Fabulous Australian wines for every winelover.
As the retail world has changed dramatically in recent times Just Wines became aware of how hard it is for the smaller boutique Australian wineries to compete with big mass produced wines, huge retail groups and endless imports. Just Wines believes that Aussie wine farmers make some of the best wines in the world, hand crafted with passion and tender-loving-care, which were getting left behind in today’s complex retail world.
With over 25 years of wine industry experience, each of Just Wines’s dedicated wine experts has scoured all the well known and up and coming Australian wine regions to carefully select an outstanding range of wines including many award winning, exclusive and hard to find premium quality wines from family owned and boutique wineries.
Just Wines is committed to ensuring that they have a unique catalogue of wines which are not available in large commercial retail outlets or their competitor’s websites.
I setup a delivery model which enabled a consolidated and centralised approach to digital marketing campaign management. The Just Wines USP was carried through all channels, enabled by a quarterly technology and solution design roadmap. An overview of the delivery model is below:
CLIENT CASE STUDY
was first engaged by Just Wines in 2012 when the business was just established. They had spent considerable months of hard-work prior to source boutique Australian wines and they had invested significantly into their warehouse/ distribution facilities. The intention was to have an internet-only business and Just Wines had launched their website on the Big Commerce platform a few months ago and was utilising Kenscio (an email marketing/ digital direct marketing company), a Facebook business page where they shared wine-humour memes, used Rokt (a transactional marketing agency) to generate warm-leads and another local independent designer to design their creatives.
Despite this, sales had been quite slow – newsletter open rates were low, traffic on the website was in the low hundreds with high bounce rates.
ines retailing business is a highly competitive industry, dominated by big mass produced labels and distributed by even bigger retail chains with presence right across Australia. Just Wines had spent ten of thousands of dollars in generating “warm leads” from Rokt, getting their website transactional and even more in building up an inventory of what they thought were high quality, boutique Australian wines offered at next to cost price.
They have a few thousand “likes” on their Facebook page and spent much effort in building an engagement with their audience. Despite this, sales had been quite slow – newsletter open rates were low, traffic on the website was in the low hundreds with a high bounce rates. Just Wines wanted to lower their on-going web maintenance costs and were prepared to invest in a further 6 months before giving up on their venture.
THE SOLUTION
Within 1 week, as an immediate saving, the delivery of newsletter creatives and web design was transitioned to an off-shore team I have established in India. I also recommended for the expensive “warm-leads” generation campaign to be paused until Just Wines had a compelling USP. With a lower cost of change enabled, the focus is then set on generating high level of sales. With the industry dominated by big players with colossal marketing budgets, tackling them head-on was never an option.
I recommended the opening up of a new sales channel on ebay – a platform traditionally known for lower price. Development was completed to enable an XML product feed to be submitted to aggregators such as “Getprice”, “MyShopping”, “ShopBot” (to name a few) for referral traffic. Meanwhile, a brand and USP campaign was developed.
ust Wines carried truly unique organic and boutique labels which are not well known to consumers accustomed to shopping for their wines from large retail chains. Running SEO or Adword campaigns with these key words associated with these labels have little no searches. The wines are generally only stocked by restaurants and eateries charging on occasions more than double Just Wine’s list price. This perceived weakness was actually Just Wine’s strength. This became the core of the campaign for the months that followed challenging consumers to “stop being a follower and try something new and different” and “high price does not always indicate good quality”. This was backed by a 100% money-back satisfaction guarantee.
A bigger team was recruited in the Phillipines to support the SEO and content creation (copy writing) efforts to “educate” consumers of the Just Wines message. Banner and display ad campaigns were ran and I recommended the use of Groupon and other social deals websites to further increase the presence of the Just Wines brand.
The finishing touch was a hand-written and signed “thank you for your support” note on each carton of wine sold.
THE RESULTS
These messages clearly resonated with the customers. Just Wines grew at a phenomenal rate, with revenue doubling in 10 months. Limited by the technical limitations of the BigCommerce platform (especially in the area of promotion rules and “bundling” of products) coupled with prohibitive costs of redesigning the website to accommodate the shift towards mobile browsing, I was engaged to completely redesign the Just Wines buying user experience. This culminated to the re-launch in early 2014 on the Magento platform.
y the end of 2014, Just Wines grew into an established online wine retailing business with sufficient revenue to recruit its own in-house digital marketing team. In 2015, Just Wines was ranked #38 on the BRW “Fast Starters” list with revenue close to $4M p.a.