The Angel Wine Story

Leading online wine merchant asks Probance to match a complex and constantly shifting catalog of thousands of wines with aficionados around the world.

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.

4.9M €
2018 Revenue

850€
Average basket

3,500
wines in stock

A Global Business with Shifting Needs

With 10,000 contacts in their customer database, Angel Wine sells fine French wines around the globe, from Singapore to London, and from Hong Kong to Tokyo. But in uncertain times, with trade wars and the Covid-19 pandemic impacting sales to restaurants and hotels around the world, the company had to act fast to adapt to their new and growing market – individual wine lovers.

The company sources their wines directly from estate producers and private sales, which only have small quantities, so immediately alerting customers that their favourite Champagne or Bordeaux is in stock is pivotal.

As well, purchase patterns are sporadic and seasonal, depending on location, so messaging needs to be timely and responsive. For example, customers tend to order at the end of the year, and avoid summer orders, when high temperatures can change the chemistry of fine wines, despite the care Angel Wine takes to avoid this.

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.”

Julie Le Trévou
Head of Web Strategy at Angel Wine

“We’re really satisfied with Probance; it helps us communicate better with customers as individuals with special interests. Probance drives around a quarter of our business volume.”

Personalized Recommendations for a Bigger Basket

Angel Wine needed a truly automated and personalized marketing solution. One that could handle their complex wine catalogue, show prices with and without tax included, and meet their global clientele in their own countries. They also needed personalized recommendations that pushed products based on their customers’ changing purchase patterns and interests. For example, a customer might be interested in all red wines, or in Bordeaux and Cotes du Rhones only, or simply wines from a particular estate. Messaging needed to meet those interests.

And given the highly niche and seasonal aspects of the business, that specificity would help them to develop relationships with customers, and continue to bond over time, to keep them coming back regularly.

Finally, they needed more visibility on results and their return on investment.

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.

Benefits

Better Personalization

Probance AI manages and analyzes complex data from different sources for better personalization.

Increased Performance

Relevant communication performs better in terms of opens, clicks and conversions.

Customized to Countries

Product pricing and info is customized to fit the currency and language it’s sent to.

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