5 Ways Digital Wine Lists Improve The Customer Experience

In most cellar doors and tasting rooms across Australia and abroad, the customer experience is the same. A visitor enters and after being greeted, they're offered a sheet of paper with a list of all the wines they can taste.

But the times have changed. And it's time to start thinking about things a little differently.

Increasingly, wineries are adopting technology that can improve customer engagement at the cellar door and one of the best avenues for this is digital wine lists.

Instead of using piles of paper, digital wine lists allow wineries to use utilise tablets and the internet to create a unique experience for every customer.

Here are the top five ways digital wine lists can improve your customer's experience:

1. Digital Wine Lists Are More Engaging

People, in general, are much more used to technology nowadays. Everyone knows what a QR code is and is used to searching for info online and some even have a general idea of what NFT means. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that for your younger customers, relying on a piece of paper is actually a little bit strange.

Traditional paper wine lists are a bit impersonal. They rely on your brilliant staff to ensure your customers have a great experience. But what happens when your tasting rooms get slammed and your staff run off their feet? Catering to wine enthusiasts, experts and novices all at once?

Digital wine lists allow customers to guide their own wine tasting aided by your cellar door staff without relying on them to give 110% all the time. So customers spend less time talking about the wine and more time building relationships.

2. Digital Wine Lists are Easy to Update

Digital wine lists can also help streamline your administration. Whether it‘s creating a new list for a special event or removing a wine that is no longer available for tasting, updating your digital wine list only takes seconds. Can you really say that about your printer?

With most digital wine lists you can upload the wine info and tag them to create a nice mix of wine lists. So, if you offer a tiered tasting at your cellar door or different ranges of wines in a tasting, a digital wine list can easily accommodate that.

Additionally, you can often add pictures, tasting notes, or even food pairings as well as pricing. Basically offering all the information customers get from a paper list but in a more interactive and engaging way.

Plus, you can make changes without chucking out a bunch of paper.

3. Digital Wine Lists are More Environmentally Friendly

Speaking of dumping out piles of paper, increasingly, customers want companies to be green and limit the amount of waste they produce.

Yes, we can all recycle that paper, but what if you never had to bother printing out the paper in the first place? Plus, there's always the chance that visitors to your winery could not recycle the paper or even litter it around your tasting room. Which gives you and your staff more work to do.

Depending on how many paper menus you print and later throw out, switching to a digital menu may make a difference to your environmental impact.

5. Digital Wine Lists Make it Easy to Capture Customer Data

When we were designing our digital wine lists, we wanted to make it easy for wineries to connect with their customers and vice versa.

When customers use our digital wine lists, they can record the wines they have tried and the ones they liked. This creates a personal record of their tasting experience. They can also email their tasting notes to themselves, so they don't have to shove paper lists of notes down their handbags.

For wineries, this has two major benefits. As part of receiving their personalised email, customers are able to join your mailing list, giving you a hassle-free way to grow your database. However, the greatest benefit is the data you capture.

You will have a record of all of the tastings in your cellar door, allowing you to see trends and create segmented marketing campaigns for your customers.