• by editor , June 25, 2018

Heineken wants to sell home draft appliances and beer to fill them in Europe and has been scaling up its marketing team to support this effort. Like Nespresso sells espresso pods for its machines, Heineken sells kegs for these home systems on a regular basis, so the idea is to focus on building customer loyalty.

The brand had identified a pretty high churn once the purchase had been made - people complained about pre-chill and the foam barrier. To overcome these issues, they created an educational program about how the machines work and how to create an optimal drinking experience and pushed these messages out through email.

The email stream begins with onboarding messages. The first message was not intended to sell, but to educate. The "Get Ready" email teaches customers how to pre-chill beer so that the temperature is ideal and features a video of "How to pour the perfect beer." "There was no selling goal, just the idea to make them feel able to draft the beer," said Bart Nijhoff, CRM manager, global commerce at Heineken, at EIS EU in Barcelona today.

After a week, the brand sent a follow up email with some user generated content from Instagram in the emails showing customers using their machines and asking customers how it was going for them. After another week, the email promotes new flavors, drinking glasses, as well as follow up ordering for the keg. This involves using customer purchase data in order to increase purchase frequency. 

Then the "Don't Run Out of Beer" email, told subscribers that you don't want your SUB to be empty, and based on your order pattern it seems like your SUB might be running empty, so it's time to repurchase. If people didn't purchase, then another email reminds them but with a focus on different flavors in case they didn't like the previous beer.