The Chatterbox blog
Field notes from the DTC sales desk.
Ideas, playbooks and lessons from years of calling wine club members and DTC customers for wineries — outbound campaigns, retention, email and the data behind it all.
Latest article
Your Holiday DTC Phone Campaign: A Week-by-Week Plan
·3 min read
November and December are the busiest buying weeks of the DTC year. Here's how to plan a holiday phone campaign so your best customers hear from you before the gift guides and the shipping cutoffs.
Read the article·1 min read
How to Grow Wine Club Sign-Ups Without Leaning on Discounts
Bigger discounts bring in members who leave just as fast. These seven ideas grow your club with customers who actually stay.
Read article·2 min read
Declined Cards on Club Run Day: A Recovery Playbook for Wineries
About one in ten cards declines on a typical club run. Here's a simple process to recover those shipments, keep the members and turn the call into a better experience.
Read article·1 min read
Email and Phone Together: How to Sequence a DTC Campaign
Email alone gets ignored and cold calls feel abrupt. Used together, in the right order, they make each other work harder. Here's a simple sequence wineries can use.
Read article·1 min read
Clean Your Customer Data Before Your Next Campaign: A Checklist
A campaign is only as good as the list behind it. This checklist covers the data cleanup that makes calls and emails land — and keeps you from annoying your best customers.
Read article·3 min read
How to Reduce Wine Club Attrition: 9 Ways to Keep Members Longer
Every member who cancels takes years of future shipments with them. These nine practical tactics help wineries lower club churn and extend member lifetime value.
Read article·2 min read
Turn Tasting Room Visitors into Repeat Buyers: The Follow-Up Plan
Most tasting room visitors leave with a great memory and never order again. A simple follow-up plan — a thank-you, a call and a reason to come back — changes that.
Read article·2 min read
How to Call Your Wine Customers Without Sounding Like a Telemarketer
Calling your own customers isn't cold calling, so it shouldn't sound like it. Here's a simple, flexible call structure your team can use, with sample wording for every step.
Read article·2 min read
How to Sell Out a Spring Release by Phone
A spring release is a story worth telling one customer at a time. Here's how to plan the list, the offer and the calls so your allocation sells through before summer.
Read article·2 min read
In-House vs. Outsourced DTC Sales: An Honest Comparison for Wineries
Should you hire your own phone sales team or bring in a partner? A straightforward look at what each option really takes: hiring, training, software, management and results.
Read article·2 min read
Win Back Lapsed Wine Customers: A January Reactivation Plan
January is quiet for most wineries — which makes it the perfect month to call the customers who used to buy from you and simply stopped. Here's a simple plan to bring them back.
Read article·3 min read
10 Ways Chatterbox Private Client Sales Increase Sales
Discover how our DTC private client sales will increase your wine club retention, sales and referrals.
Read article·1 min read
Chatterbox Sales Style: Luxury Account Management
Luxury account management is a specialized form of client or customer relationship management that is tailored to the unique needs and expectations of high-end or luxury clients.
Read article·5 min read
Don’t Believe in Telesales For Your Winery? Read This
This is an old topic for us, "we aren't comfortable with calling our customers", yet, the results prove that all DTC brands should be calling their customers, as soon as possible.
Read article·3 min read
DTC Wine Sales: About Steven T. Smith II
In 1999, Steven was working at Tra Vigne as an apprentice wine buyer under David Stevens. For nearly a decade prior, he'd lived in cities working for great chefs, but the wine bug set in hard and quick. That same year, Mark Pope hired him off of the floor to work in sales at Bounty Hunter Rare Wines - and the rest is history.
Read article·4 min read
Wine Clubs New Consumer Protection Legislation – What You Need To Know
Wine Clubs, new legislation is being proposed to to help members of all subscription types, that leverage negative option marketing, by forcing
Read article·4 min read
How to Run A High Performing Outbound Campaign
Outbound campaigns, as they relate to DTC wine sales are geared towards existing customers. The calls are an even split of service and sales.
Read article·3 min read
Direct To Consumer Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
Email marketing is a powerful tool for wineries to reach customers directly. Wine brands use this strategy to communicate and build relationships
Read article·5 min read
From the CBX Sales Desk: An Interview With Morgan Hale
Prior to joining the outbound sales team, Morgan worked in hospitality which made the difference in her outbound success.
Read article·4 min read
How To Use Your DTC Funnel To Increase Wine Sales
To find growth in your DTC program, you have the opportunity to examine the customer journey in order to segment your list on where they are in that journey. Once that list is defined, you now have a sales funnel that will allow you to have smaller strategies to move each level to the next. All the while extending lifetime value and the profitability of each customer.
Read article·3 min read
7 Ways To Kick Start Your 2023 DTC Campaign
Some great ideas of how to set yourself and DTC program up for success in 2023. December was like a fantastic roller coaster ride. One minute they are checking your harness to make sure you don't fly out - the next, you are upside down going hoarse from screaming "weeeee!"
Read article·2 min read
Tips from the Telesales Desk
Chatterbox's success with outbound has much to do with the breadth of calls we make - and how we make them. The "how" has never been as noticeable as a reason for our success - but, what we have found is the combination of personal touch + volume of calls leads to more authentic engagement and a higher ratio of calls back.
Read article·2 min read
May Outbound Sales Update
Year over year, May would mark the end of feverish Spring allocation and buying season. I use the analogy of being on a roller coasting ride and May is the end of the ride before you get off and go stand in line and wait for next October. Times are clearly different. What we are seeing is a decline in contact rate due to heightened levels of customer travel - but average order values are up 10-12%.
Read article·4 min read
Tales from the Telesales Desk: Brittany Monk
I started working at Chatterbox in 2018 with a retail sales background and basic wine knowledge. I had never heard of telesales in general or Chatterbox specifically, but I was stoked when I got the call that I got the job! I wanted to dip my toes into the Wine Industry, and this was definitely the perfect place for me. Even if I wanted to be shy and hesitant, my new coworkers were enthusiastic in welcoming me to the family.
Read article·4 min read
Score More DTC Wine Sales: Level Up Your Customers
Lead scoring your wine club and non-club members (DTC) will enable your sales team to target the customers with the highest potential to purchase.
Read article·5 min read
Outsourcing DTC Sales: Risk or Reward?
When asked what Chatterbox does or about the benefits of outsourcing DTC sales, I’ve gotten it down to one floor of an elevator ride. Outbound. We extend your brand past the 2D world of email and actually interact with your customers. Outbound leads to contact and contact leads to sales. The connection makes the sale more personal and is particularly effective with the luxury wine buying demographic. People want to talk about wine – plain and simple.
Read article·1 min read
Third Leaf Partners Adds DTC Sales Experts Chatterbox Wine Marketing
Napa, CA: An investment group led by Third Leaf Partners has acquired the direct-to-consumer sales group, Chatterbox Wine Marketing. Third Leaf Partners first worked with Chatterbox in 2018 and recognized its immediate impact DTC campaigns run by the Chatterbox team.
Read article·2 min read
How To Crush Your Next Outbound DTC Campaign
The two biggest questions we receive from prospective clients about DTC, “how do you generate the conversion rates and high average order values?”
Read article·5 min read
How To Generate More Revenue From Your Non Club Members
We’ve had so much change as an industry, that great questions are being asked that weren’t focused on before. Probably the most common I’m hearing is ‘how do we get more revenue from our non-club list?’ It’s precisely the type of question that you should
Read article·5 min read
Winning Email Marketing Tips
The things we do for each and every campaign align with what you see in Internet Retailer 500 marketing. Your wine (if you will) is the payload in this equation, and our methodology the fuel.
Read article·4 min read
Winery Customer Database or Digital Junk Drawer
Dirty customer data is the silent killer of marketing campaigns. Everybody has a breaking point. Mine was the week after Christmas when my 4-year-old son, high on gingerbread and fresh pine scent, needed a new toy opened up. Of course, it was one of those that comes packaged in its own SuperMax prison of zip-ties, packing tape, and staples.
Read articleRather we just run the campaign for you?
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What you'll walk away with
- A look at your club and customer segments
- A revenue forecast based on your database size
- Where you're losing members — and how to keep them
- A recommended mix of outbound, service and account management