Naked Wines drives customer loyalty with personalized emails.

Brand

NakedWines.com is an online wine retailer that works on a subscription basis and operates in the UK, US and Australian markets. NakedWines.com’s customers (called Angels) fund independent winemakers from around the world, in return for exclusive access to delicious wines at wholesale prices.

Objectives

• Enable the NakedWines.com team to expand their high-touch, personalized approach into their email program.
• Drive customer loyalty via increased engagement and satisfaction.
• Sell wine more closely aligned with individual customer preferences.
• Drive an increase in Angel ratings by delivering improvement in their customer experience.

The Challenge

NakedWines.com emphasize exceptional customer service to their members, who they refer to as “Angels”. Through the NakedWines.com’s website, mobile app, emails and phone support, Angels come to expect highly personalized wine recommendations as a result of their purchases and subsequent ratings. But in order to provide this experience at scale in their email campaigns, the marketing team needed to orchestrate a highly complex use of data, systems integration and technology.

The Solution

As part of their regular strategic review, their Adestra Account Manager suggested the idea of adding personalized product recommendations to their emails. A proof of concept was delivered and the go ahead was given for the project. With support from Adestra, the Naked Wines’ development team generated an XML recommendations feed and the Adestra Professional Services team incorporated the relevant code to the email templates, set up the automated campaigns, quality assured and tested them.

The campaign delivers up to five unique wine recommendations with a percentage certainty based on data fed from their recommendation engine. The conditional email content, personalization, calls to action and recommendations are driven by a number of data variables including:

• Account balance
• Customer’s basket contents
• Number of wine recommendations
• Percentage certainty of recommendation
• Subscriber first name
• Number of wines rated
• Variable call to action driven by customer profile

Wine recommendation(s) including: product image, product name with list price and Angel price, savings (calculated in email code), and dynamic URLs.

The Result

This campaign is remarkable due to Naked Wines’ adherence to brand integrity aimed at producing a positive, personalized customer experience and attention to the email’s contribution to fundamental business metrics.

The email met or exceeded all key metrics from previous monthly wine promotions in its initial iteration. Apart from seeing an increase in email engagement, the business impact of this campaign was:

• .2% increase in site conversion with customers who click through the email
• 7.2% increase in total conversion to order
• 7.9% increase in gross profit per customer, or 8.5% uplift in contribution per customer

What’s next?

Naked Wines plans to continue to optimize this campaign by refining the recommendation engine as well as focusing on acquiring ratings from customers. This would improve both the confidence of recommendations and increase the scale at which this campaign can be deployed.

Additionally, there will be a focus on developing new website content to support this approach, with other highly personalized campaigns using recommendations to follow. This will help increase the engagement of their emails and the loyalty of their customers who can thus benefit from a unique service. Last but not least, due to the success of the campaign, Naked Wines will roll out the campaign internationally.

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