Located just east of San Francisco in the historic Livermore Valley, Wente Vineyards is recognized as one of California’s premier wine country destinations. The property features wine tasting, world-class concerts, award-winning fine dining, and championship golf.
Throughout the years' Wente Vineyards had developed a Wine Aficionado membership club and this had turned into a revenue driver as it ensured growth in the lifetime value of their customer base.
To communicate with their customers they were using Wine Direct with Mailchimp for email marketing.
While these systems provided leverage for communication, Wente needed a consistent, predictable, and scalable way to continue to drive revenue.
But instead, Wente had data points without context, without the ability to measure impact, process, or success--Wente realized the business was operating by accident, not by design.
We have never been able to communicate with the sales teams that work events, hospitality, or who work one-on-one client services, with our eCommerce. Historically, the ecommerce team was a facilitator of emails, newsletters, blog articles, promotions, and offers." - Alexis Andrade
As the Wente team thought through possible solutions, they realized there was leverage in having a holistic view of the customer, and by having their on-site experiences feed data into the CRM, the eCommerce team would have a proactive role in driving growth by communicating where appropriate and timely ensuring consistent revenue and sustainable growth through lifetime value.
In this case, the business model will always operate better if there's a predictable way to sell the next bottle of wine rather than leaving the consumer up to his or her own decision.
Data wasn't connected correctly, it wasn't flowing, right. We didn't know who from which membership was buying what at what time. It wasn't timely, causing challenges for marketing and business leadership to be able to generate accurate reports.
Wente’s goal for the upgrade was to get on a newer technology platform that would allow us to move, faster, stronger, quicker, more efficiently.
Wente upgraded to Commerce7 eCommerce platform and HubSpot as their marketing and sales automation tool.
To solve the client's needs we architected our solution as such.
Wente has different types of relationships with their different personas and in order to better represent these relationships we used Custom Objects to represent clubs, club memberships, promotions, coupons, and collections.
Building these Custom Objects provided a granular layer of segmentation; this approach created the ability to systematically program communication through automation and ensure each audience was monetized appropriately.
Technically it was this:
We used webhooks as triggers for the integration that are triggered on the following events in Commerce7
Wente uses wine clubs as a way to engage with their most loyal customers more personally, and provide exclusive offers which help promote loyalty. They needed to track which members were a part of wine clubs in their database so they could easily segment lists to engage with these folks.
We created two custom objects to represent this information: wine clubs, and wine membership.
The wine club object stores information pertaining to the particular club that the customer was a part of, such as the name of the club and type of club. The wine club object is associated with the wine membership object
The wine membership object stores data about the membership itself, including information such as membership start date, membership status, etc, and it is associated with contacts, so that one membership record will belong to only one contact, but any contact can have one or or more memberships
Now, when Wente pulled up a contact record in HubSpot, they could see all this information in one place, making it easy to see the full picture of the customer. It also made it much easier to segment lists so they could message to their customers based on this information."
This architecture allowed us to solve the following challenges.
We setup Commerce7 webhooks to trigger the integration to sync clubs and club memberships object to have continuously sync in real-time whenever a new wine club record or club membership records are added or updated
Commerce 7 has great customer delight options represented by coupons and promotions
Another important element of Wente's marketing strategy is using coupons and promotions to drive wine sales. Wente needed a way to kick off coupon and promotion offers based on the wine clubs that customers are a part of and their membership status.
Now that all that data was stored in HubSpot, they could easily segment lists based on this data. This enabled them to send out more targeted coupons and promotions, which ultimately led to an increase in wine sales.
Wente was also able to easily report on the performance of every coupon or promotion that they ran, giving them insight into buyer behavior that they can use to be more targeted in future campaigns."
We engineered the solution to enable the wente marketing team to do the following
In order to store information regarding which coupons and promotions had been offered to customers, we created custom objects for "Coupons" and "Promotions." This stored information such as the coupon name, discount percentage, discount amount, and which business unit the coupon was associated with.
We associated these objects with Deals, which allowed Wente to report on the revenue generated from each coupon. It also allowed Wente to record a history of any coupon or promotion that had ever been offered to a given customer so that they can use this information to determine which coupons and promotions are offered in the future.
Coupon custom object holds the following informationWe created dropdown select properties, for coupons and promotions to make it easy for the marketing teams to create segmented contact lists based on coupon name, coupon code, or promotion name.
Whenever a new coupon is created or updated, a new promotion is created or updated we trigger a webhook that updates HubSpot coupon or promotion deal properties.
This allowed us to create lists for contacts who have deals with a specific promotion or coupon name or ID and roll them into future marketing campaigns.
Commerce 7 uses Collection as product categories, when a collection is created in Commerce 7 a page for that Collection will be created on the website to display all of the products that it contains.
In Commerce 7 a product can belong to multiple collections at once and you can create as many Collections as you'd like.
To help the marketing team segment contacts by the collection of products they purchased, we added collection information as a line item property and we synced the collection information for each line item in the eCommerce order with the line item in the deal in HubSpot.
In Commerce7 you can create tags to segment Customers, Club Memberships, and Reservations.
To copy the same tags to HubSpot so that the Wente marketing teams can use the same segmentation in HubSpot as Commerce 7 we created a contact custom property of a multi-select type.
We used webhooks to update the multi-select values whenever a new tag is added or updated.
Whenever a contact is tagged with a specific tag we used the eCommerce bridge to sync the contact and select the tag values.
The HubSpot Ecommerce Bridge API provides a way to sync eCommerce data into HubSpot. It also facilitates creating a set of out-of-box eCommerce features for HubSpot users. These features include:
We used the HubSpot eCommerce bridge to create a real-time sync between HubSpot and Commerce 7 syncing the following objects
So that once a product is added to the Commerce 7 cart a new deal is created in HubSpot in pending checkout status. and it will remain in this status until the checkout is completed or after 24 hours it will be automatically set to the checkout abandoned stage.
Syncing line items with HubSpot allowed us to add additional information from Commerce 7, like the wine type, the year creation and old, the wine properties into the line items to help the marketing team create those targeted and segmented lists based on purchase history and purchase behavior, what type profile find the, so maybe they can offer them membership in a club for that wine type.
In today's digital age, right, we've got to move smarter and faster and that's, that's just where we're at, right. When it comes to business I see two platforms that are integrated well and in near real-time.
Having our eCommece data sync with HubSpot in real time allowed Wente marketing team to run personalized campaigns for each individual customer with the information based on their purchase history as well as website behavior. This includes abandoned cart campaigns that prompt them into completing their purchase and upsell opportunities.
“Usually they would go through 50 contacts in a whole day because that's how many inquiries they receive, she is able to do that in, in 30 minutes, 30 minutes! It’s become very easy for them. Instead of having to call, which is what they used to do, call the person and then send them an email and do all this much longer process for them to get a client. Now it only takes 30 minutes instead of a whole day. What a time saver. It's almost 12 hours a week of saved time.
Also the trackability of it too, I'm able to see their work, use those clients to offer them, you know, side promotions specifically for weddings.” Alexis Anderade
Wente marketing team can now track their customers from their first site visit all of way through until they ultimately make a purchase. This means that there's no need go guessing marketing channels or campaigns attribution to revenue.
Analyze influenced revenue from each email on the email performance page.
The HubSpot and Commerce7 integration allowed Wente Vineyards to leverage critical customer and purchasing data from their shopping cart with Hubspot's powerful marketing automation & reporting tools. This allows them better understand buyers while also creating more engaging campaigns that drive revenue for the business!