Saturday, July 08, 2017

What Sells Wine Today: How One Manhattan Retailer is Thriving

I found the below article in the Wall Street Journal to be interesting and relevant due its touching on the digital strategy of Chamber Street Wines. Growing up, I always was fascinated by small businesses and their ability to compete in a market that featured more and more "chains" or franchises in addition to online retailers and Chambers Street Wines is a great example of a business flourishing due to the passion that they have for their product.

Chambers Street happens to employ two digital marketing tactics that we have yet to cover in class, email and web databases. Their email strategy targets their existing customer base of 14,000 with weekly promotions for wines from a specific region and is credited with driving 5-15% of daily sales. They also are heavily reliant on online sales that are mainly driven by a subscription to wine-searcher.com, which gets their wines posted in a database that allows for many eyeballs around the world to be reached. As discussed in class, email can be pretty cheap but other digital strategies can be prohibitively expensive. This is referenced in regard to Wine-Searcher.com where the owners of Chambers Street have considered dropping the sub due to an annual fee that has reached $6,500 annually.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-sells-wine-today-how-one-manhattan-retailer-is-thriving-1499377311

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