How Vinomofo achieved 120x ROI with MessageMedia and HubSpot

Customer stories 8 min read Oct 2020

Founded in 2011, Vinomofo has quickly become one of the biggest and coolest online retailers for wine in Australia. Described as ‘the original, most awesome wine club on the planet’, Vinomofo continues to work with the best local and international producers to find wines that they know their customers will love. According to their team, “if we don’t love it, we don’t sell it”. Vinomofo prides itself on its curated wine selections as well as the special deals it offers customers that “cannot be matched”.

For almost a decade, they have grown their loyal tribe of wine enthusiasts to bring a 100% happiness guarantee to hundreds of thousands of mofos (aka Vinomofo customers) across Australia and Singapore. In 2020 alone, their forward-thinking focus on ecommerce paid off with a massive uplift in wine sales by 50-75%. While they continue to internationalize, one of their main goals is to reach 1M happy and engaged mofos.

The challenge

Being an online wine retailer, Vinomofo is unable to offer the in-person, immersive brand experience of many physical retailers. They knew they could do better though. Regardless of where an experience takes place, customers desire personalization. By using the data, tools, and expertise on hand, Vinomofo tailored its online experience to suit the personal tastes and preferences of its dedicated wine tribe.

Like anything, wine is subject to personalized taste so it’s important we only send deals to our mofos which we know they’ll love. If you’ve placed 20 orders in your lifetime, mostly reds and not one of them Sauvignon Blanc we can kind of assume Savvy B isn’t your thing.

Jobeth Harvey – Email Marketing Manager at Vinomofo

Focusing on personalized marketing and creating engaging experiences are what really sets the brand apart. “The more personalized we are, the better results we see,” said Jobeth Harvey, Vinomofo Email Marketing Manager. Buying online can- feel like a disconnected, anonymous experience. Personalizing the experience for every visitor is not only beneficial for customers; it can result in higher open and click-through rates, which ultimately results in higher conversions and more purchases.

Previously, the marketing team at Vinomofo used multiple tools across varied systems to manage data and communications in an effort to carry out their cross-channel marketing plans. This enabled them to create an “integrated, consistent experience across all customer touchpoints”.

We want to be able to send the right message to the right audience at the right time to ensure engagement and personalization.

Mariano Favia – Head of Marketing at Vinomofo

While this initially proved very successful given their “strong email database”, the various tools and systems were becoming cumbersome to manage. According to Jobeth, “Vinomofo didn’t want to have to rely solely on one form of communication”.

Vinomofo had two key goals:

1. Streamline their processes and tools in order to retain a 360-degree customer view
2. Drive sales with personalized and engaging experiences

Having already created highly successful and personalized email marketing automations through HubSpot, Vinomofo decided to utilize the business growth platform as their one “source of truth and single customer view”. By bringing all of their tools and systems under one HubSpot roof allowed them to start building a better customer experience almost immediately.

One problem remained: what channels could they add to aid them in their personalization and sales goals but that would also work with Hubspot?

The solution

SMS for HubSpot

Vinomofo’s interest in SMS began when they noticed other online retailers using it to promote quick sale events.

In 2019, Vinomofo brought MessageMedia on board as a messaging solutions tech partner. According to Jobeth, the relationship has been “strong” and “so easy and straightforward”. MessageMedia quickly cottoned on to Vinomofo’s greater aims: personalization and tool streamlining. Knowing the power of SMS to create truly engaging, personalized experiences, MessageMedia went out of its way to create a direct integration called SMS for HubSpot.

MessageMedia recognized our needs for 360-degree view of customer and scoped out the HubSpot integration for us, which really helped solve our problem.

Jobeth Harvey, Vinomofo

Using the integration, Vinomofo was able to send SMS communications direct from within the platform and maintained a single customer view with automatic logging and tracking of activity against individual contacts. The team was also able to create cross-channel automated workflows combining multiple forms of communication including SMS and email.

MessageMedia’s integration for HubSpot solves a lot of the problems we were having with our communication being spread across multiple platforms.

Jobeth Harvey, Vinomofo

Furthermore, using SMS for HubSpot enabled Vinomofo to expand the use cases for text messaging in order to gain greater marketing effectiveness across the board. This included:

• Promotional offers
• New customer onboarding
• Special birthday automations
• Re-engagement campaigns

How it works: Re-engagement campaigns

Vinomofo found particular success when using SMS to build re-engagement campaigns to slow customer churn. Acquiring new customers, after all, is five times more expensive than simply retaining or re-engaging your existing base. According to Jobeth, email and SMS were used in tandem for these campaigns to achieve a truly cross-channel marketing experience.

Vinomofo targeted customers that hadn’t purchased for up to 12 months since their last acquisition. Within the HubSpot platform, they were able to build simple to very complex workflows from scratch. If/then logic was used to build journeys where more complex segmentation was required. With the SMS for HubSpot integration, text messaging was easily included as an alternative or addition to existing automated email triggers.

Here’s an example:

• Last date of purchase > X weeks, send email with xxxx
• Two days later, if customer did not purchase, send another email
• Two days later, if customer did not purchase, send an SMS

We chose MessageMedia’s SMS for HubSpot solution, in addition to email, because it allows us to reach more customers, which creates better connections and engagement for our campaigns.

Mariano Favia, Vinomofo

The results

“Our results powered by SMS were truly impressive”, said Jobeth. SMS has helped Vinomofo achieve its marketing goals by giving the team another way to easily communicate with customers, significantly improving coverage and reach. The addition of text messaging also enabled Vinomofo’s campaigns to stand out from their competitors and was especially useful for their business model which requires fast sales and a high turnover of stock.

By adding SMS to their re-engagement campaigns, Vinomofo saw:

• 50% re-engaged customers
• 120x return on investment
• 21% increase in sales conversion
• 0.05% low unsubscribe rate

Implementing SMS for HubSpot was “incredibly straightforward”. Having a direct integration into HubSpot granted Vinomofo the ability to ‘set and forget’ text message campaigns while still providing a better experience for customers and achieving fantastic business results.

The SMS for HubSpot integration had been a fantastic addition to our marketing arsenal.

Jobeth Harvey, Vinomofo

Sending SMS through HubSpot has helped the team overcome many of their challenges such as making their marketing communications even more personalized. They’re now able to target customers “when we want, on the channel that they want”. Keeping that single customer view was also a significant advantage, not just for their marketing team but for their large customer service team too.

The future

Going forward, Vinomofo will be looking to see how else SMS can support their business goals. The simple text message has proved itself to be a key channel to not only promote Vinomofo’s many sales events and deals but also create more personalized experiences. They are now considering using SMS for HubSpot to send out personalized messages directly from a customer’s chosen wine dealer.

We look forward to working with MessageMedia well into the future to continue to create highly relevant, highly personalized experiences for all of our customers.

Jobeth Harvey, Vinomofo

By focusing on improving their customer experience through a cross-channel approach, Vinomofo is sure to drive higher engagement and unite even more wine lovers.