Wines ‘Til Sold Out leverages email to improve personalization, optimization, and overall efficiency

How WTSO gained access to deeper audience insights, builds personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns, and grows sales.

Wines til sold out wine glasses
Company

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Pennsauken, New Jersey, WTSO is a leading online wine platform with over 26 million bottles sold.

wtso.com
Key Channels Used
Email Mobile App SMS
The challenge

As a flash sale site, Wines ‘Til Sold Out (WTSO) is an especially high-volume sender of marketing communications—email in particular—with multiple unique sales per day, and multiple emails sent to each subscriber per day, complemented by push notifications and SMS messages for a smaller but important subset of users who have opted in to hear from the brand through those channels. 

Given the nature of the company’s marketing efforts, it’s vital to continually add new opt-in subscribers to its database, as well as to maintain engagement with existing subscribers for as long as possible, and to re-engage with them when they become inactive, as some degree of “flash-sale fatigue” will eventually settle in for at least some users. Compounding the challenge, WTSO has a small marketing team that has to execute smart, effective campaigns at an extremely high velocity.

The solution

When undergoing the selection process for a new cross-channel marketing provider, the marketing team at WTSO had some very critical challenges in mind. Among the company’s most important objectives and considerations included: 

Moving from “one-size-fits-all” to more personalized messaging, by leveraging real-time data and insights, and easy-to-set-up triggers and automations—especially since the marketing team is small (but with big demands and expectations).

Making the most of user data to optimize campaign relevancy and performance. Before moving to Cordial, the marketing team at WTSO had to write SQL queries both to access marketing data for campaigns, as well as to generate performance analytics and reporting to upper management. In Cordial, data is actionable in real-time, and pulling reports that used to take days similarly can be pulled together in short order.

Wines Til Sold Out wine cart
"Having been in business since 2006, we have a great deal of knowledge not just of the world of wine, but of our customers’ preferences. One of the key benefits of working with Cordial is the ability to leverage a lot of that existing data and turn it into actionable insights that can drive our business forward, while helping to match consumers to products we know they will love."

Julie Blount, Executive Director, Customer Service & Marketing

The result

WTSO was able to integrate multiple, disparate datasets to develop a 360-degree view of their customers with Cordial. Unlike WTSO’s previous platform, Cordial is able to easily ingest (and make sense of) all of their customer data—regardless of its source, formatting, and syntax, allowing for a much more robust understanding of each subscriber at the individual level.

Having access to real people to help solve real problems. Like many marketers, the team at WTSO was challenged by troubleshooting the problems that inevitably arise when using any software platform. A shift from WTSO’s previous provider, Cordial’s “white glove” approach to servicing all of its customers. WTSO took comfort in knowing that if and when any issue should arise—whether the team needs help with leveraging certain functionality in the platform, or is experiencing deliverability issues—a real person is always just a quick phone call, text, or Slack message away, with Cordial’s unrivaled commitment to industry-leading, truly cordial client service.