Beer Club Management Made Easy
We love beer clubs! So much so that we wrote a whole article about the opportunities they provide for growing your business. Not only does the recurring revenue from clubs help stabilize the brewery and allow for better planning and more experimentation, but club programs nurture your loyal fans and create new enthusiasts.
But, the big question is: how is your brewery going to manage your clubs?
Once you determine your club audience, you can decide on the delivery method and club structure. Then, it’s time to think about club management.
It’s not practical to keep track of your club program with paper and pencil or a whiteboard. These methods may work while your team is small and your production volume is low, but a reliable record system is required to get the insights you need as you grow. Verbal or paper records can lead to discrepancies, inaccuracies, and a lack of communication.
Even using programs like Excel or Google Drive to manage your clubs will not cut it. Sure, you can share a Google Sheet, but how do you communicate club order exceptions or show relevant team members where the numbers came from? Plus, it’s difficult to forecast your future needs and reconciliation with your accounting software at the end of each month can be a nightmare.
Club Management Software is the Solution
It’s highly recommended that breweries identify and adopt a club management platform. A system built especially for alcohol subscription services will drastically cut down the time, energy, and money it takes to run a club. A good system will help your brewery stay organized, keep customer data safe, and make it easy to scale.
Below, we outline four vital considerations you need to make when selecting a club management platform.
Batch Processing
If a brewery wants to launch a club and grow it, they need to have a system in place that can handle batch processing. Manually processing club orders takes a ton of time and leaves room for error. Batch processing takes dozens of hours of manual data entry and distills it down into seconds.
Not only do we recommend selecting a system that allows batch processing, but it also needs to include exception handling. Exceptions are blocks to orders like an expired credit card or inaccurate shipping address. When this happens, you need a system that can identify the exception, create an alert, and automatically send an email to the customer with directions to fix the issue. The exception won’t clog up your process and the instant notification to the customer helps move things forward without your team having to track down information actively.
With the time and energy saved through batch processing, brewery teams can spend more time crafting new and interesting beers or planning club release parties to incentivize club participation.
Inventory Tracking
It sounds simple, but you must make sure that the platform you choose can prevent you from overselling. By having up-to-date visibility on inventory, breweries can make better business decisions.
With a beer club, you’ll be reserving beer for the club release. Without the proper system, you could easily mistake the reserved beer for excess inventory and sell it through other means. A club management system can assign beer to an upcoming club order, preventing you from overselling and greatly disappointing your greatest fans. Buffers can also be put in place to ensure you have excess if needed.
Personalization and Customization
We live in an environment with rapidly advancing technology. Your brewery fans have become accustomed to digital personalization, whether they realize it or not. Automatic notifications, recommendations, and customization are not just nice to have; they are expected.
To keep up with your member’s expectations, breweries need to choose a club management system that allows breweries to make things personal.
Custom Clubs
Many modern clubs allow members to customize their orders. Club members enjoy having the freedom to personalize their beers. If they’d rather have an extra seasonal stout and skip the porter, they can make that choice.
With a club management platform like VineSpring, breweries can easily set up a club program where members have more autonomy in their ordering process without burdening the brewery with extra paperwork. The brewery can select which elements are interchangeable and let the customer do the rest. Allow customization ranging from swapping products, adding or subtracting products, or even holding or skipping an upcoming release.
Wish Management
Allocations are another type of subscription service that is perfectly suited for breweries. They slightly differ from clubs.
Club Programs: Club members pay for a guaranteed product from your brewery.
Allocation Programs: Allocation members are given an exclusive opportunity to purchase products from your brewery.
We recommend using a technology that allows breweries to manage an allocations program and allow for additional product “wishes.”
For example, an allocation member will receive an email letting them know that they can buy two six-packs of your latest release for the next week. Usually, the items offered in an allocation are in limited supply. The member can choose to purchase those two six-packs or not. This is where the “wish” comes in. If the member wants more than two six-packs, they can “wish” for more. Once the allotted time restraint is over, the brewery can grant or deny the wish, depending on supply and demand.
This allows breweries to give loyal fans their latest and greatest while being able to carefully control the supply.
Website Continuity
When creating an online storefront for your brewery and its clubs, it’s best to have the store seamlessly blend into the rest of the site. You don’t want visitors to feel like they are exiting your website when they click on your store.
Make sure you select a system that allows storefront customization. With VineSpring, breweries can create a brand-customized store with either the Software Developers Kit (SDK) or the hosted storefront. The hosted storefront has everything you need to set up a user-friendly eCommerce store with customized styling; no coding experience required. The SDK gives developers all of the tools needed to customize the storefront even further.
Automatic Notifications
Personalized automatic notifications give breweries the power to communicate with customers about their orders efficiently. Club members get timely updates, and breweries engage club members before an upcoming release to ensure successful delivery. This type of communication only increases club members’ trust and gives the brewery the data they need to run a smooth operation.
Reporting and Analytics
Effective reporting is essential to a club program and business in general. Breweries need insight supported by hard data to gauge what is working and what isn’t.
Thankfully, technology has made it possible to create easy reports for all business areas. It’s imperative that your club management system has reporting capabilities that will present a clear picture of member activity and give practical insight to help with future business decisions.
For example, VineSpring has a club reporting dashboard that shows club member status, canceled members, members by location, and more. These types of reports allow breweries to gain valuable insights about club members and inform their marketing decisions.
Brewery Clubs Need Club-Specific Support
Choosing the right platform to manage your club programs is not a light decision. You’ll need to rely on the system you choose to please your most dedicated fans and keep your club operations efficient. If you’d like to dive deeper into the pluses and minuses of different beer club management options, feel free to reach out to the VineSpring team. We’ve been helping craft producers manage their clubs for over a decade and would be happy to give you our expert advice.
