The world of mobile apps has entered every fabric of our daily lives and for wine lovers, this brings an entire new realm of appreciation. From the neophyte to the experienced, the new apps bring an array of features, allowing each person to select the one that is the most appropriate for them.
Like wine itself, apps are very personal and can accommodate a multitude of needs. These are just some of the apps that are listed as the better ones, although we can anticipate that there will be more.
Hello Vino (Android, iOS) A free app that is more akin to a wine assistant. The purpose of this app is to help the enthusiast select your wine purchases as well as offering information on the best wine for the best food types. Users become a kind of ‘club’ taking pictures of the wine they have bought and adding their own notes. The app includes a very detailed wine guide so that you can read on both wines as well as the variety of grapes. One of the features that is considered ‘premium’ is the ability to scan the wine labels and preview ratings, tasting notes and food pairings.
Drync (Android, iOS) A free app that lets you take pictures of a specific wine label and then bring up price, availability, descriptions, tasting notes and ratings. Users have the option of adding their own notes, tracking their favorites and even placing online orders via the app. One of the key note areas is the availability of finding new wines based on recommendations of either the app engine or your friends.
Vivino (Android, iOS) A free app that is another wine ‘companion’ but with a bit more sophistication. Their platform has the ability to recognize the photo of a wine label and bring up a plethora of information about that specific wine, including: tasting notes, ratings, reviews, etc. The cool aspect of this app is that if their engine doesn’t recognize the wine their own personal team of experts can step in to manually offer info. They have a full database that users can browse to get recommendations, wine reviews and locations to buy wines nearby.
Welcome to the Deeplink Recap! We’re taking a look back at this week’s top industry news, from app engagement to deep linking and beyond. There's even an interview with one of our awesome clients -- check it out!
We talked to the folks behind the wine app Drync and got some great insights on mobile marketing — and, well, wine — in the process.
Nielsen reports that most smartphone users have about 42 apps on their phones but only use less than 10 of those regularly. How do you make sure your app is one that gets opened?
App monetization startup Inneractive on the future of mobile: “When you click a link on the web, where does it bring you? To that link, correct? That… wasn’t the case until companies like Deeplink brought this ability to thousands of mobile developers.”
The Google Maps app is integrating OpenTable listings, so you’ll be able to book a reservation through the service without leaving Maps.
In our latest episode of a feature we like to call “Customers in Cars (Not) Getting Coffee,” we’re talking to the good people of Drync. If you like wine, you’ll love this app — it lets you scan, track and discover bottles as well as order them from your phone. Sarah spoke to Drync COO Brian Carr and Marketing Manager Amy Ullman about the company’s acquisition strategy, mobile payments and beyond!
How did Drync come to be?
Brian Carr: Our CEO [Brad Rosen] was in Tuscany with his wife, and he discovered some wine and thought, "wouldn’t it be great if we could just have this delivered home?" Starting in 2008, the key was to catalogue your wines, do some tasting notes on it, take a picture of the label. What ended up getting perfected was the ability to take the picture of the label and have it render the correct wine. We’re not talking UPC codes — we’re actually taking the picture of the wine label.
Now we have almost 3 million labels that people have taken a picture of in our database, and we have image recognition technology that identifies a specific wine. If for some reason our technology doesn’t match it, we have a human take a look at it and say, oh, that’s a Beaujoulais, and render it to the right one.
How is Drync different than the many other wine apps out there?
Brian Carr: What we’ve perfected since 2008 is the ability to actually make a purchase within 30 seconds. Given the rules around alcohol, it's very complicated. We've spent a lot of time and effort on the backend code to make it super-simple for people to take a picture of a wine label they are trying, purchase it for delivery, and return to their dinner or party seamlessly.
Drync is on Android and iOS. What differences have you seen in engagement between the two platforms?
Brian Carr: We started on iOS and therefore have many more users there. We do see higher activity, engagement, sales and higher value sales in iOS. But Android is really just turning on and we just launched with the new Android product and Google Wallet, so we're excited to see how it performs in Q4. We have an iPad app as well, and from an engagement perspective it’s interesting to see the iOS audience. You don’t often see them taking a picture with their iPad. We definitely see a lot more people on the iPhone taking pictures, but we do see, particularly at night, orders coming in from iPads.
You mentioned Google Wallet -- how has that been for you?
Brian Carr: That’s right, Drync is the first wine app that’s been approved for Google Wallet, and it’s going well — and this week we launch with Apple Pay. It’s clear people are getting a much higher comfort level purchasing on their phone with a couple of clicks. We’re very bullish on quick one- or two-click payment in the app, because it really plays to our sweet spot, as the only app where you can talk about wine but also purchase it in 30 seconds or less from your mobile device. So having that ability to do one or two clicks with Google Wallet and now a finger swipe with Apple Pay is perfect for us.
Can you talk a bit about your strategy for user acquisition?
Brian Carr: We have several ways we acquire. The first is organic — if you go to the Food & Wine category on the App Store, we’re being featured by Apple, which is always great. We also have a referral program. For people who have already signed up in the app, you can give $20 to your friends, and when they make their first purchase, you get $10 put into your account as well. That’s very successful. That third-party endorsement from your friends can certainly help. There also are a lot of wine tastings and wine industry events that we attend and we show the app to a pre-engaged target audience. We also do some Facebook geo-targeting and psychographic targeting ads to get the type of customers we know will thrive.
Aside from Facebook, are there any other paid acquisition platforms you use?
Brian Carr: Yes, getting quality paid mobile installs can be expensive, especially as competition heats up for consumers in Q4, so it's always a work in progress. We also have paid content marketing, where we re-publish our wine blog content to specific audiences, as well as retargeting ad campaigns after people visit our site and have shown some interest. Weekends, you can imagine, are better acquisition times for us, because people are more in wine-consumption mode then. So we are optimizing not only in the timing of the placements but in the creative itself: scan the wine you love tonight and we’ll have it delivered to your doorstep next step.
What about push notifications? How do you re-engage users with bombarding them too much?
Amy Ullman: It really depends on the campaign and the initiatives we’re working on. We try to do a more general push on Fridays just to make sure we’re touching as many people as possible. And then within our app, we’re working on more specific, tailored in-app messages depending on acquisition source, interest, behavior, where they are in the funnel. We try to avoid sending push notifications more than weekly. Right now we’re experimenting with some of our paid sources, because we can get so granular that we can have unique pushes to them in campaigns twice a week. But that’s more targeted and segmented based on interested rather than a broad, “here’s some wine inspiration for the weekend”-type general pushes. We try to make sure the pushes we do send are really engaging and really actionable.
I really like your blog, because it struck me that you’re making an effort to educate users a bit while also acknowledging that many of them have their preferences set in stone. Are discovery and education important aspects to you?
Amy Ullman: Yes, absolutely. We’re all about encouraging users to buy the wine they love and keep going with those, but it’s also about discovering more. Whether it’s through seeing what their friends love on the activity feed or seeing it through a tweet, a recommended collection or just checking out the discovery pack in one of our emails or seeing a blog post. That’s really just going to keep them happier and make their wine lives better. It’s about enriching their drinking and wine-loving experience.
Right, so social sharing becomes really important. And we obviously love how deep linking enhances share buttons.
Amy Ullman: Yeah, for us deep linking has been a game changer in terms of email marketing. We can deep link through our push notifications, which is great, but not having the ability to deep link via email was really inhibiting because you’re making your users do so much more work in order to get where they need to go and actually be engaged and start using the app. Everything we do with pushes, we can now do in our email marketing because we know a little bit more about those users and can get a better sense of where they are in the buying cycle and what offers are going to be applicable to them. Being able to send them where they need to go instead of just being like, “OK, here’s the app” — and being able to track that within Mailchimp has been awesome.
My final question is obvious: What are your favorite wines?
Brian Carr: I’ll take any Tempranillo at any moment.
Amy: It really changes on the time of day, my mood, what I’m eating, if I’m eating. But if I had to pick one bottle that I’m obsessed with, it would be the first wine that I ever blind-tasted correctly, and that was a 2004 Domaine DujacGevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru.
Cheers, Amy and Brian! For those interested, you can download the Android app here and the iPhone app here.
Download the Drync app today and get FREE WINE delivered to you during the week of premiere! Check back here tomorrow at 11am ET for a special code.
iPhone download: http://dryn.cc/1jQfenv
Android download: http://dryn.cc/Kaer1e
