More Previous Enhancements to WineWeb Services

WineWeb continually enhances the feature set to benefit its clients. Here's some previous enhancements. Be sure to check out our enhancement list for additional enhancement postings.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Clients subscribed to the Enhanced Website Plan or the Premier Bundle have access to our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) component. This is available at no additional cost. Major features of our CRM include:

• Adding Notes to a customer record and keeping a history of customer communication.
• Assigning follow-up and other Tasks to yourself, or others at the winery, for a customer.
• Keeping track of the Relationships between your customers.
• Adding Custom Fields to specific types of customers to enable you to track prospective customers through the sales pipeline.

There are inquiry, search and reporting capabilities around all these functions, as well as integration with our other modules, for example:

• A note can be flagged as an alert that is displayed in the POS for that customer.
• An email blast will automatically create customer notes to maintain the communication history for each customer.
• A note is created if a wine club credit card pre-check exception is identified and the customer is emailed.
• If you email a customer and BCC a special email address, a note is created for that customer.

The CRM component rounds out our service offering and makes WineWeb a complete solution to manage your direct sales channel.

The CRM services supports not only existing customers, but prospects and other types of winery contacts. The service manages assigned tasks by individual, and is integrated with our reporting and import/export routines.

Social Media Integration

We noticed that several of our winery clients were adding "follow us" links on their website to the major social media sites, so we've enhanced our website services to make it easier to add these links, and have these links appear throughout the winery websites. Now, a winery can easily select the social media sites that they want to appear on their website. For each site, they can choose an icon, or can upload an icon of their choice. These links appear automatically on the Contact Us page of the website.

In addition, we've created a Social Media Page Pod (those areas typically to the right of a web page that highlight a product or feature) that can be placed on every, or selected, web pages. We've also created a Social Media Page containing all these links that can be included in the site navigation menus, so it is available from any page on the website.

That was phase 1: to inform website visitors of a winery's social media sites and allow the visitors to navigate to those social networks.

Phase 2: involved deeper integration with the winery website, so visitors could easily interact with their social networks while viewing the winery's website. We provide the tools for visitors to easily spread the winery's message to their social networks.

For example, a winery website visitor could be viewing an upcoming winery event and want to tell their friends about it. They can now click the "Tweet" icon to compose a post to their Twitter account. The service then creates a short URL of that event page, appends it to the message, then posts the message to Twitter, all without leaving the winery website.

We have integrated our existing "Email a Friend", "User Reviews" and "Wish List / Gift Registry" tools with social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, del.icio.us, Digg, CellarTracker, Snooth and VinCellar. We've developed social media integration into the following winery website pages: Wines, News, Events, Merchandise, Wine Clubs, Food Pairings / Recipes, Blog and User Reviews. You choose the pages to have this functionality and you choose the social media sites to include, along with icons for each. We've also included this posting functionality on the Social Media page, so a visitor could literally post about any page on your website.

To fully understand the social media integration within a winery website, view our test website at www.testvineyards.com.

• Notice the social media page pod on the right side of the interior pages with the "follow us" links to our social media sites.
• Navigate to "Contact Us" and notice the social media links.
• Navigate to "Community: Social Media" for the social media page. Notice that the Tweet and Ping links will include a URL to the previous page viewed.
• Navigate to "News & Events: Upcoming Events" page. You'll see the social media icons next to each event. Click on the "Tweet" icon and you'll see a pop-up window displayed to compose a post to Twitter. If you were logged into your Customer/myWineWeb account, your Twitter account information would be pre-populated. Post a tweet to your network about these features, or close out of the pop-up window.
• Navigate to "Community: User Reviews" and click the "Write a review" link. You can not only post a review to the winery's website, but to other wine review sites. If you are logged into your myWineWeb account, the system can automatically post this review to your Twitter and/or Ping.fm account.

The social media functions are available at no additional cost to our Enhanced Website and Premier Bundle winery clients.

iPhone Web Application for Winery Websites

WineWeb.com announces the release of its iPhone web app component, which allows its hosted winery websites to display like a native application on these mobile devices. This mobile component integrates with WineWeb's content management and e-commerce services, so mobile users can interact online with the winery, including buying wine online, registering for wine clubs, purchasing event tickets, and using the newly-released social media tools. This mobile component extends a winery website to be optimized for the iPhone and similar mobile devices. Over 50 programs were developed to support the uniqueness of the mobile environment and workflow.

The mobile winery website component leverages all the content available in the WineWeb system, so wineries can maintain a single set of data. Wineries can include a customized navigation menu structure and design theme to their mobile winery website to further promote their wine brand. This component is available as a no cost enhancement to wineries using WineWeb's Premier Bundle or as a $20 per month add-on to the Enhanced Website service.

If you'd like to look at our Test Vineyards mobile website, point your iPhone (or Palm Pre) to m.testvineyards.com. You can also get an idea of the interface by shrinking the Safari browser to it's minimum width and browsing the site. (Safari is also available for Windows PCs at apple.com). Two screenshots are below.