Feeds

eCELLAR Marks 25th Year With Winery E-Comm Platform Upgrades and Client-Focused Programs


eCELLAR Celebrates Silver Anniversary with
Platform Upgrades and New Client-Focused Programs

—eCELLAR Marks 25 Years Helping Wineries Elevate Operations—

(Calistoga, CA)—eCELLAR, the direct-to-consumer sales platform for wineries, finished its silver anniversary celebration with a significant number of upgrades to the platform and new client-focused initiatives meant to uplift winery marketing and sales efforts. The new initiatives were spearheaded by eCELLAR’s new Chief Operating Officer Tracy McArdle who was appointed in January and has overseen an increase in eCELLAR clients in 2024.

Throughout 2024, the talented eCELLAR development & client service team deployed more than 30 upgrades to its DtC e-commerce platform. Among the platform’s upgrades were significant consumer-facing shopping cart enhancements, email campaign compliance enhancements to accommodate new Google and Yahoo email anti-spam policies, and multi-brand email marketing consent protocols allowing more flexibility for eCELLAR’s multi-brand clients. Finally, eCELLAR launched an entirely new public-facing website in mid-year. 

More Than 30 Upgrades Enhance eCELLAR DtC Platform in 2024
Among the client-focused initiatives that came in 2024 was The Pulse, a webinar-based speaker series exclusively for eCELLAR clients that featured some of the top voices in the wine trade directly addressing top issues of concern for DtC marketers. The Pulse Speaker Series featured Andrew Adams of Wine Business Analytics giving up-to-date insights into the pace of wine shipments during 2024, the Red Chirp text marketing platform founder Jennie Gilbert delivering do’s, don’t’s and how’s of using text messaging for DtC sales and management, and Erica Duecy of The Business of Wine Podcast who addressed eCELLAR clients on Millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward wine and DtC marketing.

McArdle also launched a new eCELLAR Client Newsletter in 2024, giving its wineries regular marketing and platform insights and announcements. 

“This 25th year in the wine DtC business has been very special for eCELLAR,” notes founder and CEO Paul Thienes. “The goal for the Silver Anniversary was to help our clients elevate their DtC game with client-driven platform augmentations, delivered by an innovative and dedicated development team, enhanced customer service and expanded access to marketing ideas and strategies to help them sell more wine. Looking ahead to 2025, we’re excited to continue building on this momentum.”

ABOUT eCELLAR
First launched in 1999, eCELLAR provides wineries with a comprehensive e-commerce platform for managing, marketing, and selling their products directly to consumers. With numerous 3rd party shipping and compliance integrations as well as experienced customer support and development departments, eCELLAR strives to be a partner in its clients’ direct-to-consumer sales and marketing program. More information is available at eCELLAR1.com.

# # #

This press release is linked on the web at: https://www.ecellar1.com/ecellar-celebrates-silver-anniversary-with-platform-upgrades-and-new-client-focused-programs/

CONTACT:

Tom Wark, Wark Communications
707-246-6451 • tom@warkcommunications.com


Join us for eCELLAR's The Pulse: Trends in Millennial & Gen Z Preferences webinar!

Are you ready to tap into the evolving tastes and buying habits of Millennial and Gen Z consumers? Don't miss this opportunity to gain insights from industry experts Erica Duecy and Tom Wark as they dive into the latest trends that are shaping the future of the wine and beverage industry.

📅 Date: Monday, November 4th
🕚 Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (PST)
🔗 RSVP now:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84412302294

eCELLAR's The Pulse Speaker Series: Texting for Success with Jennie Gilbert of RedChirp

Join us this Wednesday, October 2nd at 10 AM PST for the next exciting installment of eCELLAR's Speaker Series — The Pulse!

We’re thrilled to host a dynamic discussion featuring industry leaders Jennie Gilbert of Red Chirp, Jennifer Sullivan (Oaks) of Benziger Family Winery and Imagery Estate Winery, and Tracy McArdle COO at eCELLAR. This session will deep dive into how texting can revolutionize your customer communication, boost engagement, and supercharge your sales.

Don't miss out! Secure your spot now: https://lnkd.in/gjUdrMdA

WinerySuccess DTCWine TextingForSuccess RedChirp eCELLAR WineMarketing CustomerEngagement WineryGrowth

Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Creative Juices

It’s one of those cliches that turns out to be true: “AI isn’t coming for your job, but someone using AI is.”

Artificial Intelligence will turn out to be the next real “killer app”. The last one that completely transformed the Internet and the way you work was Social Media. Before that, it was email. Putting AI in the same category as email and social media should give you a sense of just how transformative this technology is and will become.

But how to incorporate it into your daily DtC efforts is the subject of regular debate and discussion. We believe it is best used not to write copy for your website or email campaigns but rather to fuel your creative juices. It turns out that while AI’s current copywriting capability is good, we don’t think it is yet so good that it can authentically communicate the uniqueness and personal voice that is so important to successful communications and campaigns. However, it sure can generate great ideas for communications and DtC campaigns.

Whether you are using ChatGPT, Claude, Bing AI, Google Gemini, or another AI tool, they all excel at assisting in brainstorming. It’s this process of coming up with creative ways to position, sell, market, and communicate the unique qualities of your wine brand that most commonly set you apart from your competitors and keep you’re your customers engaged. 

The key to using AI to help generate idea for a DtC email or marketing campaign is precise prompts. “Prompt Engineering”, as some refer to the practice, is the process to providing the AI tools with proper context and direction: From what perspective should the AI respond? What is the specific context that the AI should consider? Exactly what task should the AI perform. In practice, that kind of prompt created by a DtC-oriented winery might look something like this: 

Respond as a consumer marketing expert in the wine industry. You work at a small, 5,000 case winery located in Napa Valley with a reputation for producing single-vineyard Chardonnay and Cabernet from the Coombsville sub-appellation. Create a series of email campaign for past buyers that will utilize the theme of the coming of Spring. The goal of the campaign should be to generate interest in visiting the winery over the next three months.

Using Microsoft Co-Pilot, our AI provided five different email themes including:

- Spring Awakening at [Winery Name]”

- “Unveiling Our Spring Releases”

- “Exclusive Spring Cellar Tours”

- “Picnic Among the Vines”

- “Springtime Events Calendar”

- “Personal Invitation: Visit Us This Spring!”

 With each above idea came underlying suggestions on how to make the overall theme compelling. However, none of the Co-Pilot Theme suggestions focused specifically on the winery being in the Coombsville region of Napa. This is where revision and “conversation” comes in. As you brainstorm with the AI it is always important give your AI partner further guidance. For example, we responded to Co-Pilot with this: “Provide more options focusing on the fact that the winery resides in the Coombsville region of Napa Valley.

The result were five more campaign suggestions, all focused on the winery being in the Coombsville region. Among them was this:

  1. Email 4: “Picnic Among Coombsville Vines”

  • Subject: “Picnic Among Coombsville Vines”

  • Describe the Coombsville vineyard landscape in Spring: rolling hills, budding vines, and wildflowers.

  • Suggest a Spring picnic experience with Coombsville wine pairings.

  • Highlight secluded picnic spots with breathtaking views.

The notion of “Secluded picnic spots with breathtaking views” was a particularly appealing idea. And no doubt a Coombsville winery could run with this idea, utilizing their knowledge of the region.

Prompt. Refine the Prompt. Refine Further. These are the keys to directing your AI tool of choice to drill down exactly to where you need your brainstorming session to go. Moreover, the more detailed context you can provide in your original and subsequent prompts, the more useful the ideas that will be generated.

It will be tempting if you are working to generate an email campaign to ask the AI to generate the copy for the email. We recommend keeping this “in-house”. Few things are more important to your outreach efforts than maintaining the authentic voice of your brand. That voice has been developed as a direct result of real people intimately connected to your winery, your location and your culture personally crafting honest and real messages.

Besides using AI tools to help uncover effective themes for email campaigns, you can also use the AI to help develop protocols for post-visit outreach, creating concise lists of requirements for new positions at your company, ideas for unique communication assets for the tasting room, compelling names for a new wine made of a proprietary blend of grapes, and much more. 

Take time to learn how to manipulate and generate prompts and how to direct the AI to dive deeper, then use your own voice to generate the final product. This is how the new generative AI tools can help make your customer outreach and marketing effective without compromising your authentic brand voice.

Getting Creative in Your Customer Engagement

After establishing a customer connection, it's essential to nurture the relationship strategically and tactically with your brand.  And a little bit of creativity goes a long way too.

Using data insights from your e-commerce platform and customer relationship management tools, along with your email/campaign platform, empowers you to target your customers in all sorts of creative ways.

Here are just a few ways eCELLAR users can creatively use the platform’s CRM reporting capability and built-in Campaign Manager to make customer outreach more creative.

USING CRM AND ECOMM REPORTING TOOLS, DO A SEARCH FOR:

Customers who visited the winery last May, June, July, and August and bought Rosé. They get an email mentioning that warm, rosé-sipping months are coming up and it's best to be prepared.

All your customers in the states/cities of the teams heading to the Super Bowl or World Series or NBA Championship. They are going to need something to celebrate when their team wins the big game. Give them something.

All your customers within 50 miles who, in the past year, enjoyed your walk-in winery tasting but not the private, culinary experience. Every one of these folks can get an invitation to “elevate” and see what they were missing. Maybe they even get the tasting fee waived or a discount if they reserve a “top” tasting experience in the next two months.

Contacts that have visited the winery two or more times in the past two years, but never joined the wine club. These are your most enthusiastic, but unusually uncommitted customers. Ask them to join the club.

All customers in the zip codes that are in the path of the next eclipse or other celestial event and reach out. Remind your customers that a solar or celestial event needs wine for a proper celebration.

All your GenX customers (born 1965 -1980) and show them someone is thinking of THEM. If there is a forgotten generation, it’s GenX. Let them know you remember them.

All customers who enjoyed a tasting with a particular member of your staff 6 to 12 months ago and who bought wine, invite them back. An email from the person you had your tasting with is much more personal than an email from “the winery”. Ask them back to do it again.

Those customers who have not visited or bought anything for 5 years and give them incentive to buy before they are dropped from the list. The odds of someone buying via email after not doing so for five years are SLIM. Email this group letting them know you will no longer be burdening them with more email but let them know they can get a discount on wine or a tasting before they are off the list.

Any customers who visited the winery exactly one year ago from today and invite them to return or offer them something special. Birthday emails are a dime a dozen. Give your customers a Tasting Anniversary Email.

Those customers who are 25 years old and who need a wine that will be ready for their 30th birthday. Email them and let them know that the BIG 30 isn’t as far off as they think, and you’ve got the wines that will be perfectly aged when they get there in 5 years. (Do this for the 40-year-olds looking out to their 50th)

Too often our communications with customers and clients become rote. This is one reason why mailing list customers are likely to receive numerous emails on the same topic (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, their birthdays, etc.). A little bit of creativity and leveraging your eComm platform’s reporting tools can set your outreach apart.

eCELLAR E-Commerce Platform Celebrates 25th Anniversary Powering Winery DtC Sales

—In at the beginning of the DTC revolution, eCELLAR Celebrating Innovation—

(CALISTOGA, Calif)—The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of eCELLAR, the Napa Valley-based e-commerce and customer management platform that has delivered numerous innovations during the winery DtC revolution that occurred over the past quarter century. Founded by computer scientist Paul Thienes in 1999, eCELLAR early on took the All-in-One approach to e-commerce platform creation and has not looked back. 

Over its 25-year history, eCELLAR has introduced numerous innovations to winery DtC technology including

  • The first domain hosted online store
  • The first 100% web-based Point of Sale system, rather than hard-drive located system
  • The First internal reservations management system for tours and tastings
  • The First PCI-Validated Security system for protecting winery credit card data
  • The first platform allowing wineries to search across 100 data points for customer segmentation for reports and email.

“Wineries have always been particularly precise and careful in the way they communicate with their customers, which told me from the very beginning that winery data and access to that data would be paramount in their DtC efforts, “says Thienes. “Whether we were developing e-commerce systems, POS systems or allocation systems, I always knew that preservation and access to customer data had to undergird the eCELLAR platform so wineries could easily get to the business of delivering great customer experiences.”

ALL-IN-ONE AND NO-COMMISSION SYSTEM

Setting eCELLAR apart from other industry DtC platforms is its centralized architecture and no-commission revenue model. eCELLAR  has always offered an all-in-one system that provides e-commerce, Point-of-sale management, customer data management, email campaign creation, wine club, allocations, reservations, and reporting all in one internet-based platform, without resorting to outside vender services while still allowing clients to choose to use outside services. Additionally, Thienes has kept eCELLAR as one of the few winery-serving e-commerce platforms that doesn’t charge clients commissions on sales that go through the system.  

“I think we could charge commissions; frankly we don’t need to in order to hit our revenue targets. We know our winery clients, whether very large or very small, operate in an ever-increasing cost environment and appreciate predictability,” explains Thienes “If we can keep their operating costs down, they succeed and that means eCELLAR succeeds.”

Thienes expects eCELLAR’s and the wine industry’s next twenty-five years of DtC sales and marketing to be much like the first 25 years: adapting to change.

“Demographics, technology and consumer expectations will drive the evolution of DtC platforms like eCELLAR over the next quarter century, but we believe that this future will be intensely data driven, making winery access to their data and their ability to interrogate that data in diverse ways critically important,” Thienes predicts. “We don’t yet know for sure how the younger, digital-native consumers will interact with wineries and their tasting rooms, but we know they will include an affluent tranche of consumers that will interact with wineries. The job of winery e-commerce and CRM platforms like eCELLAR is to assure our clients are set to meet and serve up-and-coming customers exactly where they are—whether it’s at the tasting room, on websites, on phones or on the next device to come down the pike.” 

eCELLAR will be celebrating its 25 years helping move forward DtC sales and winery CRM with client events throughout the year.

ABOUT eCELLAR

eCELLAR is an integrated e-commerce, POS and customer management platform dedicated to serving the wine industry’s unique challenges and opportunities. Its wine-country based customer service and programming teams are at the heart of the firm’s operations. With wineries located up and down California and in other wine-producing states, eCELLAR remains focused on client DtC success, customer service, technical support, and innovation. For more information see www.ecellar1.com.

Supplemental and Other New Discount Capabilities

If you're in the market for DTC software for 2022, you will want to see eCELLAR's new Supplemental and other new Discount capabilities to supercharge your consumer offerings in 2022.  Previewed in last week's User Group, these new features are now live in eCELLAR today

Your winery can offer, for instance:

An extra 10% off library wines and 5% off specific holiday wines -
on top of specific club tier's 20% base discount...

Limit $0.01 shipping up to 5 cases max...

An extra $25 off the order when your
club member spends over $180?

Request an eCELLAR demo and see why eCELLAR is the wine industry's most powerful all-in-one platform.

Request an eCELLAR demo

Thank you, Happy OND, and be safe & well!

 - Paul


Watch user group feature preview:

DTC Software Discounting

Free Data Migration from WineDirect, Commerce7, Vinespring & Nexternal & New Monthly Pricing!

If you're considering your next move for a new DTC platform, consider eCELLAR.

Go to https://www.ecellar1.com to learn more and see the unrivaled power of eCELLAR!

New pricing that brings certainty

Data Migration DTC

Product Demonstration: eCellar's DTC Platform - A Single Source of Truth for Wineries

Event Type: Seminar

Event Date: 05/26/2021

Location: Wine Industry Sales Symposium - virtual

Paul Thienes, Founder & CEO / eCellar will present a product demonstration of eCellar's DTC Platform - A Single Source of Truth for Wineries at the Wine Industry Sales Symposium May 25, 1:00-1:30 PM and May 26, 1:00-1:30 PM.

What will be covered:

We understand that wineries have pivoted significantly to accommodate changing consumer demands of virtual wine tasting, eCommerce & club purchases, and safe visitation to the winery by reservation. From reservation placement to point of sale transaction in the tasting room, using a single-database platform that provides a single source of truth of customers and their interactions across all sales channels & brands is imperative. We will demonstrate how wineries working within eCELLAR's unified platform and ever-powerful workflows, keep their customers engaged and coming back for more wine purchases across all sales channels.

Register to attend the Wine Industry Sales Symposium for free and check the eCELLAR product demonstration box join this breakout session.

Wine Industry Sales Symposium POS DTC

True CRM - Sell More Wine Across All Channels

Serve your customers with ease across all channels from online to tasting room using a single, All-In-One web-based platform that's available anytime, anywhere on any device. 

From online reservations to tasting room orders, avoid the headaches of working with multiple systems that don't synch 100% (if at all), and call us when needed for immediate and live assistance - we fully support everything!

Kristina Palko“eCELLAR has one of the strongest querying systems I have ever utilized in the industry. We use this powerful tool at Huneeus Vintners to craft and manage highly targeted sales and marketing campaigns that are both effective and thoughtful. By leveraging eCELLAR’s full service platform and personalizing our data with custom tags, we can achieve a 360 view. This comprehensive view of our consumer allows us to leverage these insights to grow our consumer business across all brands. I highly recommend eCELLAR.”

Kristina Palko, Director of Marketing & Sales
Huneeus Vintners

Our customizable online storefronts and subscription tools are designed to be mobile first, as our API-driven online stores look great from phone to desktop. Built-in CRM, reporting and email campaign automation tools allow you to consistently retarget and remarket to your best customers, sending them personalized and branded emails that automatically log them in to easily take action. 

See all the True CRM features.

For a demonstration and a sandbox account to see how eCELLAR stacks up against all other DTC systems, request a demo at https://www.ecellar1.com.

POS CRM eCommerce

About

WINThe Wine Industry Advisor is an Online Industry Publication featuring news and articles relevant to the wine industry. Our goal is to be a resource for wine businesses and professionals by providing free access to our knowledge base articles, industry press releases, and daily news. We aim to provide you with the information most relevant to you.

Wine Industry Advisor
155 Foss Creek Circle
Healdsburg, CA 95448
(707) 433-2557
editor@wineindustryadvisor.com

Afternoon Brief

The Afternoon Brief is a summary of daily news headlines and top stories packaged in an email format and delivered to subscribers at the end of each business day. Subscription is provide for free to wine industry professionals.

Learn more & Subscribe

Expert Editorial Guidelines

The Wine Industry Advisor welcomes articles from industry experts; however, we ask that your article follow these simple editorial guidelines. Expert Editorials are intended as a means for you to share your expertise with the Wine Industry Advisor community and not as an advertising piece. This doesn't mean that you cannot mention your company name or product in the article, but that the bulk of the article should be focused on sharing original, valuable wine industry specific information with the readers. The suggested length is 500 to 700 words, and we encourage you to include any images you have the rights to use.

You will be credited as the article's author with name and company logo as well as a link to your website or Wine Industry Network profile. If you are interested in writing an Expert Editorial for the Wine Industry Advisor, please contact editor@wineindustryadvisor.com with a brief summary of your article. All submissions are subject to review by the Wine Industry Advisor, which retains editorial privilege.

Expert Editorial examples

News Releases

The Wine Industry Advisor strives to be a resource of industry news and knowledge for wine business professionals. If your company, association, or institution has a press release that is relevant to the wine industry, please send it to editor@wineindustryadvisor.com and include the word press release in the subject line. We welcome inclusion of photos, logos, and links to additional information. All submissions will be screened for wine industry relevance by the editor before publishing to the press release section.

Contact

Contact List

Title Name Email Phone Extension
Contact contact@wineindustrynetwork.com 707-433-2557

Location List

Locations Address State Country Zip Code
Wine Industry Advisor 155 Foss Creek Circle, Healdsburg CA United States of America 95448

List of Locations