Successful Email Marketing for Ecommerce: It All Starts with Understanding the Value of an Email Subscriber
Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 3:30 am
We used email marketing for eCommerce and learned valuable lessons that every business owner and marketer can benefit from. Here's our story.
In 2011, my friends and I had a simple idea. We wanted to help people drink great wine at an affordable price.
We were a small group of friends trying to build careers while living in California. We had young children, new mortgages, and the expense of trying to make it in California. Eventually, we just didn't have enough money to uncork a few good bottles of wine a month.
So we decided to create a site to help people drink great wine at an affordable price. But we didn't just want to make a profit.
Besides making money, we also wanted to do good in the process. So we wanted this business to have a cause. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a difference and offer wine at an affordable price?!?” That’s when we came up with the idea of donating clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold.
At the time, there were really cool companies doing similar things in other industries. For example, Tom's shoes donated a pair of shoes for every pair sold. That was an inspiration to us, so we decided to weave our own thing into it as we were getting the business off the ground.
So we teamed up with Charity Water and came up with a way to donate clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold. We were excited about our potential to make a difference and help people drink better wine.
We had our own concept and we started to implement it.
The next thing we needed was a name. Looking back, we probably could have come up with a better name, but we called it CellarThief.
You see, a Thief is a device used by a winemaker to sample wine from a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought it was a cool play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines on the cheap.
Wine Barrel Thief
After the name, we needed to come up with a logo. So we turned to 99 Designs, asked friends to vote on the logos they received, and chose a logo.
Our logo for CellarThief looks dated now, but we were very happy with it
With our concept, name, and logo in place, it was time to build our website. We asked a friend to create a unique design and teamed up with a small development company to build our site on an e-commerce uae whatsapp number platform/CMS that was soon acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be cool, inspiring, and fun.
The original design of the CellarThief website - we won a bunch of awards for it
Finally, we needed to figure out where the wine was coming from. Luckily, our team had connections in the wine industry, both with wineries and distributors. The idea was simple: if we could sell a batch of a certain wine in one day, would they give us a big discount that we could then pass on to our customers?
Wineries and distributors embraced the concept and we were quickly able to build a good lineup of the best wines we could offer at a great price. We gave them an estimate of how many cases we could sell and they held them and then we picked them up and shipped them to our customers.
We felt that storytelling would be the most important part of what we did, so we were excited to interview winemakers, tell the backstory of the winery, and help our customers connect with the people behind the wines we sell.
Once many of the pieces were worked out, CellarThief was born. It was a tiny company with no outside funding. It was just a few friends trying to build a nice little business that helped people drink great wine at an affordable price. And make a big difference.
The first wine we offered was a hit – Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet.
The first wine from CellarThief, offered
Then it was time to figure out how to attract customers. We knew we had to find a balance between taking care of existing customers and finding new customers.
That's why we turned to PR.
We created our social networks.
We entered into several partnership agreements and tried to establish word of mouth.
And while we were looking to get new customers, we were also investing heavily in customer service for our existing customers. We did this mostly with our time, because, well, we didn't really have any money.
In 2011, my friends and I had a simple idea. We wanted to help people drink great wine at an affordable price.
We were a small group of friends trying to build careers while living in California. We had young children, new mortgages, and the expense of trying to make it in California. Eventually, we just didn't have enough money to uncork a few good bottles of wine a month.
So we decided to create a site to help people drink great wine at an affordable price. But we didn't just want to make a profit.
Besides making money, we also wanted to do good in the process. So we wanted this business to have a cause. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a difference and offer wine at an affordable price?!?” That’s when we came up with the idea of donating clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold.
At the time, there were really cool companies doing similar things in other industries. For example, Tom's shoes donated a pair of shoes for every pair sold. That was an inspiration to us, so we decided to weave our own thing into it as we were getting the business off the ground.
So we teamed up with Charity Water and came up with a way to donate clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold. We were excited about our potential to make a difference and help people drink better wine.
We had our own concept and we started to implement it.
The next thing we needed was a name. Looking back, we probably could have come up with a better name, but we called it CellarThief.
You see, a Thief is a device used by a winemaker to sample wine from a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought it was a cool play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines on the cheap.
Wine Barrel Thief
After the name, we needed to come up with a logo. So we turned to 99 Designs, asked friends to vote on the logos they received, and chose a logo.
Our logo for CellarThief looks dated now, but we were very happy with it
With our concept, name, and logo in place, it was time to build our website. We asked a friend to create a unique design and teamed up with a small development company to build our site on an e-commerce uae whatsapp number platform/CMS that was soon acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be cool, inspiring, and fun.
The original design of the CellarThief website - we won a bunch of awards for it
Finally, we needed to figure out where the wine was coming from. Luckily, our team had connections in the wine industry, both with wineries and distributors. The idea was simple: if we could sell a batch of a certain wine in one day, would they give us a big discount that we could then pass on to our customers?
Wineries and distributors embraced the concept and we were quickly able to build a good lineup of the best wines we could offer at a great price. We gave them an estimate of how many cases we could sell and they held them and then we picked them up and shipped them to our customers.
We felt that storytelling would be the most important part of what we did, so we were excited to interview winemakers, tell the backstory of the winery, and help our customers connect with the people behind the wines we sell.
Once many of the pieces were worked out, CellarThief was born. It was a tiny company with no outside funding. It was just a few friends trying to build a nice little business that helped people drink great wine at an affordable price. And make a big difference.
The first wine we offered was a hit – Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet.
The first wine from CellarThief, offered
Then it was time to figure out how to attract customers. We knew we had to find a balance between taking care of existing customers and finding new customers.
That's why we turned to PR.
We created our social networks.
We entered into several partnership agreements and tried to establish word of mouth.
And while we were looking to get new customers, we were also investing heavily in customer service for our existing customers. We did this mostly with our time, because, well, we didn't really have any money.