Most wineries market to the 60 miles around their tasting room. That radius feels safe. The people who live there already know wine, already visit, already buy. But the wineries with an established online presence tell a different story. For many of them, more than half of their direct-to-consumer revenue comes from customers who live nowhere near the tasting room.

Read that again. Wineries that only market locally are leaving roughly half their revenue opportunity untouched.

That was the starting point for our recent webinar, hosted by Amplify with three people who work on this problem every day: Jennie from Redchirp, Emily from Awtomic, and Nikki from Amplify. The theme was simple. Direct-to-consumer brands have spent a decade learning how to acquire, keep, and grow customers online, often without any physical location at all. Wineries can borrow almost all of it.

Here is what stood out.

The tasting room is your highest-intent funnel. Treat it like one.

There is no higher intent than a customer standing in your tasting room, glass in hand. They have done the hard part. They found you, they showed up, they liked the wine enough to buy.

And yet most wineries fail to capture that moment. When you visit a good DTC website, you meet a pop-up to subscribe, a newsletter opt-in in the footer, a banner inviting you to join. Walk into a tasting room and those invitations often disappear. You hand over an email to make a reservation, and that is the end of it.

The data backs this up. WISE runs thousands of tasting room visits and publishes what it calls the "triple score": how often staff ask visitors to buy wine, to join the club, and to share an email and phone number to stay in touch. That last one is where the industry struggles. Only about one in five wineries even asks.

This is fixable today. Add a checkbox at guest check-in. Put a QR code on the table. Ask for both email and phone number, not just email. And ask for express written consent to keep marketing after the visit ends. As Jennie put it, an opt-in list is either growing or decaying. There is no third state.

Run acquisition as a math problem, not just a hospitality one

DTC brands measure customer acquisition cost obsessively. Wineries rarely do. That gap hides real opportunity.

The tasting room is an acquisition channel with a cost attached. The property, the staff, the pour. Once you calculate what it actually costs to convert a tasting room visitor into a club member, digital marketing stops looking risky and starts looking like an apples-to-apples comparison. You may still find that tasting room customers carry a higher lifetime value. You will almost certainly find that a much larger pool of online traffic, converting at a lower rate, still delivers meaningful growth.

There is a national audience of people who love good wine and have no easy way to buy it locally. Many of them, by their own account, have never once seen an ad for wine. DTC brands sell water, hydration powder, and canned beverages to strangers every day. Wine, which is genuinely interesting, is an easier product to make people care about. Most wineries just are not trying.

Emily named the biggest difference she sees between top DTC brands and wineries. DTC brands experiment constantly. Their sites, offers, and messaging change all the time. Wineries too often treat the website as an online placeholder or a piece of art, rather than the conversion tool it can be. Get clear on your value proposition. Say in one sentence why your wine is the right wine for a specific person. Then A/B test your way toward more conversions.

The welcome flow starts everywhere

Ask where a welcome flow begins and the honest answer is everywhere. It starts with a pop-up sign-up. It also starts with a shipment notification, an event invitation, an order confirmation, a thank-you. Every touchpoint is a chance to begin or continue a conversation, especially if you embrace two-way texting.

At the sign-up moment itself, one mistake stands out. Many wineries lead with a discount that beats every club and subscription offer they have. A 35% welcome code trains customers to wait for the next promotion and skip the club entirely. Access works better than a markdown. First dibs on new releases. A library wine non-members cannot get. A reveal that arrives 24 hours early. Access is a stronger motivator, and it earns you the subscriber without eroding your pricing.

Two more things worth adding at sign-up. Remind customers what you can do for them beyond a discount: pairing help, storage advice, reservation support, a real person who texts back. And always let them know they can reply. A simple "text us back anytime" turns a broadcast into a relationship.

Personalization means segmentation, and segmentation is care

If the webinar had a single banner to fly overhead, it would read: segmentation.

Good personalization is the right message to the right person at the right time. It does not have to be one-to-one, but it should feel that way. Start with channel affinity. If a customer engages over text and ignores email, send the next campaign by text alone. Stop sending the same message across every channel at once.

Then segment on behavior. If someone only buys Cabernet, lead with Cabernet, not the new rosé. Redchirp's own research into message sentiment surfaced four layers worth watching:

• How long since the customer last bought non-club wine
• How long since you last sent a promotional message
• Current club status, active or not
• Past engagement with your text campaigns, and how strongly

Those four inputs alone will sharpen almost any send.

Segmentation also lets you be genuinely thoughtful. Drip out membership benefits after someone joins, because nobody memorizes the fine print after three glasses in the tasting room. Reach out before a first club shipment to smooth any friction. Say thank you on the anniversary of a membership. And tell people why you are contacting them. "We're reaching out because we loved seeing you last spring, and we know you love our big reds." That single line signals attention, and attention builds loyalty.

Two-way texting: where wineries are ahead

Here the lesson runs the other way. DTC brands could learn this one from wineries.

Wineries tend to text with customers, not just at them. When you give people multiple paths to purchase, including "reply and I'll place the order for you," those messages outperform a promotion with a link every time. Even shipment notifications benefit. Making them two-way cuts returns and failed deliveries, because a customer with a problem can reach a real person instead of a self-service dead end. This is working for wineries. The advice is to double down.

RCS is coming, and early movers will win

RCS is the biggest change to text messaging since text messaging began. Three features matter most for wineries.

First, RCS messages come from a verified business, not a phone number. They arrive branded with your logo and carry trust even for a first-time contact. Second, you finally get design control: image placement and size, multiple images, even a carousel. Third, messages can include suggested responses ("I'll take three bottles," "I'll take six") and action buttons ("Shop now," "Add to calendar," "Share my location," "Call an ambassador"). Every tap is tracked, so the analytics arrive with the engagement.

RCS is new to brands, carriers, and consumers alike. That is exactly why getting in early pays. The wineries that start experimenting now will stand out and will learn what works before everyone else does.

A wine club is a subscription. Manage it like one.

Emily's closing argument was the most provocative. A wine club already is a subscription. Few wineries run it like the modern subscriptions their customers use everywhere else.

DTC brands learned that flexibility lowers the barrier to conversion. Skip a shipment, change the frequency, adjust the quantity, cancel online. A decade ago subscriptions felt like traps you had to phone to escape. Now the good ones say "cancel anytime," and that transparency is what makes people willing to try.

Wineries worry their customers are not ready. The wineries that have modernized report the opposite. Customers were ready before the winery was. Often it is the winery that is more attached to the release-schedule tradition than the customer is. Operationally, spreading shipments out can smooth both revenue and fulfillment rather than compressing everything into a single frantic week.

Two more DTC lessons apply directly. Measure retention and act on it. Find your biggest drop-off point and place an incentive just before it. Find the shipment number beyond which members reliably stay, and design the early experience to get people there. And handle cancellation with care rather than a wall. Cancel mitigation, meeting the customer in the moment, often keeps them. The number-one reason people cancel across all of eCommerce, wine included, is simple: "I have too much." Flexibility answers that directly. Let people take three bottles this quarter and five before a party, more whites in summer, a longer gap when life gets busy. They stay.

You do not have to flip a switch on the whole club. Many wineries introduce a flexible subscription option alongside the traditional model and let members show them what they want.

Incentives that mean something

Discounts are not the only lever, and often not the best one. Gifts with purchase work when they are relevant and thoughtful rather than generic. A branded tote moves no one. A packet of seeds meant to grow in an empty wine bottle might, especially for a winery that leans into sustainability. Imagine a seed packet with every shipment, building toward a full herb garden on the counter, each spent bottle becoming a daily reminder of the brand.

The principle underneath is identity. The strongest DTC brands sell something customers fold into who they are. Access-based rewards do the same work, often for very little cost. Let a referral unlock the ability to customize the next box. To the customer, choosing four products instead of two feels like a meaningful upgrade. To you, it costs almost nothing.

If you do one thing after reading this

The panel each offered a single next step.

Make sure your welcome pop-up is firing, connected to a list, with a follow-up message behind it.

Build a real opt-in strategy with at least three sources: something on your website, something in the tasting room, and something triggered by a transaction.

And write down two sentences. One on what makes your winery uniquely valuable. One describing your most loyal, most valuable customer. Get your team to agree on both, print them, and put them everywhere. That clarity drives everything else.

None of this asks a winery to stop being a winery. The hospitality, the story, the white-glove service are advantages DTC brands wish they had. The opportunity is to pair them with the acquisition, retention, and measurement discipline that online brands have already proven. That combination is where the next half of your revenue is waiting.

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