told me that he was just as friendly as possible, and meet as many people as possible. He would walk into a local bar or the super market and talk with everyone.

I had an interesting conversation this past week with a prospective client. She was talking to me of the importance of having personal relationships.

In the end, you can have nice tasting sheets, a great website that really conveys your brand, mass email that is highly targeted, but nothing beats personal relationships. When the economy is down, and people are starting to choose which wine clubs they want to belong to and which ones to drop, I beat you the choice overwhelming comes down to who they have personal relationship with.

Side note: This message of personal service applies to us at Vin|65 as much as it applies to wineries.

Jan 25, 2009 at 10:24 PM

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Who's talking about you?

Ever wonder who is talking about you? Or want to know who is talking about your competitiors?

Here are a couple of tools that can help you:

1. Google Alerts - enter a key search term and your email address and Google will notify you daily with any new search results.  This is a great way to monitor your brand, and your competitors brands.
2. Twitter Alerts - our PR rep Melissa Dobson turned me onto this tool.  Similar to Google Alerts, you can be notified daily of any search terms that are talked about on Twitter. 

And if you really want to dig deep and spy on your competition or see how well your website ranks, Future Now provides links to these 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition.

Jan 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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The Importance of User Experience

When a customer walks into the tasting room their experience is incredibly important. Everything has to be just right. The right atmosphere leads to higher sales.

The same thing happens online. Your brand and image is conveyed in your site design, how fast your pages load, how easy it is to navigate, how easy the user can accomplish their goals.

Just like your tasting room, your website user experience should be monitored and improved over time. People's expectations continually raise, your industry continually raises the bar, and your website is something that should be continually looked at. If you haven't changed much in your site in the last year or two, it's probably time to review and look at the overall experience.

Jan 15, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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Get Found on Google

Getting found on Google always seems to be a hot topic for our website clients. Here are a couple of interesting blogs that came out last week.

1. The easiest way to a first-page ranking on Google (from Forresters Research)
2. Sitemaps Decrease Crawler Response Time (from Search Engine Land). (Note that our current platform automatically creates these site map files and automatically puts them into a robot.txt file for you)

While we don't provide Search Engine Optimization for clients, we do have a very Search Engine friendly platform and we can recommend a few search engine optimization companies and are more than happy to talk with you.

Jan 13, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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Have you used your own website?

Have you used your own website? Try completing an order on your site. Try ordering multiple products. Where does the 'continue shopping' button take you? Can you figure out the shipping easily?

What are the most common questions customers ask? Try finding the answers from the homepage on your website - can you?

Have you tried emailing customer service from your website? How many clicks till you found the customer service email address? How long till someone responds?

Jan 11, 2009 at 7:42 PM

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Consumer Reviews trump Professional Reviews

Do you trust a consumer review more than a professional review? Do you care more about what your friends think or what professionals think? Will a consumer review out perform a professional review?

I was watching Sex and the City Saturday night on TV. (Okay I don't watch TV much, and my wife had it on). A stranger's facial expression seemed to worry Carrie Bradshaw more than a professional book review.

When I pick a movie, I tend to listen to my friends' opinions and could really care less about the professional reviews. When I rent a video, I ask the checkout clerk if the video is good and often listen to his/her opinion.

I've been in a wine store and asked the clerk if they have had the bottle of wine that I'm contemplating and what they thought about it. I often pick up a bottle of wine because a friend mentioned it, or perhaps I read something on twitter or in a blog.

In today's manufactured society, I crave for something more real and real comes from other consumers rather than professionals.

Jan 5, 2009 at 9:57 AM

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Does your website have a New Year’s resolution?

This is the first time I've publicly stated a new year’s resolution for our platform.

1. Enhanced User Experience. Increase the user experience in both our admin panel and clients front end websites. This involves both visual experience, and the way different components work.
2. Simplify. Make it easier for website administrators to enter data. Make it easier for end users to checkout, sign up for a wine club, etc.
3.  Smarter. Make our systems smarter. We have tons of data on hand, and we want to put more intelligence in the system to utilize this data better.

Truthfully, we have all been thinking about these three ideas for awhile. Our new platform launches in January and we are really excited about some of the new features. (If you want a private demo, email me and we can show you some of the new features).

In 2009 we have some giant plans.  We've shared a few of these plans with some of our partners. 2009 is going to be a great year and you should see some amazing work by everyone one. (Hopefully that statement doesn't sound to arrogant)

If you have a new year’s resolution around your website I would love to hear about it.
 

Jan 1, 2009 at 11:28 AM

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