How Market and Customer Insights Sharpened a Wine Subscription Brand's Marketing Strategy

Context & Challenge

Le Petit Ballon, one of France's best-known wine subscription brands, wanted to grow its subscription range: monthly subscriptions for wine lovers and gift subscriptions. Before investing further in campaigns, the subscription team wanted clear answers. Who was really buying each subscription? When did demand peak? How did the offer compare with competitors? Which marketing actions would actually pay back? Starts worked alongside the Subscription Product Manager over three months, from July to September 2021.

Phase 1, Audit Before Spending More

• ◆Twelve months of website analytics (acquisition, behavior, conversion), focused on the subscription pages
• ◆Customer base analysis by subscription type: profiles, buying habits and seasonality
• ◆Social media performance and the path from social channels to subscription
• ◆Conversion funnel review and tracking recommendations

Phase 2, Demand & Competition

• ◆Seasonality of online demand for wine subscriptions, by week and by region in France
• ◆Competitor benchmark of leading French wine subscription offers across product, price, service and promotion
• ◆Analysis of customer reviews and social conversations to anticipate what subscribers want next
• ◆Data-based personas for monthly and gift subscribers

Phase 3, From Insights to a Marketing Plan

• ◆Separate value propositions for monthly and gift subscriptions
• ◆A 12-month marketing plan built on the SOSTAC model (situation, objectives, strategy, tactics, actions, control)
• ◆A 6-month action plan with owners and time budgets
• ◆A campaign roadmap timed to demand peaks and to the slowest sales months
• ◆A KPI tracker with five performance goals set up in Google Analytics

What the Research Revealed

• ◆Gift and monthly subscriptions behave differently: gift sales follow Christmas, Valentine's Day and Father's Day, while monthly subscriptions sell year-round. They needed separate messages and calendars.
• ◆Online demand for wine subscriptions peaks around Black Friday, Christmas and the summer sales, and is concentrated in a handful of French regions.
• ◆The audience was younger and more mobile than the traditional wine buyer, opening room for a more modern tone and mobile-first offers.
• ◆No-commitment subscriptions and a range that includes spirits were strong differentiators that weren't communicated enough.
• ◆Paid campaigns needed clear goals and return tracking before budgets were scaled up.

Coaching for Autonomy

Each step came with a one-hour coaching session, ten in total, so the subscription team could run the analyses themselves. Starts also set up a quarterly routine for reviewing competitors and customer demand.

What changed

The subscription team moved from campaign-by-campaign decisions to a plan grounded in its own data and in the market.

• ◆Clear priorities for the subscription range
• ◆Value propositions rewritten for each audience and applied across digital and print materials
• ◆A campaign calendar aligned with real demand
• ◆Measurable goals and tracking for every campaign
• ◆In-house capability to keep monitoring competitors and demand