The Client
With millions of capsules served, Bartesian is on a mission to pour the world the perfect at-home cocktail. And boy are they nailing it! Their eponymous Bartesian Cocktail Maker shakes up perfect craft cocktails on demand, won the 2020 Good Housekeeping Innovation Award, has been an Oprah favorite thing, and was one of Shopify’s top-10 selling products during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022.
The Client
With millions of capsules served, Bartesian is on a mission to pour the world the perfect at-home cocktail. And boy are they nailing it! Their eponymous Bartesian Cocktail Maker shakes up perfect craft cocktails on demand, won the 2020 Good Housekeeping Innovation Award, has been an Oprah favorite thing, and was one of Shopify’s top-10 selling products during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022.
What We Built
- Custom Cocktail Subscription Program
- Mobile-First Website Redesign
Robust Mobile-First Subscriber UX - Responsive Mobile App
The Results
In 12 months, Bartesian achieved:
-
356%
Revenue
Growth -
281%
Subscription
Revenue Growth -
50%
Increase in Monthly
Subscriber Base
How We Did It
Building The Ultimate Party Prep UX
Sam is a monthly cocktail subscriber. She’s just returned from vacation and is planning a last-minute party for her neighbors. She grabs her phone and unpauses her 3-box capsule subscription. Then she swaps all of her current cocktail selections for some crowd-pleasing variety packs and adds a few extra boxes of margaritas to cart for her guests–throwing in a cocktail shaker at the subscriber rate of 50% off. At checkout, she applies a seasonal promo code and pays the balance with her loyalty rewards points. All while earning even more points in the process.
The invisible tech that helped Sam plan her party also helped Bartesian nearly triple the share of their monthly revenue from subscriptions in less than 12 months.
But nothing like it existed out of the box.
So P3 Media built it with our partner, Recharge a platform that helps the most innovative DTC brands grow and retain a loyal customer base.
The Problem
Normally when you set up a recurring purchase, you’re subscribing to a single product or bundle of products. You make your purchase in a checkout designed just for subscriptions, and when you eventually realize that your T-zone needs a gentler toner/moisturizer combo, you cancel and pick something else. This paradigm works when all you need is to replenish a single item you use up at a predictable rate (like an air filter).
But cocktails are all about the fun of variety. And P3 uncovered data showing that customer consumption habits vary widely by season and occasion.
Bartesian needed a subscription experience that would allow customers to mix and match multiple cocktail selections without canceling their subscriptions first. And it had to align with the way their customers prefer to shop–adding extra boxes of cocktails to orders when hosting, removing boxes and pausing when traveling, tossing in the odd upsold piece of barware. Most importantly, the system had to integrate Bartesian’s always-on subscriber discounts on cocktails and accessories with seasonal promotions and LoyaltyLion rewards.
Did we mention that all of this functionality needed to work intuitively on a mobile-first UI?
The Solution
With Recharge, P3 devised a way to allow customers to subscribe to a quantity of cocktails rather than a specific variety. This enabled subscribers to:
Build their own bundles instead of choosing from a few pre-merchandised options
Seamlessly swap the cocktail varieties in their subscriptions without having to cancel first
Skip and unskip complex orders involving several SKUs
But that was just the beginning.
A Powerful Integrated Checkout
Once we’d solved for these essential requirements, we built an integrated checkout experience on Shopify so that customers:A. wouldn’t have to leave the Bartesian store to buy or modify subscriptions (a significant source of lost sales), andB. Could check out with a mix of subscription items and one-off purchases in the same cart.
P3 worked with Recharge and LoyaltyLion to tie rewards points to subscription orders and ensure that blended orders would stack subscriber and seasonal discounts correctly.
A Mobile-First Subscription UX
To improve conversion rates and subscriber retention, P3 completely overhauled Bartesian’s subscription management UI to make it intuitive on mobile.
We reorganized the subscription management portal, placing the most-used options where the thumb likes to travel.
We revamped the quantity-selection menu with hierarchical fonts that self-organize information, and robust purchase-driving metadata–like how much money customers stand to save with each option.
And we created an efficient cocktail selection page that makes it easy to navigate Bartesian’s 50+ capsule options on a small screen, adding progress bars and prompts to help users keep track of their quotas even when selections are off-screen.
A Seamless Customer Data Transfer
Once the system was built and QA’d, Recharge executed a full customer data transfer for all subscribers, importing order histories, current selections, and active orders with no action required by Bartesian’s current subscribers. Loyal customers simply woke up to find that their pain points had been addressed.
Driving Net New Subscriptions
Based on customer feedback, Bartesian drives subscriptions with a generous incentive schedule, giving active monthly subscribers a quantity-based discount of up to 20% on subscription cocktails, and a flat 50% off all barware accessories.
P3 leverages these perks in all email campaigns, as well as segmented SMS campaigns targeting machine owners who have not yet tried a monthly cocktail subscription.
The program currently mints an average of 5,000+ net new subscriptions a month, and climbing.
A Responsive Mobile App
Finally, P3 built Bartesian a cost-efficient responsive mobile app so that customers on any device could make and manage purchases anywhere, anytime.
Since responsive apps reproduce extant web experiences, P3 mobile-optimized all of Bartesian’s revenue-generating pages using iterative conversion rate optimization techniques.
These discrete optimizations have helped Bartesian improve their conversion rates by 50%.
App V1 was a proof of concept and the first app ever to leverage the Shopify API, giving Bartesian a simple and direct way to reproduce their customer login, cocktail menu, and purchase functionality in a mobile app–without a ground-up redevelopment process.
What’s Next
Bartesian is poised to release a smart version of their 4-bottle Cocktail Maker. The new hardware will connect with the Bartesian App to let owners know when it’s time to replenish their cocktails, help them re-order spirits, and alert them when their machine needs to be cleaned and serviced.
Takeaways
Bartesian invented a market-leading product that has captivated cocktail lovers everywhere. To fully capitalize on their competitive advantages, they’ve invested heavily in ecommerce-- optimizing their subscriptions program according to their customers’ buying behavior, and supporting these changes with a streamlined mobile-first UX, and a first-of-its-kind responsive mobile app.
