Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

I can't believe it's already been a week since Cabernet Day in the social media world. If you weren't aware of this event, check out http://cabernet.eventbrite.com and search Twitter for the hash tag "#Cabernet". WineWeb organized a meetup in Santa Fe and served wines from two of our clients. (Note to our clients: send us wine and we help promote your brand.)

Here's my tweets about Cabernet Day.

# Heading to the cellar to see what to open for #Cabernet Day tomorrow. 5:18 PM Sep 1st via sobees

# Just setup a meetup in Santa Fe for #Cabernet Day tomorrow, 6-8PM. Drop by if you're in the area. http://meetup.com/u/1pM6 6:39 PM Sep 1st via Meetup

# Getting munchies for #Cabernet Day at TJs. Picked up the Wine & Chile edition of Local Flavor mag - WineWeb has an ad in it. 10:37 AM Sep 2nd via sobees

# Just decanted a 04 Saddleback #Cabernet and a 07 Meadowcroft Cab. I'm ready for the festivities to begin. 5:33 PM Sep 2nd via sobees

# Savoring a 07 Meadowcroft #Cabernet. Wow, I understand how it got 94 pts. 6:47 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# Of course it's a combination of the company, patio, fountain, birds & #Cabernet. But a good Cab really puts the evening over the top. 6:52 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# Getting good adjectives to use in describing #Cabernet from the Essential Wine Tasting Guide cheat sheet. Pocket sized. 7:07 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# The 07 Meadowcroft #Cabernet is opening up, even after aerating & decanting. Good job Tom M. 7:12 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# DanGod1 Before the night gets too late big thanks @RickBakas for a great day showcasing #Cabernet 7:07 PM Sep 2nd via web Retweeted by WineWeb_Ron

# Sunset in Santa Fe. Absolutely awesome with a glass of Meadowcroft #Cabernet. The spirit of one nourishes the soul of the other. 7:29 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# @CellarsofSonoma Bonneau is a client of WineWeb - good wine 7:37 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad in reply to CellarsofSonoma

# Possibly saving the best for last - 2004 Saddleback #Cabernet. Just poured - the aroma is amazing - earthy, tanned leather. 7:49 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# 2004 Saddleback #Cabernet - Nils Venge continues to make huge cabs -a WineWeb.com client since 1995. 8:00 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

# Heading to the hot tub, of course with the Saddleback #Cabernet. A great Cabernet Day, thanks Rick. 8:12 PM Sep 2nd via Twitter for iPad

A couple of notes about the technology used to tweet. The Twitter app for the iPad is great. I had the search setup for #Cabernet and all it took was a flick of my finger to refresh the latest tweets. For a while in the early evening, there would be 20-30 new tweets every few seconds -- talk about speed reading (while drinking wine of course). Sobees is another cool tool I now use. I've setup a second monitor to display Sobees. It allows me to watch what's happening in my social networks and to easily interact with them.

How effective are your email campaigns to your email mailing lists? How do you analyze and compare your email campaigns to make the best use of this marketing tool, and to increase sales to your business?

First, you'll need to maintain a clean mailing list. How many of your emails bounce back? Are they hard bounces (email address doesn't exist), soft bounces (mailbox full) or out-of-the-office auto replies? Your email campaign tool should be able to read your newsletter inbox and identify the bounced emails. Then, either purge the hard bounces or contact the subscriber to get a new email address. Too many hard bounces to a service provider can cause them to reject your valid emails as spam. An unclean email list also distorts your statistics. For example, if you send 100 emails, 20 bounce and 30 are opened, your open rate would show as 30%, when it's actually 37.5% (30 / 80).

Open rates are the first indicator of your email campaign's effectiveness. Open rates are not accurate, but they are useful to compare across email campaigns as a measure of a subject line's effectiveness. Not accurate? Correct, an email campaign's open rate is overstated by the recipient's email program's use of a preview pane (previewed, but not actually read) and understated by persons opening the text-only version of the email or having "display images" turned off on their mobile phone. What's a good email open rate? It depends on the mailing list. While an email to your general mailing list might get a 30% open rate, an email to your wine club members can get a 60% or higher open rate. Again, it's main use is in comparing across campaigns.

Likely you want people to act upon your email campaign, so you'll have one or more "call to action" links in the email message. The ability to track the click-throughs of these links is a good indicator of the perceived value of the email to the recipients. Your email campaign tool should be able to identify each link that was clicked, and even who clicked on each link.

With social media becoming a larger influence in our lives, many email campaign tools allow you to place social media share links into the email message. While that's great, the ability to track how many people shared your email message across their various social media networks is another good indicator of the perceived value of your email message. Not only may they think the email is of value as they click a link in it, they may consider it of value to their friends and pass it on.

A final (and some would argue the most important) indicator is how much sales volume was a result of the email campaign. This statistic is often elusive, especially if your email campaign tool doesn't integrate with your shopping cart software. We (WineWeb) have recently implemented enhanced integration between the email campaign tool and our e-commerce software to identify orders that were placed as a result of a link in a specific email campaign. The ability to show your boss a "sales $ per email" statistic and an (hopefully) upward trend in that statistic can further highlight your value to the organization.

The winery CRM product review article from the July issue of Wine Business Monthly is now online. I just read it again to see what the author considered most important (integration of CRM across all sales channels), and where WineWeb may want to invest in enhancements to its customer relationship management services. It's a good article and worth a read. One thing that was not quite accurate in the product comparison matrix was the price listed for our CRM service. The WineWeb CRM service is included at no additional cost to our Enhanced Website Plan. The pricing listed in the matrix is for that plan, not just the CRM component.

You've probably heard the news that Inertia Beverage is scrapping their e-commerce software. If not, read about it at Wine Industry Insight. Our response was a letter to all our clients, as follows:

June 3, 2010

Dear WineWeb Clients:

Thank you for being a loyal client. We want to assure you that WineWeb will continue to provide innovative technology solutions to meet your business needs. With the publicized demise of Inertia's e-commerce software, we want to take this opportunity to reinforce that your technology decision was the right choice. We also want to thank you for speaking well about us to other wineries who are researching software solutions. Many new clients tell us that they are amazed at the glowing references from our client base. We believe that it's all about providing a great technology feature set at an affordable value, and backing that with great customer service.

Inertia's letter lists some features that their new software vendor will provide that were not part of their current software. The phrase "yeah, we do that" comes to mind. Here's a list of some of their "new" features and when they were implemented in WineWeb.

We have always believed in integrating our services with others. In 2006, we published a guide to our web services to enable any other service to integrate with us. We provide integration to over 20 payment gateways, a dozen fulfillment centers, multiple compliance services, age verification services, shipping carriers, wine club software, POS software and QuickBooks, with no additional setup fees.

We continually enhance our services, based on client input and technology trends. This year there have been over 60 enhancements. All of these enhancements are provided at no additional cost to our clients. Read the full letter.

We've been saying for a while that our winery POS system runs on an iPhone, which makes it very portable. Now, with the release of the iPad, I needed to see how the POS would look and function on that device (at least that's the excuse I used to justify purchasing this new gadget).

As expected, the WineWeb point-of-sale application displays nicely on the 1024 pixel wide iPad screen. We made a couple of very minor tweaks to the software to optimize it for this display and proclaimed the software "good to go". However, connecting other devices to an iPad is currently an issue. In a POS environment, a credit card reader and a receipt printer, though optional, are typically used. Since the iPad does not have any USB ports, we need equipment that can connect via the charging/sync port or the headphone jack, or over Bluetooth. Based on some limited research, there are products either announced or shipping that will work. I noted a credit card reader that attaches to the headphone jack, a Bluetooth credit card reader and a Bluetooth card reader/receipt printer unit. I'm confident that the coming months will provide more options.

My impressions of the iPad have changed in the past few days. My initial thought was that it would be just a larger version of an iPod Touch and it would replace a netbook for surfing and email when traveling. I'm now seeing more for this device. After spending time with the Apple developer guides and their interface standards documents, I'm sensing that the iPad will usher in a new way of interacting with web content. The eBay app is a good example of how a more visual, touch-oriented approach can be applied to an application.

Dubbed the Wholesaler Bailout bill, House Resolution 5034 was introduced into Congress. If passed, this bill would essentially end the direct shipment of wine to consumers and put many of this country's 6,000 wineries out of business. If you ever needed an excuse to write your Representative, this is it. Don't let this bill pass -- oppose it, and tell your friends.

Tom Wark has done a great analysis of the bill -- read it here.

In case you missed it, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy yesterday conducted a hearing entitled "Legal Issues Concerning State Alcohol Regulation". Here's the link that includes the video and the statements from each witness. Lot's of buzz about this from both sides of the argument. Essentially the beer wholesaler's association wants Congress to enact legislation to prohibit direct shipping of any type of alcohol.

Here's a link to Wine Industry Insight's article listing 11 of the 14 members of the subcommittee that have accepted contributions from the beer wholesaler's association. Here's a link to the Specialty Wine Retailers Association statement and Tom Wark's blog post. Please read this information to better understand what's going on here, then get involved to raise awareness of this issue.

When we demonstrate our winery point-of-sale system, we tell people that it's portable anywhere there is an Internet connection. We also inform them that our POS can run on an iPhone, and we think it looks quite nice on that mobile device.

We usually joke that the only thing that our winery POS on an iPhone can't do is swipe a credit card. Now it appears we can't say that any longer as Mophie has announced an iPhone case that includes a credit card reader. Quite cool.

As I was sweeping snow off of the solar panels (again), I realized that I had never blogged about our solar project. Our photovoltaic solar array came online Dec. 29, in the midst of the holidays and the year-end crunch to get the tax credits. We can now claim that all the energy needed to power, heat and cool WineWeb's office space comes from the sun.

I'm still amazed at the ability of the solar panels to generate electricity in less than sunny conditions. Currently it's totally overcast (one of those rare days in Santa Fe) with a few snowflakes coming down, and they're generating 345 AC watts, enough to power a computer and lights. It's a grid-tied system, so excess energy is fed back to the utility. The incentives are great to install solar panels. 30% Federal tax credit, 10% state tax credit, net-metering for all energy sent back to the utility, and an additional credit for every kWh that we generate, regardless of whether we use it or give it to the utility. Our payback on the investment is about 5 years.

Of course we opted for the ability to monitor the system in real-time over the Internet. The monitor was installed over the weekend, and now anyone can see the statistics on our solar system by going to solrenview.com. I like talking about this to anyone who would listen, and am happy to see the results of many years of research.