As the wine industry faces unprecedented challenges with COVID-19, wineries have had to grapple with how to engage their customers now that on-site visitation has been banned or restricted. For decades, the tasting room has been a central component of DTC sales, but now wineries must turn to digital channels to continue growing.
Commerce7, the two year old customer centric platform that is leading the wine e-commerce revolution, has partnered with Vimbibe to unlock new digital engagement channels that had, until now, been out of reach for the wine industry.
Thanks to this partnership, Vimbibe exclusively offers Commerce7 users the ability to text their customers and open new lines of communication with their customers.
“Vimbibe had been in development long before COVID-19, but today especially, customers want the ability to create deeper relationships with brands on their terms. Email marketing is a great tool, but realistically only 20-30% of emails are ever opened. With texting, studies have shown an 98% open rate and 30% click rate,” says Vimbibe founder Simon Solis-Cohen.
Companies like Amazon, Williams-Sonoma, and Nordstroms have already proven the success of texting with customers and now finally the wine industry will have this ability.
The key to this new partnership is Commerce7’s robust API based platform. For non-tech-junkies, this means they have secure ways of sharing data with apps that unlocks unlimited opportunities for innovation. “Because Vimbibe is built directly into Commerce7 using our APIs, wineries can segment their customers and clubs instantly and send individual or mass text messages. We know that personalized communication via segmentation and automation is a powerful way to boost engagement and sales metrics and we are very excited to see how wineries leverage this amazing new engagement tool provided by Vimbibe,” stated Zach Kamphuis, General Manager of Commerce7.
According to Solis-Cohen, texting is just the beginning for Vimbibe. Their team of digital marketing experts are busy building a referral program into their platform so wineries can unlock the power of affiliate marketing. Customers will be able to share their unique referral code to unlock discounts and offers for themselves and their friends. Once again, this is all thanks to Commerce7’s best in class technology that allows Vimbibe to connect with its system to automatically create and track these referral codes.
Seemingly overnight, COVID-19 forced wineries to quickly shift their focus to online sales. Commerce7 saw an almost instant surge in e-commerce orders, citing e-commerce sales are still up 68% this month compared to the beginning of the year. Now with Vimbibe and its innovations in customer engagement such as texting and affiliate marketing, wineries can build on this initial success and create sustainable and long lasting relationships with their customers which will lead to further growth in e-commerce.
For more information on Vimbibe and to sign up to leverage their texting and engagement tools within Commerce7, visit vimbibe.com.
If you are not yet using Commerce7, visit Commerce7.com to learn about their platform to start delivering customer centric commerce experience.
