#drync

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.