SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vintners’ Alliance, a marketing technology and database provider for super premium wineries, announced that wineries utilizing its Intent Conversion service received, on average, a 14% increase in their October eCommerce sales.
“Intent Conversion utilizes marketing technology that has been proven effective throughout luxury retail,” said Ahin Thomas, Vintners’ Alliance co-founder and President. “We are interested in generating sales for our wineries but only if we can do so while simultaneously protecting their brands.”
A ground-breaking solution in the wine industry, Intent Conversion is a hybrid of Retargeting and Search-Engine-Marketing (SEM).
Retargeting is where Vintners’ Alliance hyper targets customers after they leave a winery’s website and brings that customer back to the winery website to purchase through targeted, brand enhancing advertisements. The advertisements are triggered by user behavior and are exclusively shown to the winery’s customers. SEM is the process of securing targeted keywords and phrases on search engines, like Google.
“The beauty is that wineries have zero risk. We do the creative (they approve), we pay for all the advertising (they have no out of pocket costs), sales come back to the winery’s website and we get paid a commission on incremental sales,” said Eddie Trask, Director - Marketing & Sales.
Anthony Severo, Chief Technology Officer, reveals that “the advantage of Vintners’ Alliance is our database. With 34 winery partners under contract, we believe we have the largest cooperative database of wine buyers in the US. That means we are able to target and learn with great precision. The data is nice, but that we can translate it into consumer facing action means our partner wineries benefit in the form of incremental sales, and brand enhancing advertising placements.”
“We are certainly pleased by the results, but not surprised,” said Patrick J. Connolly, co-founder and Chairman of VA, “these are techniques, processes, and technology that have been proven effective by many specialty and luxury retailers.” In addition to his role at Vintners’ Alliance, Mr. Connolly serves as EVP, CMO of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
“Vintners’ Alliance created a substantial increase in our eCommerce sales,” said Joy Sterling of Iron Horse Vineyards. “Importantly, they have taken the time to understand our business and shown great care and respect for our brand. I believe they put our best interests at the center of what they do.”
About Vintners’ Alliance
Vintners’ Alliance analyzes customer purchase data in order to help wineries identify purchase patterns, preferences, and optimal pricing - all so that member wineries can customize communications to its customers and acquire new ones.
Vintners’ Alliance was co-founded by Connolly and Thomas in 2009 with the mission to enable wineries to connect with consumers through proven, brand enhancing direct to consumer tools and technology. The company has assembled a board of some of Silicon Valley’s most successful technology and marketing veterans in its efforts to bring best-of-breed services into the wine industry:
- Jorge del Calvo (Pillsbury Law) serves as the lead in navigating the complex regulatory environment that VA faces in operating within the wine industry. Since 2000, Jorge has led the nation in representing issues in complete technology IPOs.
- John Eastburn (Kohlberg Ventures) serves as the lead in advisor for startup operations.
- Thampy Thomas (Angel Investor) serves as the primary systems and technology expert. As co-founder of Nexgen Microsystems, Thampy led the development of the first competitive alternative to Intel’s Pentium Processors