The Angel Wine Story

Probance Provides Angel Wine with Personalized Recommendations for International Wine Lovers

Angel Wine specializes in vintage wines, and is the parent company of vinsetmillesimes.com, their successful ecommerce site. Founded in 2006 by wine enthusiasts Didier Frayssou and Nacim Tiliouine, the company sells fine wines to all those who share their passion. Positioned at the premium end of the market, prices for wines range from €30 to a staggering €19,000 a bottle. While they started the company selling to professionals, market shifts during 2020 saw ecommerce sales to individuals really take off.

Tired of Monkeying Around with Email Tools

While a leading email solution had taken them this far, mass emailing had reached its limits.
Angel Wine’s wide-ranging and constantly shifting product catalogue was too complex for a simple email tool to solve. And international sales means communicating in multiple languages and currencies, and showing prices with and without tax.

“Our email tool wouldn’t take us to the level of personalization and targeted recommendations we wanted,” says Julie Le Trévou, Angel Wine’s head of web strategy. “And all campaigns and segmentation had to be set up manually, which was really time-consuming.”

Their tool also didn’t allow for automated cart recovery emails, which was frustrating as they knew from their Prestashop stats that cart abandonment was leaving money on the table.

Julie Le Trévou adds, “We were flying blind: we didn’t have any tracking or visible results. We couldn’t analyse open rates, or specifically assess customer behaviour.”

Probance AI and Analytics Boost Personalization Performance

A digital agency recommended Probance to Angel Wine as a marketing automation solution whose customized approach delivers truly personalized recommendations. It also represented a chance to automate emails, saving the Angel Wine team a lot of time.

Probance responded by using its powerful AI to match the complex, fast-moving catalog of over 3,500 wines with the equally complex customer interests. The most effective customer scenarios are the automated newsletters (whose frequency increased during peak periods), the all-important basket recovery emails, alerts on new stock, and post-visit remarketing messages.

With the Probance AI analyzing data, including browser behavior and purchase patterns, the personalized recommendations became relevant to each wine lover.

Relevant communication performs better in terms of opens, clicks and conversions. According to Julie Le Trévou, their open rates top the market average – abandoned basket messages are at a 60% open rate. And bringing more potential customers to the site means selling more and more often.

“Alerts are a great way to keep specific customers informed of new stock and rare bottles. Because they are only available in small quantities, customers need to know as soon as they’ve come in.” That attention to detail in turn increases customer loyalty, and leads to higher average baskets.

Automated Messaging Drives 25% of Business Volume

“We found the solution to be really effective and are pleased by the number of features. For example, product information is automatically customized by currency, whether there’s tax or not, and is in the country language.” The Probance AI delivers fine-grained product recommendations personalized for each individual customer, based on their purchase patterns and their likelihood to purchase.

Julie Le Trévou also appreciates the Probance team: “They’re really responsive. Any time there’s a problem, they’re there with a quick solution.”

“In short, we’re very pleased with Probance, it really helps us communicate better with customers as individuals with special interests. The automated newsletters and marketing scenarios alone drive roughly a quarter of our business volume,” says Julie Le Trévou, who has just extended the contract with Probance for another 2 years.