Episode 3 of my New Series w/Geoff Miles

Hey guys, I'm stoked to have Jeff here. Jeff is the VP of Marketing at Bev. Jeff, how are you, bud? Good, hey Chase. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, man. So for everyone listening, this is another episode in kind of the series I'm doing where I'm interviewing internal CMOs, VP of Marketing to figure out like how email plays into their stack. So let's dive in. Would you mind telling me kind of about yourself and kind of the current role you're at? Yeah, so I mean, I joined Bev back in, it's been almost a year now, like September of last year. And the company was sort of like at this transition stage. We just signed our wholesale distributor. So Bev, we make canned wine. Let's start with that. And we signed the largest spirit and wine distributor in North America, Southern Glaciers, who are amazing. And at that point, our D2C business was basically non-existent. We were focused solely on getting into stores on and off premise. And that was how, that was basically 99% of our business at that point. And that also was the case basically through up until February, when we started really like looking at ads and e-com. We built out, we started to think about building out our new website and optimizing for conversion, which is actually the original reason we got into wine as a product and business. I mean, there's the mission behind Bev, which Alix, who's also my wife, I don't know if you knew that. She like started Bev. With this mission around wanting to change drinking culture and create a narrative and a brand in that space that spoke to and for women and made drinking culture a far more positive and fun environment. So that's sort of like what Bev was born out of. And the great thing about our product as a canned wine, we're allowed to sell direct to consumer because of like California wine laws. So most alcohol in the United States cannot be shipped direct to consumer. You can't go and buy like a bottle of Jack Daniels on their website and have it shipped to your door. But wine, we can. So that was how like we sort of like got into, that was one of the initial reasons for like moving into wine as the product versus something else, was like shipping direct to consumer. It took a little bit of time to get off the ground and see traction, but now we're moving. That's awesome, man. So obviously you've mentioned that your wife is kind of the founder and starter. Were you then the first kind of marketing person alongside her? Like, how big is the marketing team today? And kind of like, what did it look like before you started it, if there were people there? Yeah, I mean, before, so I've been working in advertising marketing for my whole career, worked with many media startups like in New York, and then had a brief political stint after the 2016 election when I worked on some campaigns. And I've been a fly on the wall essentially to Bev for our entire relationship and have seen it go through a couple of stages. I mean, it's not that old, two and a half years old. But when I joined the marketing team, there wasn't a head of marketing per se. I think it was a lot of the creative team like trying to figure it out. As a lot of startups, you have a lot of like young, very smart people. But I think when I joined, there wasn't a ton of marketing direction. And we started to, we focused a lot, started not doing some things and focusing on the areas where we're obviously seeing impact. And our ads started performing earlier this year, D2C, I mean, it's the first time we actually started running ads, the first time. And we started seeing success in D2C as well as success in our retail. With our new distributor, we started expanding to a lot of grocery and other stores that required marketing support. But first segment of, I guess, the company. Before me, it was a lot of like brand building. I mean, it takes a while to get a beverage company off the ground. The inventory alone takes a long lead time to build and then lead times for getting into say like grocery stores like Target is almost like a year long. So we had a bunch of lead time and I sort of like popped in at the really fun point. That's awesome. And then, so talking about like email marketing, which is gonna be the focus here, how do you think about email within kind of your D2C playbook or channel? I mean, it's hugely important. I think with any e-commerce brand, we're aiming for at least like 30% of our total revenue to come from email. Once from the top of the funnel, like once we get people into our ecosystem from our Facebook ads, Instagram ads, we're running testing a lot in podcasts and other places now too. But once they're like in there, right? You can remarket to them for essentially nothing with email. So it's a huge revenue generator and we use it. We aim to have like 30% of our revenue could come from that. Do a lot of testing around it, both with our flows and our campaigns, but it's hugely important. That's awesome. And what email platform are you guys currently on? And was this the same platform when you started that you guys were using or did you switch to something? We're on Klaviyo now. When we started, when I started, we were on MailChimp and really like not doing much email, primarily like newsletters, but Klaviyo has been like a game changer in how we're segmenting and marketing to people. And I think the Klaviyo team has also done an awesome job in terms of integrating with really like key platforms that we use around like data audiences and other things. Yeah, that's awesome. In terms of, I know you mentioned kind of campaigns and flows, like in terms of campaigns and flows, like how do you think about like the split in terms of time, like on a weekly or monthly basis? Like do you lean, we're doing one more than the other? Is it pretty split? Like how do you split your time? So I'd say like we, I would want to be spending more time on campaigns. We're spending like, we do probably like one email a week around campaigns and trying to get that up to like two to three with, you know, among different segments, not to our whole list, obviously. But we've spent a lot of time recently on flows. I think flows are usually important because they are, you know, evergreen. They are working when you are not, you know, there. They're the passive moneymaker. So we do spend a lot of time on our flows, maybe testing them, you know, especially abandoned car, browse abandonment, windbacks, and, you know, seeing where we can improve on those things that are constantly running in the background. Yeah, that's awesome. So on the flow side, so that sounds like there's kind of some focus there with the category you're in, kind of like the fact that people consume this, I don't know if it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, are there any kind of unique or special flows that you guys leverage to get people to continue buying and repurchasing? Yeah, so we, I mean, we have found like our average repurchase time. We also are looking at that for like different segments of people as well, but having replenishment flows, post-purchase replenishment, we have those live both for our subscription and like one-off purchasers. Generally, you know, it's for us, it's around, you know, three weeks or so for certain shoppers that we've segmented out. Like it's even sooner. People, you know, go through the wine pretty quickly, but it's definitely key to just stay top of mind. And again, you know, with email, it doesn't cost you much of anything to do that. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. You mentioned something, you're sending one campaign per week, like in terms of planning for that campaign every week, like how far out are you guys scheduling, building, creating content, kind of you're sending four campaigns a month, like are you guys a few months ahead? Are you guys doing things last minute? Like how long does that turn around time normally take? I wish I could tell you we're planning like four months ahead. Most of the time right now, we are a small team. So there are only three people on my marketing team right now. And, you know, we are expanding that actively, looking for some more people to join, like growth design as we wanna create more content. But, you know, we're more reactionary right now. I'd say like we are planning roughly like two to three weeks ahead, which is pretty good for us right now. And I think, but I guess to that, like there are certain things, like we just launched our Labor Day sale that you wanna plan far in advance to have, which you know are gonna be there, right? Like your holiday promos and stuff. But we also like wanna send emails and often do that are very like timely. And so we'll design things the week before that are going out just to have that like context and have a more personal relevant connection to the person that it's being sent to. Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned obviously holidays and kind of sales. And then you also mentioned I guess kind of current events. Do you guys send any other kind of campaigns whether it might be like community-based recipes, like what other kind of campaigns you guys send or what does that makeup look like? Yeah, so, I mean, we do a lot of our welcome flow for one, like there's a lot of educating on our brand. I think people still, while canned wine is like starting to boom and become more common, people still like need education on like the wine itself, like how we're zero sugar, how we like other ingredients that we have, we basically don't use any like preservatives and stuff like that. So like there is a lot of consumer education that still needs to be done. We also have been like made our wine specifically for the can, whereas a lot of say like larger wineries who have canned wines often are just like making an extension of their normal wine. They just take their wine that they put in bottles and put it in a can. But we've made ours specifically for the can. I think that education is really important. It's not really just like a sales email, but it is like giving consumer more context and moving them along the buying path. And then outside of that, like we have a very strong brand mission and like visual presence. And so we just have fun with our emails and speak to like issues and things. If you go to our Instagram, like you'll see where we do like a lot of that communicating around like real time events, but around issues that are really important to women and men, but like commenting on social issues that are going on. Awesome, man. I love that. So then we talked about the content in terms of actually like, you know, project management tools, like we're actually getting these campaigns done. Like are you guys using something like Insana or Monday or Notion? Like how do you guys keep organized? Is it a Google Sheet, Slack? How do you actually plan and execute the campaigns in terms of like project management basis? Yeah, I'm known as like the Insana guy and the office have like drilled at home and built an Insana loving reputation here. But Insana, yeah, is our project manager of choice at Bev. I think it's just like, it offers so much functionality, no matter like what team you're on, especially for creative teams. It's worked really well for us and what we need. And, you know, I think it takes a little while to learn. I would like also recommend for teams that don't, you know, haven't used it before, like find an expert and get them to teach it. Like that onboarding is super important. If you don't have like full adoption, then it's not gonna like really work well for you. But yeah, Insana has been great. We also occasionally, we use Milanote too, just to like visualize and plan out, comment on the actual like layout of say our campaigns. We'll have like our August calendar and layout each week. And then, you know, same thing with flows and edits that we're doing on those. Awesome, so outside of like Klaviyo and the two project manager tool, are there any other tools that you kind of likely recommend, whether it's on the email side or just marketing in general, that are kind of helping you guys, whether it's on the design or copy or whatever kind of boarding, like is there anything else that you guys are using that you think is worth mentioning? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say on the design. We like have great, great designers. We design like most of that stuff just in Adobe, right? We don't use other tools for that. But DataCue is something I would probably mention. Are you familiar with that? No, you mean explaining it? Yeah, it's, I mean, I have zero affiliation to them, but DataCue.ai is something we just started using fairly recently, but it's been like actually amazing, both for ads and Klaviyo. Basically, it takes in data from your Facebook ads, Google ads, your Shopify store, and you can create audience segments that it uses its own like AI algorithms to pair people together into specific audiences. And you can export those audiences directly to Klaviyo, as well as your Facebook ads and Google ads. And we've seen like really, improvements in our CPAs on the ad side and increase in our general revenue percent in our emails. Dude, that's awesome. For sure checking that out after. So one more last question on that then. In terms of like your segments and your audiences, like I'm imagining you're sending to people that are engaged over a period of time, but it also sounds like now you're maybe targeting people that have certain interests or buying behavior. How, like, what are some of the ideas of segments that you create either with that tool that you send to or outside of that tool? Yeah, I mean, it is, I mean, it depends on like the use case. We probably have like 15 to 20 segments that we built out, both that are, became standard templatized in data queue and ones we've created ourselves. But things like, you know, getting the top 20% of customers within the last 90 days. We have like, there's an audience in data queue that's called like superstar rookies. That is like their own template. But like basically the people that, you know, just found your brand, but actually like, have engaged with it. They really like, they've bought the product or are showing a lot of like promise. And so you want to retain them, right? You want to give them a little extra love. And other things like the critical, we have like a critical retention moment segment where, you know, we're basically there at the end or have just like missed their normal repurchase rate and it's time to re-hit them. And that's done like that audience specifically is like done dynamically, which is great. Not everybody, you know, will need to replenish at the same time, but it's taking, you know, averages and looking at our order data to determine that. Yeah, that's awesome. So it sounds like you guys are kind of taking some of like the popular segments, right? Sounds like you almost have like a VIP segment that's kind of very specific to your brand. It sounds like almost like you have these people that are kind of new loyalists that you really want to kind of nurture and turn them into VIPs. So it sounds like you guys are hitting people at all the right stages. That's awesome, man. Right, yeah. And then we, yeah, we have all those, you know, standard ones obviously as well, the VIP and yeah. But this specifically I think has helped us a lot. There are like other audiences that overlap, you know, with those or like missed stages that I feel like a lot of marketers don't hit on, right? That like there's a gap between when you become like a loyalist and a VIP from that like intro stage. And it's sort of this swamp of unknown sometimes, like you don't know how to necessarily get them over to that loyalist. And I think we've seen a good amount of success from targeting these people specifically in different ways. Dude, that's so awesome. I'm gonna pick your brain a little bit more about that offline, so good stuff. Anything else about the business, about work, about email that you wanted to chat through? If not, dude, I really appreciate the time, this was sick. Yeah, no, I mean, thanks for, you know, having me on. I think this is, we're just like cruising. It's been a wild ride during COVID specifically. I mean, feeling obviously very grateful to be in a business where people are sitting at home and on their couches and drinking wine. So it's made our lives easier, but, you know, we are definitely trying to, you know, keep up our growth and to see how big we can build this thing. Awesome, and then is it just drinkbev.com? Is it the website? What's the URL that people can check out? Yeah, drinkbev.com is our website and you can check out our social at drinkbev. Awesome, and then last thing for you, what's your platform of choice? Is it Twitter? Is it LinkedIn? Instagram? Is it Facebook? If I could people, maybe reach out to you personally. Yeah, I mean, Instagram is generally platform of choice, but you can check out Twitter as well, but I'm at ge.of on Instagram. Cool, I'll find that. I'll grab a communal throw it in the notes, so. All right, man, well, I appreciate you coming on. And again, I've mentioned before, but I love the background, so it's awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. Cheers.