During this webinar, we covered best practices and tools for a successful spring peak. The three keys to a successful spring shipping season we highlighted include being proactive, setting expectations, and gathering feedback. Read on for more details.
Be Proactive
Get ahead of customer, vendor, and team issues by being proactive in the following areas:
Customer Information: Check with customers to verify their address, credit card information, and preferences are up to date.
Products Offered: Keep customers informed of any new products, benefits, events, and promotions along with changes that happen along the way.
Pro Tip: Events are a great tool to drive engagement and loyalty to your brand.
Internal Planning: Set the teams you work with up for success by keeping them in the loop, including sharing sales forecasts with your fulfillment partner and any up-and-coming offerings with your internal team so they’re enabled and ready to sell. Also, double-check that your DtC shipping licenses are up to date and all integrated systems have information set up, like SKUs, to avoid delays and to ensure a smooth customer experience.
Pro Tip: Run test orders to ensure your systems are working together.
Set Expectations
Communication with customers and internal teams is key so they know what to expect.
Customers: Notify them about any deadlines to place orders or update their information. Inform them about what channels are available for engaging with your brand to place orders, communicate with your team, and how they’ll be notified about their shipments. Wineshipping Premium Tracking’s branded email and SMS notifications about shipments can be sent automatically for a seamless customer experience. It can also be integrated with other email and SMS platforms, such as RedChirp.
Pro Tip: Use general language like, “Your package will arrive this week” instead of “Your package will ship on this date” to better set expectations and improve the customer experience.
Internal Team: Let your customer service team know when they should reach out to your customers.
Pro Tip: Teams who proactively communicate with customers about weather delays, damages, and other issues help reduce return rates and provide a positive customer experience.
Get Feedback
Understand how you did so you can improve your sales, your customer experience, and performance.
- Ask for Feedback: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple way to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. You can also ask customers for reviews of their experience. Wineshipping’s Premium Tracking captures customer reviews if enabled.
- Analyze Data: Run data from your point of sale (POS) or e-commerce systems to understand your sales performance. If you have access to delivery metrics, those can be reviewed to understand costs and carrier performance.
- Internal Retrospective: Ask your team how things went from a customer service, shipping, sales, and operations perspective.
Wineshipping Best Practices for Successful Spring Shipments
If you’re a Wineshipping client, we recommend the following to best collaborate with our team for a successful spring shipping season:
- Use our Awesome Client Portal – we continuously add value with each release.
- Reserve your club or allocation date by filling out our club form and sending it to our customer service team.
- Add new SKUS in Wineshipping and integrated systems.
- Inventory – make sure we have it in our warehouses including collateral and merchandise.
- Order data for clubs or releases – provide at least 3 days prior to ship date.
- Premium Tracking – configure branding, emails, reviews, and more so your brand experience can be carried through the delivery.
- Arrival Date – focus on arrival date vs ship date when setting expectations with your customers.
Watch the full webinar here.