Virgin targets 100,000 new customers a year

Virgin Wines’ managing director Jay Wright has set out a series of initiatives to assist the company in recruiting 100,000 new customers annually.

Since taking the helm at the UK arm of this online and mail order retailer five years ago, Wright, who was named Man of the Year at the Drinks Business Awards 2013, has focused on expanding the company’s face-to-face interaction with its customers.

From the single consumer tasting event in London that existed when Wright joined, Virgin will hold 30 tastings this year in cities across the UK.

“I created this so we could be very much out and about with a physical presence,” explained Wright, who highlighted the tangible uplift in sales that result from these events. “A year after someone’s come to a tasting for the first time they buy on average 30% more than they did before,” he noted.

Among the most successful elements of Virgin’s current offer is its WineBank Plus programme, which sees 37,000 customers pay £25 each month in return for discounted wine. Thanks to schemes such as its Discovery Club selection, Virgin wine buyer Andrew Baker estimated that “85% of our volume comes from pre-mixed cases”

In addition to the combination of voucher inserts, telemarketing, search engine optimisation and old-fashioned word of mouth that last year helped the company to bring in 96,000 new customers, Wright is now particularly keen to expand the Virgin Wine Fabulous programme.

These see company wine advisors host tastings in customers’ homes – another chance for Virgin to enhance its off-line presence – with each advisor taking responsibility for building their own customer network and maintaining a personalised follow-up service.

Outlining the scale of these Virgin Wine Fabulous events, Wright told db: “We’re planning to have 2,000 tastings over the next 12 months.”

As a natural extension of this initiative, he also confirmed a plan to expand the business into corporate tasting events. “There’s still a lot of opportunity in the corporate market; it isn’t being done very well,” Wright remarked, adding: “A full blown gift business would be quite interesting too.”

With the majority of the company’s sales currently falling in the £8-10 price bracket, Wright also expressed an ambition to expand Virgin Wines’ stake in the fine wine market.

“We would like to do fine wine in a different way,” he told db. “There are a lot of people specialising in Old World fine wine but there are also some fantastic New World fine wines and that side’s not being done particularly well. We would try to do that in a different, interesting way.”

Between them, Wright hopes that these plans will help Virgin achieve his target “to recruit 100,000 customers every year.” However, he stressed: “We don’t just want to launch lots of things in a haphazard way.”