Creating Your Virtual Tasting Program

Offering virtual tastings is another great way for your business to lean into the changing landscape and engage with your customers. It’s easy to leverage social technology platforms like Zoom and Google Hangouts to bring your tasting room online and re-open the tasting based revenue streams that your in-person business has always enjoyed. Customers both old and new are sure to enjoy a guided tasting experience from your team. If you’re ready to increase your revenues during the pandemic by hosting impressive virtual tastings, here are some steps to follow.

Curate Your Products

Take a look at your inventory and determine the best sets of products to offer as tasting flights. While traditional tastings are centered around samples, given the socially distant nature of a virtual tasting, you’ll be using your standard inventory. If you offer mini bottles of your beers, wines, or spirits – these would be ideally suited for virtual tastings where you will charge per person. If you only offer larger sizes for your products, consider composing your tasting flights of full-size bottles and charging per household.

Detail Your Distribution Plan

Once you have picked the line-up of wine for your event and determined your price point, it is vital to determine how you will distribute your products to attendees. If you plan on shipping your products, you’ll want to price out those costs in advance. It is much the same with delivery, having your costs outlined will help you in determining your overall pricing in the next step. Finally, if you plan on having your customers pick-up their bottles in person, make sure you have your curbside pickup guidelines well defined and ready to go so you can easily communicate them as events are booked.

Plan your Price Point

For a virtual tasting program to succeed, it must offer your customers good value without breaking the bank for your customers. Economic concerns abound during this crisis so keeping your pricing accessible for your customer base is a must for success. Since the tasting will constitute a multi-bottle sale for you, consider applying a small discount per bottle for the tasting event to keep the cost per customer in line. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to charge full price for your tasting flight – consider offering free shipping on your products or a post-event discount for products purchased by the attendees. Remember, keeping your virtual tastings affordable will help make your customers want to repeat the experience. 

Public or Private

With all the details in place, you’re almost ready to launch your virtual tasting program. The last piece to determine is whether you will be hosting public tastings, private tastings, or both. With the public tasting, you will be determining the dates and times and selling individual flights direct to your consumers. With the private tasting, you will be working with a group leader to organize a virtual event for their group. However you choose to offer your new program, GroupTools can help with fast, efficient, digital optimization for your events. 

#GroupForward with GroupTools

GroupTools offers a full suite of tools for creating custom event pages, securely collecting payments online, managing surveys, forms, and more. You can leverage the platform as a planner for your public events and promote them directly to your customer base or create templates you can transfer to group leaders to keep group-buying easy for your planners. Whichever way you choose to #GroupForward in your business, GroupTools has the solution for you, and getting started couldn’t be easier! In as little as an hour our team will have your account ready and your team trained. Simply complete our supplier inquiry form and our team will get you set up right away.

Virtual Tastings for Group Leaders

If you’re a group leader looking to book a virtual tasting or plan one of your own, we’ve got you covered too. Join us next week and we’ll have a guide to virtual tastings for you here on our blog.