Month: September 2012

Naked Wines – A master class in CRM and customer relations

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Have you heard of Naked Wines? Do you like wine? Then you should check it out In our industry we talk a lot about customer engagement and CRM / social media usage and often talk about AMEX or Starbucks as the benchmark. There is one company that in my experience has blown them all away, I mean really stand out and that is Naked Wines.

Basically Naked Wines invests in new wine makers, start ups of the wine industry and you are encouraged to invest, the investment is small scale, could be £20 a month for example. This money is then ploughed back into the start ups via your purchases. As you purchase you receive 33% cash back to spend again. There is then an amazing site that allows you to rate and share and see what others are drinking, liking etc. When you do buy some wine, it comes with a personalised message from the wine maker on the label which is a nice touch.

As with Amazon they keep track of what you like and don’t like and make suggestions for you etc for future purchases. This is all good but it is not all of this that has taken me, it has been the amazing contact strategy.

After a few standard emails from them telling me what money I have in the account I then receive an email entitled ‘FW That thing I was telling you about’ you open it up to find Naked Wines have forwarded an email from a winemaker offering a chance to Angel investors to buy a one off. Naked Wine email starts with ‘this is what I love about my job’. It is all a fantastic tone, it draws you in.

As it happens I did not take this offer and a little while later I receive an email entitled ‘Have I offended you?’ This is the text:

Dear Marco

I am baffled.

Every month I tell you about the free bottle of wine that you have earned..and every month you ignore it. It is not a trick, it is your reward for being a loyal investor.

If you are too busy to faff about mixing a case to get your free bottle then I have a solution. (goes on to explain solution)

If there is some other problem then please tell me by hitting reply.

This is an engaging, refreshing and actually quite to the point as an opening approach and had me already more engaged in something I was partially committed to. They continue with a number of contact emails and most are ignored, not out of dissatisfaction, more time, busy life etc and I think that is where I genuinely respect this company – they worked that out!

Every so often though after a period of time, they come back to grab your attention, I liked ‘warning do not open before Christmas’ when you open there is a selection of wines with the warning that they may attract unwelcome relatives. As you read further it continues to push the message – avoid this offer – all the way through, it’s nice, a change of pace from the usual CRM messaging.

To my amazement I then actually got a call from someone to have a chat with me about my wine preferences and what I would be interested in the future, a website that calls you? As it happens I did not have time and so…

Along came the next hook email – ‘I am feeling VERY guilty…’ the opening line is brilliant ‘We’ve got your money AND your wine. That is not good! We owe you £80 of wine and I am losing sleep over it’ then comes the genius and ties back to what I said earlier, they know I have not got loads of time for deliberation so they make it easy.

‘I’ve tried to call you several times, but you are a very hard person to get hold of, so I have a no nonsense proposal for you’ They go on ‘Give me one chance to put a selection of wines together and if you like them you have had some great wine and I get a clean conscience. If not a full refund.’ What did I need to do to get this arranged? Hit reply and say YES! That’s it. There is the beauty of it. Let us do the work and just say yes, show us some faith. I did. On the delivery confirmation email they then propose another way I could work with them that gets me the best wines and with the least hassle until I decide to invest more time in it.

Underpinning this amazing contact strategy is an awesome service. Order before 3pm for next day delivery, follow up emails, great website full of information and social engagement and more. Why have I felt like writing about this company, well because so much time is spent writing off email strategies instead focusing on social media etc etc. I don’t think it is true, it is just not done well. Naked Wines is the best experience I have had with a business bar none and should be a benchmark for all. And at the end of it all as I reviewed the emails they sent me I saw that I had bought a fair amount of wine and I would say 90% of that has come from the email nudges!

Well done Naked Wines and every one else take a good look and learn something.

My Mediaweek judging experience – take it back to basics

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I judged my first Mediaweek awards this week. An array of illuminati from media were there (me excluded), from agencies, publishers, creative and media. All of them were senior and full of experience in judging and the industry as well as carrying a good helping of cynicism and sarcasm.

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Not sure what I expected really, a big old argument over the winner, a load of opinionated, puffed up media types all showing how right they are? I could not have been more wrong. In fact my group, not to mention names, was experienced and senior for sure, a mixture of advertisers, agencies, clients and media owners, all very polite, thoughtful and very insightful.

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With that comes a very acute ability to judge and to see through bullshit. Discussions around the table were not around disagreements so much as agreement. Of course there were individual opinions and differences but actually what really stood out was the immediate way in which entries that lacked either direction, quality, clarity on accomplishments and results were all found out very quickly.

It was fascinating seeing the entries boiled down to a single 5 minute video, it means you have to nail it and in a clear and succint fashion. Overall the quality was very high indeed but there were a couple that when they ended left the group all staring at each other in bewilderment. It is harder than it looks, sitting in that room watching this finished material it looks easy but I know it is hard from my New Business days. I recall the time we were told to do ‘something different’ in our new biz submission so we decided to send a video as primary introduction. It was slick, showed off the brands and the results we had achieved, it was described by the client as ‘a load of corporate w@@@’ So it is difficult to know what to do. Overall though my advice to entries of the future, knowing that it is being watched by 10 very experienced, sharp, media people would boil down to these few tips:

1. Start with the brief and make sure your video actually answers it and focuses on what the category is looking for, not what you want to shoehorn in.

2. Enter it in the right category!

3. Don’t submit the same video into different categories without adapting to some extent, this was an interesting debate. I think I came out on the side of tailor in some way, a nod of acknowledgement that it was a different brief to the previous you submitted into – not everyone agreed with that though.

4. Make sure results are strong and properly benchmarked – amazing amount of stats used out of context and with no benchmark. You have to remember that judges will either think they are not great stats in context or they are made up and twisted in some way if you dont.

5. Dont over use phrases such as ‘contributed to the overall’ that will deliver a wave of cynicism from these old hacks

6. Create a professional video that looks like you want to win, not one you threw together for your graduate presentation. Can you hear what the people are saying over special effects for instance?

I have to say thought that overall I was really impressed both with the approach and professionalism of both the judges and entries. It was fascinating to see all this great work side by side and even more interesting to hear the judges comments first hand. I was also quietly relieved to see business results front and centre rather than likes, licks and other titbits.