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Problem
Tinker Coffee, a renowned specialty coffee roaster, faced challenges in scaling its market reach and engaging effectively with customers. Key issues included ineffective customer communication, complex inventory management, and driving sales to new and limited time inventory. The need for an innovative solution was evident to elevate their sales performance.
Selling seasonal & limited edition roasts comes with it’s challenges. Besides the obvious limited shelf time, knowing how much to produce to meet sales demands can be very unpredictable. Produce too little and they miss out on sales, but produce too much and it cuts into their profit margin.
With email engagement waning, the Tinker Coffee team also began to lose confidence in relying on that channel to consistently drive sales. They desired a more direct connection with their audience, unencumbered by the noise and clutter of most email inboxes.
Solution
After hearing about the success Pull & Pour was having with their own text campaigns utilizing Text-to-Buy, Tinker Coffee decided to migrate to AudienceTap to explore how they could set up their own text program.
AudienceTap offered a breath of fresh air to revolutionize Tinker Coffee’s approach with new strategies focused on text marketing. Tinker Coffee invested in building their text list, running regular campaigns, and experimenting with even pre-selling new roasts.
Tinker Coffee started sending targeted campaigns every two weeks, featuring their unique and seasonal roasts. This way, they could showcase limited edition roasts to customers who typically only order their “regular” coffees. Immediately they found this cadence to prove fruitful, striking a balance of being frequent but not too frequent to overwhelm customers.
This included integrating with the AudienceTap product and inventory management system to set up Text-to-Buy functionality so customers could simply purchase with a text, bypassing having to go to a website to checkout. Tinker Coffee also created several segments to identify casual coffee drinkers from the connoisseurs, allowing them to send more personalized campaigns relevant to their customer base.
Results
The text campaigns and Text-to-Buy functionality led to remarkable outcomes:
- Conversion Rates: Tinker Coffee saw an impressive increase in conversions, with a conversion rate of 8.11%, significantly higher than industry standards of 1% or less for text campaigns and 0.07% for email campaigns.
- Quarterly Campaigns: A specific campaign highlight was a $45 deal for their Crown Series, where significant sales were achieved despite no discounts.
- Clearing Excess Inventory: Tinker Coffee offers a monthly subscription to their customers that occasionally results in excess inventory. They were able to run promotions to clear much of it out and drive sales on product that otherwise would result in a loss.
- Pricing Optimization: By having regular touchpoints with segments of customers, Tinker Coffee was able to dial in pricing on certain SKUs to be the most profitable, finding the balance between demand and supply.
“We did a presale [for the Crown Series] for about two weeks ahead of time. And then right before the coffee was going to be roasted, we thought, let’s throw it on AudienceTap and try and bump that presale number up. And it worked out well!”
— Steve Hall, Tinker Coffee Co-Founder
The success of working with AudienceTap has set the stage for continuous growth and innovation at Tinker Coffee. Plans to further harness the power of AudienceTap's text marketing strategies are in motion, with the aim to keep growing the text marketing channel as the next significant driver of sales. They’ve had so much success with their Text-to-Buy program that they are now exploring how to provide a similar program for their wholesale customers as well.
