As any wine collector knows, it's difficult to find all of the fine wine you want to buy from a single wine retailer.  As noted before in Buying smartly from wine retailers, you increase your odds of obtaining scarce fine wines by concentrating your purchases because most retailers make some attempt to reward loyal customers with priority access.

Our approach to cultivating loyalty 

In early 2007, Vinfolio created a customer priority program.  Benefits increase with reaching higher annual spending levels ($5,000, $25,000, and $75,000+).  The prime benefit is priority buying access to scarce, allocated, and/or highly rated wines.  These wines are generally highly sought after but given excess demand, I'd always prefer to offer them first to customers who have demonstrated their loyalty to Vinfolio.  So that's what we do -- in a very systematic fashion.

How it works 

For newly puchased wines that fit our criteria for scarcity and high ratings, we literally offer these wines in three successive 24-hour periods to an expanding group of priority customers before releasing any remaining unsold wine to the general public on our website.  Wines that sell out at a given level are simply not presented to the next level.  When signed in on our website, priority customers are recognized and wine available at their benefit level is made available to purchase.

Moreover, the email notification such customers receive that announces newly available wines is personalized to reflect whether the customer already owns a wine being offered and in what quantity (based on the contents of their VinCellar cellar management software account).

Bottom line: If your retailer is not reciprocating your loyalty in some proportionate manner to your spending level, then take your business elsewhere.

Note: This post was inspired by a book excerpt titled "Loyalty is a Two-Way Street" from a new book called Marketing Metaphoria that was written up in a recent article in the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge email newsletter.