One of the big challenges in the wine category is remembering which wines you personally like or not—and recalling the name of the wine, according to Wine.com CMO Peter Elarde.
“We’ve created an area called ‘My Wine’ that keeps track of all your favorites and lets you easily remember and reorder them,” Elarde explained to Loyalty360. “Let’s say someone discovers a new wine at a restaurant or friends house over the weekend. Using our app, they can scan the wine label to look up all that great information about the wine and check pricing. Then when the customer returns to the site the next day, say on their laptop, it’s been saved in My Wine where they can rate it, write a personal note about it, and add it to their shopping cart. My Wine keeps track of any wine they’ve scanned, rated, or purchased so they’ve got their own virtual cellar with notes and ratings of all their favorites.”
Wine.com launched a new website and mobile app last year.
“The new Wine.com site has been very well received by customers,” Elarde said. “We now have a single technology platform powering our site across devices—desktop, tablet, and phone—as well our new iOS and Android apps. The result is that customers have a seamless experience across devices. We wanted to give customers fast, easy access to all the amazing wine content we have anytime, anywhere. The beauty of mobile is that you always have your phone with you. With the Wine.com app, you can scan a wine label whenever you try a new wine whether you’re out at a restaurant or bar, visiting a friend’s house, or at home.”
Then, the Wine.com platform matches the label to one of hundreds of thousands of wines in its database and takes the customer to that product detail page to see a description, pricing, winemaker notes, professional ratings and reviews, community ratings, and details about the winery, region, and grape.
“The app also has a button so you can chat live with a wine expert seven days a week to get free advice on what wine to choose or what food to pair with the wine you have,” Elarde added. “Our new App has been very well received, earning a 4.8 star rating in the App Store and becoming the second most popular wine app out of hundreds out there. The new app and improvements to our mobile web site have helped dramatically improve mobile conversion and accelerated mobile revenue to more than 70 percent growth over the past year.”
What’s more, Elarde said Wine.com wants its app to be the one that empowers customers on their wine journeys.
“As they encounter and discover wines, the Wine.com app helps them learn about those wines, remember their favorites, and of course, purchase and enjoy the wine,” he said. “Imagine walking through a store that remembers which products you’ve tried, which ones you liked or not, and that can make recommendations tailored to your personal tastes. We think technology enables that type of personalized experience and we want to lead that transformation in the wine category.”
Elarde talked about the company’s goals for the rest of 2018.
“In 2018, we’re focused on getting the Wine.com app distributed and helping customers learn how easy it is to scan and rate wines as they try them throughout the year,” he explained. “We’ll help them remember their favorites and discover new wines based on their personal tastes. Early results have been very positive with the new Wine.com app driving strong ecommerce with an even higher conversion rate than our desktop site. As we engage more customers and wine enthusiasts in the year ahead, we’re looking forward to driving even more mobile engagement and ecommerce.”