GroupVine blog

Interactive Email Case Study: Raptor Ridge Winery

2011-05-01T23:53:14-07:00

What’s old is new again: Email the new Social Medium

"...the thrill for me was to see that same authenticity of community coming through and jumping out of the email right at me."

- Annie Shull, Raptor Ridge Co-founder/Co-owner

Organizations and individuals are scrambling to figure out how to use social media to build brands, establish online thought leadership and create long-term, high-value customer relationships. Joining the social media scramble feels non-optional... We have Facebook and Twitter accounts. We write and visit blogs. But so far no one has really cracked the code on how to use social media in a clear, consistent way to deliver measurable results. In spite of the excitement and the hype, social media remains a platter of often-confusing options and combinations rather than a well-designed, seven course affair that delivers value. So while the talk continues to swirl around social media, the action continues to rely on the most ubiquitous online medium: email.

What we’ve done at GroupVine is stay where the action is, but stretch this familiar, proven environment to make it contemporary and better-suited for today’s requirements for immediacy and visibility by pulling the “social” into email.

GroupVine’s Interactive Email transforms email into an action-oriented and engaging medium by making it:

social,
real-time, and
frictionless

A Winery Becomes a Community: Raptor Ridge’s Experience with GroupVine
Raptor Ridge, is one of Oregon's most dedicated boutique producers of premium and super premium Pinot noir and Pinot gris wines. From the beginning, the focus of Raptor’s founders/owners, Annie and Scott Shull has been quality not quantity. This has been their approach when it comes to customers and relationships as well. With the tremendous growth of the Raptor’s business over the last 15 years, production has gone from 500 to 6,500 cases annually, and the winery’s customer base continues to expand across the country. Annie and Scott Shull, the proprietors, needed something more than the standard quarterly, paper newsletter to engage their growing customer base with the same level of connectedness they had been able to practice before.

In an early attempt to deepen customer relationships and create a sense of community around the Raptor Ridge offerings, Annie and Scott launched the Raptor Ridge Flight Club. Flight Club members receive benefits such as the first glimpse of releases on the horizon, invitations to events at the winery, as well as special offers and discount shipping. Additionally, Flight Club members are viewed by Raptor Ridge staff as a sort of extended family with special ties to the vineyards and the wines that are produced.

Raptor Ridge’s Dilemma: Designed to extend the dynamic, vibrant feeling of community so prevalent onsite at the winery, the “Club” struggled to take off. Instead of a community, it subsisted as a silent, distant audience.
Despite Annie’s efforts to transition Flight Club members from printed newsletters to online newsletters, the vitality of the club was difficult to gauge and often seemed flat or disengaged. Communications were one-way with no ability to pull in the customer voice and feedback. Regardless of content, the newsletters were unable to generate any sense of community between the winery and its customers or among the customers themselves. The customer energy, excitement, and connection so present at the winery tasting room, at events, and during tours vanished the moment the visit was over.

Raptor Ridge and Interactive Email -- a vibrant community is activated!
With Interactive Email, Annie discovered that the energy and the community experienced at the winery was out there. It was just a matter of giving it all a space to come alive.

According to Annie, “It’s really interesting to see the enthusiasm. Our customers are very involved, we’ve created this great community through our tasting room and through hosting local events; but the thrill for me was to see that same authenticity of community coming through and jumping out of the email right at me. That is how I want our wine club to feel whether or not they live close enough to the winery to come visit with us. I want members to feel that closeness and camaraderie and that kind of collaboration.”

Raptor Ridge and Interactive Email -- expanding value as Raptor Ridge continues to grow.
Annie has just begun to build and experience the long-term value of her expanded customer community. According to Annie, “We’ve drastically increased our response rate and I’m getting extremely articulate responses that I can use in my marketing materials, not only to this same audience going forward but also to my other audiences. It crosses over to all aspects of my business so that when I’m out working with distributors in the market, I can quote something a customer said about my Cuvee for example.” With Interactive Email as a launching pad, it’s possible to reach people in a way that sustains the sense of being involved in authentic relationships.

Additionally, Annie’s looking to leverage Interactive Email to other parts of the business. Annie, “I’d like to carry this over to my sales reps and my distributor teams. I have been thinking about how to create similar collaborative community amongst this very important community. They have a chance to experience this kind of thing during trade events such as Oregon Pinot Camp, but mostly are focused within their own markets. So I think if they were able to converse about sales techniques that work for Raptor Ridge across all markets, we can give them a richer tool chest, and thereby build loyalty more and more with this very mercurial audience as well. That’s the next phase for me.”

Annie’s hopes for the future include, “capturing and harnessing the same authenticity that people have when they visit the winery and extending it to our community at large. We want them to feel that they are a part of the Raptor Ridge family. That their opinions have an impact.”

Below is an interview with Annie Shull on using Interactive Email to build community around Raptor Ridge...

GroupVine founder, Darren Lancaster, speaks with Annie Shull, Raptor Ridge Co-Owner, about Building Community:

(DL) What were your original communication methods and what were your original goals in shifting toward email communications, and eventually to GroupVine’s Interactive Email?

(AS) My original goals were to communicate information about the current shipment of wines, tasting notes, update from the winery on what’s happening there, some interesting factoids about Oregon wines, winemaking, or news. It was unidirectional. I didn’t know if my audience ever even read what I wrote. Our original mode was hard-copy 2-page newsletter with pictures in the shipping box. Then we moved to an email version only. The third phase was moving away from unidirectional and into bidirectional communications that gave us feedback (hopefully) about what people wanted to see. The first couple of attempts were not very successful.

(DL) What were the most challenging aspects of the shift to email-based communications?

(AS) Getting my head out of the “content rich” space to realize that all of what I was writing, which was very content rich and was what I thought customers should know, was probably not being read or appreciated. The scatter-shot method of providing a variety of topics was ingrained in me, and I needed to step away from being the one doing all the telling - with GroupVine’s encouragement. Once I did, however, it was very freeing. Less time was needed to come up with the newsletter, but they still felt very content rich and more fun, I was able to be less stuffy and formal and more myself. The true persona of Raptor Ridge (and Annie Shull) felt like it was finally coming through.

(DL) How did you position the switch to you customers?

(AS) Saving trees, getting the info to them sooner, allowing them the opportunity to tell us what they wanted to hear and see, getting them involved in the quality and future of the product. Just another way to boost the feeling of community that had already organically begun around the quality of our product and the authentic experiences people have in our Tasting Room or when they meet us on the road.

(DL) How have your customers reacted to Interactive Email? challenges? concerns? complaints?

(AS) It was slow going at first, but it really helped this time to do some seeding (of the Interactive Emails) with about 10 loyal followers/power users. They really got the ball rolling.

Annie struggled with how to expand her business and maintain the authenticity of customer relationships she experienced at face-to-face winery events.

(DL) Did Interactive Email allow you to tap into information/feedback that was inaccessible with direct mail and regular email?

(AS) Yes. As an owner, my daily focus has been on other audiences. I have been out of touch, not in front of the direct consumer audience in the Tasting Room for a long time. I am now able to get the kind of feedback virtually, information that I would have to spend hours and hours in the Tasting Room to collect ordinarily. For me to be able to, in a moment look, at an email response and be able to see these quotes coming through and identify who it’s coming from is invaluable. It will inform a lot of my ownership decisions on future wines and offerings.

(DL) What kind of data were your able to gather?

(AS) Opinions that are going to influence our vineyard purchasing decisions, blending trial focus, and enable me to use some of their reactions with other audiences to promote my wines.

(DL) Were there any surprises in what you learned?

(AS) Yes, we knew our members appreciated our vineyard designates, but what was news to us was how much they like our Cuvees, or blended wines, and the reasons why. This lead to an immediate validation for a marketing shift we were already contemplating, and a new product was born.

(DL) And how does this data, the unexpected surprises and Interactive Email impact your business decisions?

(AS) We wiil continue to utilize Interactive Email as a virtual voting platform that will draw our visiting members and our out of state members together next month to cast their votes and give a collective opinion on three different blends to determine a new Raptor Ridge “Democracy Rules” blend for wine club members only.

(DL) How would you have gotten this data if you didn’t have Interactive Email?

(AS) Probably a very tedious survey that may not have gotten enough responses.

The next challenge for Annie: How to sustain a responsive, engaged community

(DL) What has been your biggest indicator of success with Interactive Email?

(AS) The most powerful feedback is that they respond. We’ve drastically increased our response rate and I’m getting extremely articulate responses that I can use in my marketing materials, not only to this same audience going forward but also to my other audiences. It crosses over to all aspects of my business so that when I’m out working with distributors in the market, I can quote something a customer said about my cuvee for example.

(DL) Your open rates have historically been quite high, averaging over 50%. And you’ve been able to achieve a 15% response rate overall, with nearly 27% of your customers who opened your emails responding to your interactive elements. How do you think you’ve been able to make that happen?

(AS) The topic that was the most successful was something that gave them the feeling of directly shaping their own future. They were asked what their favorite vineyard designates are, and told that, “No promises, but we may tailor future flights based on your responses.” They wanted to take responsibility for their own future, you might say. Then, the next successful question was open ended and asked for what specifically it was that made them vote the way they did. Everyone loves to give their opinion, feel like an expert.

Interactive Email’s expanding value as Raptor Ridge continues to grow

(DL) Now that you’ve tried Interactive Email for this part of your business, are there other areas of your business where it could add value?

(AS) Yes, definitely. I’ll be calling you in to help me with that. I’d like to carry this over to my sales reps and my distributor teams. I have been thinking about how to create similar collaborative community amongst this very important community. They have a chance to experience this kind of thing during trade events such as Oregon Pinot Camp, but mostly are focused within their own markets. So I think if they were able to converse about sales techniques that work for Raptor Ridge across all markets, we can give them a richer tool chest, and thereby build loyalty more and more with this very mercurial audience as well. That’s the next phase for me.

(DL) What are your hopes for Interactive Email heading into the future?

(AS) More bi-directional rapport built with out of state members, capturing and harnessing the same authenticity that people have when they visit the winery and extending it to our community at large. We want them to feel that they are a part of the Raptor Ridge family. That their opinions have an impact.

Which of our customers are best suited for GroupVine's Interactive Email?

2011-04-01T16:39:03-07:00

We’re asked this question all the time by agencies and other service providers who we work with. Although we believe nearly all brands and organizations that consider email to be a core marketing and communication asset can achieve increased engagement and participation rates with GroupVine’s Interactive Email, there are some characteristics that can positively bias the results. These are characteristics that apply to the brand or organization itself. These characteristics may already be in place or may be something the organization recognizes as critical and is working towards.

Relationship Marketing and Customer Insights are highly valued. It’s not just about achieving a short-term or transaction result, it’s also about long-term customer value.
Focus on people, not just brand. Current eCommunications are “people-friendly” designed to give recipients the sense that they are connecting to real people involved with the brand or organization (as opposed to a brand, feature, etc.). The organization understands that people engage with people, not brands or organizations.
Understand and want to talk about lifestyle. They love to talk about ways their product, service, or brand are used in real life.
Prefer targeted and succinct email style rather than (or in addition to) the “email buffet” style of newsletters (ie. covering so many topics that there’s a virtual guarantee that every recipient will find something they like). They prefer or are willing to experiment with “simple and focused” over “cluttered and busy”.
Value social marketing, but continue to believe that direct email marketing is driving the measurable results. They love the idea of pulling the upside of social marketing (social awareness, influence, and relationship-building) into email.
Engage in real-time conversations with their customers in social channels so they have competence and resources that can carry those conversations over to email (even though they’re not used to real-time, frictionless conversations in email yet).
Would prefer to hear the customer’s voice more often than their own. They are comfortable engaging with recipients in an open and transparent manner, or they would like to take baby steps in that direction.
Can offer “organic” incentives for participation. By organic we mean that the recipient’s experience will be shaped, influenced or somehow improved if they participate or engage (vs. a “10% off” kind of incentive). For example, Raptor Ridge winery motivated their Flight Club members to tell them which wines are in their top 3 by hinting that their future shipments might be tailored based on their responses. Their response rate improved over 200% (even when compared to their attempt to offer free T-shirts!) and enabled their recipients to become more comfortable engaging with them via email.

Here's the example Engagement Widget that Raptor Ridge put into a recent email:

As we learn more we'll tweak and update this list. In the meantime we're all ears if you've got other suggested additions for our list.

How about making the inbox more loveable?

2011-02-28T12:00:06-08:00

For me, something was missing from the InboxLove conference...But first, let me show some love for the event!

The InboxLove conference - not your father's email conference. No, nothing like many of the other email marketing events happening on a daily basis. This was a get-together of progressive thinkers around email who unanimously see a long life for email and want to make it work better. For that reason alone you could feel the love for 500startups and the other sponsors of this event before it even got started. There's a really great summary by Chris Nutall on the FTTechHub blog.

What I heard a lot of: Making it easier for us to manage our inbox overload and making the time we spend in our inbox more effective. Good! There's also a lot of effort by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL going into making their various inbox applications harmonize with the rest of our online activities (possibly ridding us of the "ALT-tab" phenomenon that surfaced frequently).

What I didn't hear much of: How do we deal with the inneffective and time-sucking emails that are reaching our inbox in the first place? This is a tough problem to solve because it can't be solved by technology alone. It requires equal parts of innovation in technology and behavioral change on the part of all senders. For example, kudos to these folks:

Rapleaf - for putting the information into email marketers fingertips to send more targeted and relevant email from day 1.
Shortmail - for forcing the question.
Ramit Sethi - for steering the conversation away from email marketing tactics/tools and toward behavioral change.

So let's talk about email marketing. There's so much left on the table for making email marketing more rewarding for recipients, and astronomical upside if you can get it right. Although you may not agree with Ramit's core value proposition, I think he was spot-on in saying:

It's not about testing, it's about understanding behavioral psychology. Changing the behavior is the goal.
Stop thinking like an expert. It's not about regurgitating information.
Persuasion is written about and for people, not at people. The key is to get specific.
The key question email recipients ask themselves: is it right for me? Show them people they can identify with who are receiving important benefits from your solution/service/product.

Here's a toast to this year's InboxLove! What seemed to be missing? Making the inbox more loveable. I hope that next year we're able to applaud a lot more compelling success stories involving technology and marketing practices coming together to reduce the stream of ineffective, irrelevant, and time-wasting emails reaching our inbox.

PS. My favorite quotes from the conference: Jeff Bonforte: "I want to huddle up by the fire with email. I want to make sweet love to email." Dan Martell: "Most people SUCK at email marketing." Ramit: "No one wants to receive a newsletter."

PPS. Interactive Email - our company's attempt to facilitate changing the behavior of email marketers through innovation in technology:

Your email can do better! 5 quick tips to put into practice right now.

2011-01-28T14:25:10-08:00

Here are five tips I intend to immediately practice, or continue practicing more diligently, when it comes to my email communications. Having just returned from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit this week I found myself with copious notes and ideas, but wanted to distill them down to stuff I'd really focus on RIGHT NOW. I've focused on tips that should apply to you whether you consider yourself a marketer, or just someone who uses email as an effective means to move people into action.

Clarity trumps persuasion – lose the marketing speak. We are talking with people on the other side of our emails. Email is a conversation, not an ad campaign. Consider whether your emails are talking at people or building a relationship.
Plain text outperforms busy emails time and time again. Copy rich email with plain text beat out the graphics-driven email with single click actions by 46%. Many of us have been sucked into using really pretty, but cluttered templates for our emails. Those templates are dragging down your results.
Make sure you have the 3 elements of a good email: capture, convince, close. Make sure the close includes your main call to action. Don’t force the reader to decide on your call to action too early, it interrupts the reader’s thought sequence.
Lazy people create email newsletters. Ok, I think this is a bit harsh, but the main point is valid. Make sure your email doesn’t feel like a buffet where you’re hoping at least one piece of content is interesting for each reader. Put the effort into getting to know what your individual readers want and deliver highly relevant content and opportunities to them. In other words, if I’m a vegetarian you better not be serving me meat! (note: we've built Interactive Email specifically to help you gain these kinds of insights)
Don’t get too distracted by social, email is still THE ubiquitous online channel. 96% of people polled were more willing to share their email address vs. only 12% of people willing to share their social handle.

Agree or disagree? Got others that you consider more important? If you want to dive deeper then check out the presentations from the conference, a summary on the MarketingSherpa blog, or the Twitter stream using hashtag #sherpamail.

A potpourri of topics last night at the SF Online Community MeetUp

2010-12-16T02:38:04-08:00

The December rendition of the SF Online Community MeetUp featured Robyn Tippins (@duzins) who is currently the Sr. Community Manager at Current TV. You can check out more of her background and the agenda here and the Twitter stream at #octribe. Robyn, Susan, and the rest of the TechSoup crowd planned a potpourri-like event that covered 3 diverse topics, so it moved fast and was a pretty cool event!

Topic 1: Sharing community management strategies and best practices

Robin covered 3 community case studies from her experience at Yahoo: 1) Yahoo Merchant Summit, 2) Yahoo Developer Network Events, and 3) the Flickr community. I suspect Robyn's slide content might be available somewhere, so I'll focus on what I captured as the lessons learned.

#1 Take it local and f2f. Even primarily online communities need Barcamps, MeetUps, hack events, etc. to build, sustain, and nurture relationships. Local events can be great for increasing your social media content, pumping up evangelists, and creating a local love-fest which hopefully can include the media.

#2 Leverage local folks for your events. Robyn talked about how Yahoo would use their employees to have a bigger local impact. They trained them up thru internal tech talks where they could hone their public speaking chops. They saved a bunch of money by not traveling to the events, but still had attendance - their local employees who become temporary "rock stars". Yahoo also had a go-to person for each region.

#3 But my company isn't Yahoo! We don't have global presence and 1000's of employees. Try to focus on empowering your local community members or customers, especially the evangelists (but not the crazed zealots - you gotta vet them!). Try to target top members and influencers to carry your messaging and possibly play a key local role by providing them any resources you can, expanded visibility, contests, even swag!

#4 Local community events can be done on a tight budget. Try to combine your events with other on-going events. FInd unused local community centers. Offer sponsorships in exchange for using their facility (Valley entrepreneur groups do this endlessly with local law firms). Find sponsors. Again, use local people to cut costs.

#5 Kit it up! Create a process for running local events to make it easier for the organizers.

#6 Who do we invite? Should it be exclusive? Not sure there was one answer on this one. Certainly there are opportunities for exclusive events that feel like rewards for the top members. But where does your revenue come from? Does the top tier of members generate most of the community value and/or revenue, or does your community have a longer tail?

#7 Be transparent - especially when you know you're gonna piss people off. It's inevitable that you'll be making some business decisions that the community doesn't like. That's when it's most important to be honest and transparent. Make sure to create opportunities for the community to air their concerns and ask questions.

Topic 2: Outsourcing community moderation - good or bad idea?

Lots of vibrant discussion on this one. I think the room had a general opposition to moderation which may have been voiced best by Susan Tenby who felt that "outsourcing moderation could be a crutch against building trust". It might be better to empower your engaged members who have a lot invested in your community and (hopefully) the motivation to help. But certain communities have REALLY engaged members who aren't always providing positive content and value, such as news-oriented sites and blogs. On these sites it's common for the active members to flag each other as "offensive" which may not be appropriate. You have to consider whether people are abusing the ability to flag abuse!

It seemed that one of the common threads in the discussion was that you can't risk losing touch with your community. Can you outsource to folks who GET your community and brand without losing touch with your community. If so, then it's probably worth considering.

What about pre vs. post moderation? And should it be automated? Current.tv reacts to any abuse flags but doesn't do any pre-moderation. This seemed to be a common approach. Reputation management systems were mentioned as a great way to prioritize bad content, but they can be very expensive.

What about deleting content? It seemed that a common approach was to "hide" inappropriate content and make sure to document why it was hidden. I mentioned that I believe GetSatisfaction does a really nice job of providing sensible post-moderation tools, particularly allowing for hiding content with an explanation. Much could probably be learned from their model which is used in 1000's of support communities.

Topic 3: HootSuite vs. CoTweet - a continuation of the info sharing in the online digest

What Robyn learned from the digest discussion: most big brands were using CoTweet. TechSoup switched from HootSuite to CoTweet because of cost per user (which recently become a premium paid service at HootSuite), but still use HootSuite on a personal basis. Common thread: everyone who had experience with both tools preferred HootSuite's UI, scheduling ability, assignment of Tweets, and analytics over CoTweet but felt that HootSuite's new pricing model overwhelmed all those "relatively minor" benefits. For example, HootSuite now charges $5 for the first two users, and $15 for each additional user on a monthly basis (unverified!). So a team of 5 people would pay $50 per month vs. $0 for CoTweet.

One major upside of CoTweet that was mentioned: it shows which user in a company actually posted a Tweet (but don't you have to be using CoTweet to see that extra info?). Bottom line: if money is no object then the preference seems to be for HootSuite.

Susan Tenby mentioned Sprout Social but no one was using it yet. Perhaps someone can share their experience with Sprout Social if they check it out. And one last "must-have" free tool if you're not already using it: NutshellMail. It's a great daily summary of your social networking activity across a variety of social networks. Perhaps one of the most important features of NutshellMail is seeing your quitters and having an immediate "unfollow" button available if you are currently following the quitter. Bloggers note: that little button kinda feels good to press at times ;-)

Undoubtedly I missed a bunch of worthy ideas and content. Please add them as comments here or into the #ocrtribe Twitter stream. You can also reach me at @thecommunityguy with any comments or questions. Thanks to all the organizers for another great event!