A Winery Relaunch Reaps Rewards

The US wine industry is a global leader in all things vinous. Indeed, a single California-based winery produces more than 3 percent of the world’s entire annual wine supply. This family-owned company has long been known for the quality of its releases and for its innovations in both wine production and marketing. In addition to its family label wines, it produces and distributes more than 100 unique wine brands.

Also a leader in environmentally friendly wine production and one of many family-owned wineries to implement the California Code of Sustainable Winegrowing Practices, this firm helped establish a comprehensive set of vinicultural methods that ensure minimal environmental downsides and enhanced equity for workers and local communities.

With more than 100 labels under its umbrella, the winery needed a digital presence that reflected its prestigious reputation, uniformly high product quality, and market dominance. The company had multiple ecommerce goals: a powerful reference architecture that provided an optimal customer experience; a single core platform that gave brands the requisite flexibility for necessary evolution and differentiation; unification of sales, marketing, and customer service functions; enhanced communication with customers, allowing the company to benefit from consumer insights and develop long-term and profitable relationships; and website designs that were compelling and founded on up-to-date branding, enabling each of the winery’s labels to express its unique characteristics while secured to the company’s rock-solid reference architecture.

In consultation with the client, Astound identified the solution’s multiple components: a flexible, mobile-first design system to enhance customer experiences across brands and improve wayfinding; a design update that reflected timely data on branding and consumer trends; enabled API integrations for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, compliance, fulfillment, third-party wine apps, and trade marketing partners; and implementation of Salesforce’s order management system (OMS), which provided a tightly integrated data foundation, simplified the company’s data architecture by bringing in a single source of truth for order data, and provided an end-to-end order experience for customers.

Astound’s solution is grounded in a versatile reference app based on Salesforce multi-cloud architecture, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), Salesforce OMS, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), and Mulesoft. This reference architecture drives a seamless customer experience powered by a modular design toolset (SFCC Page Designer), allowing for maximum flexibility in capturing unique brand identities. Simultaneously, Salesforce OMS provides the winery’s customer experience teams with complete visibility into historical order data and in-flight order journeys––including customer interactions, compliance, and fulfillment. It also improves customer service by offering simplified cancellation, appeasements, and returns.

The winery and Astound demonstrated the value of this reference application with the relaunch of two websites. These relaunches represent complete site redesigns that optimize navigation and product finding and provide thoughtful, integrated content to enhance the shopping experience. The winery and Astound also partnered to identify optimal technologies to address complex industry-specific requirements such as age gates and shipping compliance rules.

Finally, Astound supported SEO and analytics integrations to enhance ongoing data-driven optimization and planning for the benefit of the winery’s customers.

The winery’s customers now experience a rich and engaging digital journey. Essential product information is easily accessed, and supporting content is comprehensive and contextual. Most critically, progress toward purchase is intuitive, painless, and direct.

The post-launch data speaks eloquently to Astound’s success. The following statistics compare results from the first quarter following launch (January to March 2021) to the same quarter from the previous year.

Site One
Q1 data show ecommerce transactions increased by 338 percent (712 transactions to 3,120), average order value (AOV) increased by 49 percent, and online revenue increased by 555 percent.

Site Two
In the three months since taking the brand direct-to-consumer and enabling ecommerce functionality, site data show more than 600 completed transactions with an AOV of more than $100, and more than 70,000 in ecommerce revenue where previously there was none.