For over three years, Zazmic has been supporting Palate Club – an e-commerce wine club where wine enthusiasts get customized wine deliveries to their personal palate using the expertise of sommeliers and neuroscientists, as well as intelligent matching algorithms.
We work with the company leaders to help generate more leads online and provide potential customers with an enjoyable on-site experience.
Objectives
Palate Club is a startup with an innovative idea and mission to bring together the power of AI to help wine lovers find their perfect palate match. The company’s founders created a way to connect with prospective users and encourage them to give wine subscription a try.
Business managers had the following business goals in mind:
- Establish a robust digital presence for an innovative idea. The company’s website had to communicate the benefits of signing up for a wine subscription online and convince users that personalized wine selection is a way to find a drink that fully matches their tastes and meals.
- Build an engaged social media community regardless of marketing budget limitations. Palate Club is selective about marketing investments – the business was looking for ways to maximize the efficiency of advertising efforts and cut marketing costs.
- Shorten customer journeys. Business owners want website visitors to have all the data needed to make a purchasing decision at hand.
- Attract mobile visitors. Palate Club managers want to make sure they are not missing out on attracting smartphone users. The company wants the website to be fast and mobile-friendly so that the user would not face any hurdles when signing up for a subscription.
- Ensure full security and legal compliance. The company needed to ensure compliance with alcohol sales age restrictions when a visitor browses the website. Palate Club needed to be in full cooperation with online safety and data protection regulations, creating a website that’s secure by design.
What Our Team Offered
We created a responsive, easy-to-manage website, with a mobile-friendly design and multi-layered security protection. Here’s how we approached building the Palate Club e-commerce store:
Design
Responsive theme
Based on the client’s requirements, a Flatsome theme has been used for the PalateClub website, as it perfectly caters to the needs of companies of various types and sizes.
The theme is an ultimate toolkit for unlimited website options that can be easily accessed and customized from a single admin panel, providing the client with the necessary level of autonomy and flexibility to make specific changes without having to touch the code.
CSS3 Animation
Every custom section of the website is CSS3-powered, which ensures gradual transitions of elements from one style to another. The functionality works independently and is not reliant on any external libraries and helps avoid loading the website with additional scripts.
New features
Payment processing
Palate Club’s app integrated with Payeezy, a Magento payment extension that enables seamless credit card processing both on the storefront and in the site’s admin panel. It provides extensive payment options accessible through a single interface.
Payment transactions pass through a secure transaction protocol where encryption for protecting sensitive cardholder data and preventing theft of credit card information kept in storage for recurring billings.
AI and Data Science integration
Palate Club’s core functionality is a sophisticated algorithm that works by tracking the wine ratings which users provide based on their preferences for each bottle they taste. Recommendation API written in Python.
The input includes wine features evaluated by professional sommeliers (taste and aroma, both numerical and categorical data), classic wines’ models, and our statistical findings based on production data. Primary and secondary taste palates are derived. The approach varies depending on the absolute value of customer rating and wine clusters.
Separate iterative logic developed to determine a customer’s sensitivity to the traits, which helps distantiate wine characteristics that are not likely to influence preferences. Based on the customer’s sensitivity, a dynamic system of weights is applied to match stock wines and classic wines to the profile. As a result, API produces a unique customer profile of taste and aroma characteristics and provides wine recommendations.
Social media integration
A built-in social media integration feature allows website users to share any page content externally to their social profiles, as well as to follow the client’s company pages on social media. With the help of the page builder, this functionality is added to any page or section of the website.
Subscription
According to the client’s business objectives, the site integrated with Mailjet, one of the most reliable subscription platforms.
With the help of the tool, website visitors who subscribe to newsletters via a widget automatically added to a selected contact list. Mailjet allows the client to create as many subscription lists as needed and provides a number of marketing email solutions on top.
Security
Malware and third-party attack protection
For additional website security, we integrated Wordfence, a comprehensive WordPress security solution that includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner specifically built to protect the website.
Login security, such as two-factor authentication, which is enabled for specific roles on the site, is one of the many security options that can benefit a Wordfence user.
Age verification
To make sure the business is compliant with the law and deter persons under the legal drinking age, we created a custom age verification widget using JS functionality. The simple pop-up window is both user- and SEO-friendly.
Performance
Although the Flatsome theme is already optimized for page speed, we have come up with additional solutions to optimize the website for even better performance. This supports custom functionality and improves the user experience for both mobile and desktop devices.
SEO
SEO plugin integration
Using a built-in WordPress plugin infrastructure, our team integrated Yoast – an all-in-one SEO management plugin into the admin panel. This way, we ensured that Palate Club’s in-house professional could optimize the content on their own, with no external assistance.
Robot.txt optimization
Our SEO team created a robot.txt file and optimized it for Google Search. We maximized the crawl budget for a page by choosing which elements should be indexed by crawling bots. The SEO team used non-index and disallow properties to make sure ‘Thank you’ pages are not accessible via Google.
Keywords and semantic core analysis
SEM research, keywords, and semantic core analysis let improve the copy and create the content which matches the most frequent user search queries. Also, incorporating keywords into the text helped increase the visibility of the content for Google crawlers.
Social media management
Creating and implementing content strategies
Our team designed content strategies for the most popular social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. We created a consistent content plan and published short-form, engaging, and visually-rich content. Our SMM specialists tracked the social media engagement metrics to determine the types of posts and content that perform best.
Running advertising campaigns
Zazmic marketing team started CPC campaigns on Facebook and Pinterest to boost engagement and attract new leads to Palate Club. These marketing activities helped increase conversion by three times and had a 175% return on investment. The company’s Pinterest community became an exceptionally powerful lead driver.
Email marketing
Designing custom templates
To ensure high readability of Palate Club newsletters, our team created custom templates for the company. We made sure that emails are easily accessible by smartphone users and represent the brand as an innovative, reliable company.
Running email campaigns
Thanks to on-site sign-up forms, our team managed to build an impressive subscriber list of Palate Club website visitors. After collecting emails, we segmented the subscribers and sent relevant emails to each audience segment. We monitored the performance of every email, capturing deliverability rates, revenue per email, and click-through rates.
Email automation
Our team integrated automation tools into email marketing strategies and instructed in-house marketers. Now, the company’s content management team can effortlessly initiate and optimize campaigns.
Domain reputation management
Zazmic marketers are thoroughly monitoring blacklists and spam rates. By keeping the bounce rate as low as possible, we ensure that the domain is not blacklisted or flagged by Google algorithms. Such considerate email marketing practices help preserve and strengthen the startup’s reputation.
Content management and PPC
Creating a content strategy
We created an editorial calendar that helped post regular updates to the corporate blog. By researching the most important industry trends and issues and taking the best content management practices after competitors, we created high-performing blog posts that are ranking high on Google.
Custom photo and video content creation
Other than writing comprehensive and engaging blog posts, our team wanted to make sure the customers can connect with the brand through visual mediums. That’s why we produced custom photo and video content for the brand, showcasing the wine selection, sharing useful insights and tips.
Optimizing Google My Business
Google My Business is a powerful way to strengthen the business’ local presence. That’s why our marketing team focused on optimizing the company’s My Business page, encouraged clients to leave reviews, and worked hard to increase the credibility of the company’s profile. Improving the startup’s My Business presence increased the amount of organic traffic by 55%.
Running PPC campaigns in Google Ads
We helped Palate Club reduce conversion rates by taking a thought-out, data-driven approach to keyword selection. Zazmic marketers A/B tested and executed a series of PPC campaigns. Then, we selected the ones that brought the cheapest leads and included them in a long-term promotion strategy.
Results
- The website helps Palate Club attract over 30,000 monthly visitors.
- High user satisfaction rates – the company doesn’t have to deal with phone or email inquiries
- High conversion rates – thanks to the website, Palate Club converts 20% of website visitors to customers
- Over of 1,700 contact forms are filled in monthly
- Fast and easy website maintenance – takes 2-3 content managers to update the content on any page
- Return on investment – 250%
- Higher average session time – 2 minutes 50 seconds
To create a conversion-driving website for your project, reach out to Zazmic anytime. You can order a free website audit as well – we will take a look at your company’s corporate page, scan it for design and performance issues, and give you free tips for maximizing online conversion.
Fill in the contact form to contact the team or order a website assessment – we will get back to you in no time.
