WineDirect.com.au are passionate about great wine. They write about it, they judge it, they travel for it — and they also drink it.
It all started about 20 years ago, when the Managing Director, Mark Pradun, found that many of his regular customers would call up and say: "Mate, just put a dozen red together for me and can you drop it off on your way home?" Inadvertently, this was the birth of their direct wine sales model, and they haven't looked back since.
With 20 years of experience selling direct to their customers, WineDirect.com.au weren't strangers to advertising online. However, the team didn't have the time and resources to continuously test new audiences and strategies.
Leveraged remarketing
According to Wunderkind, 70–96% of website visitors who abandon a website will never return again. Because WineDirect.com.au didn't have any remarketing in place, if new visitors didn't purchase on their first visit, it was very unlikely they ever would. This presented a huge opportunity.
By mapping out the user journey in a storyboard, we helped create many tailored remarketing advertisements, based on where the user was at in the buying cycle. So if a user browsed a product category, added an item to cart, or was an engaged subscriber, we created ads that were relevant to their behaviour.
These tailored remarketing campaigns soon became their most profitable.
Growing the email database
The team at WineDirect.com.au obviously possess great knowledge of wine, but they're also very creative and talented copywriters. The combination of industry knowledge and copywriting talent equals a fantastic newsletter — so there were no surprises when we saw how profitable their email marketing campaigns were.
However, the only thing preventing them from acquiring more revenue from email was the size of their list. Although there was no real scope to provide our Email Marketing service, we identified an opportunity to further grow their database.
Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook & Instagram campaigns were built to target new wine enthusiasts, incentivising them to subscribe through Facebook Lead Ads.
We then integrated these Facebook & Instagram campaigns with their email platform (with the help of Zapier), and since then we've helped acquire over 1,000 new subscribers.
Seamless integration
Through strong collaboration with the WineDirect.com.au team, we worked together to provide a seamless integration between email and social marketing. There were many clever things we were able to do, but the standout is the 'Win-back' campaign.
A 'Win-back' campaign is a series of targeted, personalised emails sent to lapsed customers. So when a WineDirect.com.au customer wouldn't purchase or open an email after 180 days, they'd be subscribed to a sequence of tailored emails.
However, if a user hasn't opened an email in 180 days, it's logical to assume they may not open any of the Win-back sequence either. So whenever someone fell into that segment — 'not opening an email or purchasing within 180 days' — we would dynamically add them to a Facebook & Instagram 'Win-back' audience.
This provided WineDirect.com.au with other avenues to reach their lapsed subscribers and re-engage with them. What we found was that this campaign didn't just help re-engage lapsed subscribers — it also encouraged them to purchase again.
Wine for thought
After working with WineDirect.com.au for over a year, combining their marketing and industry knowledge with our digital marketing skillset has led to fantastic results. After reviewing their campaign performance at the end of the financial year, this is what Mark had to say:
"I have loved working with Market Ease. They're a team of digital marketing specialists who value transparency, hard work and are results focused.
From January to now (July 2020), the revenue from our digital marketing efforts with paid traffic has increased by 338% and our return on advertising spend has increased by 114%. So far this year, we have managed to yield a $20.40 return on every dollar spent on online advertising.
Needless to say, we are absolutely thrilled with the results and have decided to ramp up our investment and focus into digital marketing moving forward, as it has had a much better return compared to our previous traditional marketing approaches. We have complete trust in Market Ease's ability to help us with this."
The takeaway: most first-time visitors never come back — and most lapsed customers never re-engage on their own. By building behaviour-based remarketing, growing the email list with Lead Ads, and connecting email and social into one win-back system, WineDirect turned paid traffic into a $20.40-per-dollar revenue engine.
