With each shipment we included a postcard asking people to spread the word about CellarThief.
It was a labor of love, and we earned amazing customer loyalty. We still call some of our first customers friends.
We got some initial traction and got some initial sales. And then it was time to try to take the business to the next level.
Like many small, independent businesses, we had little money and few big competitors. There were big online wine sellers and a few new entrants offering a deal of the day on great wines. So we had to figure out how to stand out, and we had to figure out the math of our business quickly.
Ultimately, no matter how passionate you are about your business idea, you need to figure out how to attract customers . And with so much competition in virtually every industry on earth, you'll have to find a channel you can conquer and own.
Source: Mabel
At the time, we simply couldn't afford paid acquisition channels. These channels were much more accessible back then, but our margins were slim... and, well, did I mention we were self-sufficient?! So we had to find a channel that would allow us to build relationships with our customers and that would drive regular, consistent sales.
We earned some great media, even being named a "Hot 100" retailer by Internet Retailer (a big deal at the time). That media was great, but it was also fleeting.
We'd get a media hit, see some customers come in, and then two weeks later the traffic would drop off and we'd have to get another media hit. It was tough, and it meant our sales were out of our control.
CellarThief Named to Top 100 Online Retailers List
So we took a deep breath and looked at what drives our sales. Most companies just don't do that. They have their channels, their budgets, and their sales. And they just don't do the work to understand where their best customers are coming from. We were the same way.
We knew we were getting some sales from SEO. We knew we were getting some referral traffic. We also knew we were getting a few affiliates promoting us. But we didn't know how much each of them was contributing to our sales each day, week, and month.
What made it even more difficult was that we couldn’t predict how much revenue we would make a day, week, or month in advance. This started to create problems with our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine we should take on from our suppliers. Sometimes we would sell 5 cases, and sometimes 50.
So, we chose a channel that we wanted to dive into, and that channel was email marketing for e-commerce. We knew that email campaigns would be useful for us. We knew that email campaigns could be incredibly useful and successful. And as I said, our goal was to tell the stories of the people behind the wines, and we thought email was the best way to do that.
We knew that our e-commerce efforts were helping us build uk number for whatsapp relationships with our customers. But quantifying the financial value of our email marketing efforts was difficult.
We spent 60 days really digging into our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and our click-through rates. We compared them to others. We tested sending one email a week versus multiple emails a week. We tried different copies. We learned all about email deliverability and how to avoid spam filters.
We experimented with each topic and looked at other e-commerce companies' subject lines to see what we could. We tested days of the week and times of day for sending our email campaigns.
We learned everything about what others were doing to succeed in email marketing for e-commerce. We iterated and iterated on our email marketing strategy. What seemed to work one day, didn’t work the next. But we kept moving forward and trying to learn.
Something that was bugging us was that we really needed to have a “North Star Metric” that we could use to be successful in our email efforts. Then one day we were in a meeting and I asked the question, “How much is an email subscriber worth to us?” And no one could answer.
We had all this data. We knew our open rates, our click rates, and our purchase rates. We knew how many people were on our lists, how many people were unsubscribing, and how many people were being added.
