February 26, 2008

K&L Wine Merchants toasts new e-mail service

Online wine retailer K&L Wine Merchants has tapped e-mail marketing services firm StrongMail Systems Inc. in a move to increase its white listing and more easily manage its program.

After using an in-house service that was often black listed and another provider that charged a per-message fee, K&L turned to StrongMail to accommodate its growing customer list.

“E-mail marketing is a big part of the strategy for our site,” said Brian Zucker, co-owner and CTO of K&L Wine Merchants. “It was tough to manage on our own or on a per-message basis, so we decided to go with StrongMail.”

With the StrongMail platform, K&L has access to campaign management functionality and reporting tools. The integration with StrongMail took about a week, and K&L was up and running earlier this month.

The wine retailer sends e-mails to customers based on personal profiles on what kinds of wines they prefer. All recipients have opted in to receive e-mails on the homepage, where personal wine taste profiles can be created. Zucker would not disclose how many customers are on its list but did say that they send e-mails daily depending on the product.

“We always have to determine how many e-mails to send, because our products are not limitless,” Zucker added. “We have a new wine with only 500 cases made and so we have to determine who would probably respond to this wine and not oversend e-mails.”