Case Study: Evino

Evino’s mission is to democratize wine in Brazil. Wine is, and has been for a long time, regarded as a rare luxury product in Brazil. On average, Brazilians drink only around two liters of wine every year, compared to the dozens of liters averaged by North Americans and Western Europeans.

Evino seeks to engage Brazilians with easy-to access information and a large range of affordable wine, delivered to their door. When the team got started in 2013, the startup focused on a desktop web presence, growing email lists that became the primary means of engaging with existing users. Envino reached out to customers with offers over email and redirects them to the website to finish the purchase. That’s been the basis of a stable business.

But users began turning toward mobile. Evino currently targets 35-50 year-old Brazilians, a customer segment which increasingly prioritizes mobile devices over desktop computers. Mobile devices can be acquired for a fraction of the price of a laptop or desktop computer, and access to mobile data is cheap. This is especially important in a market where the average monthly income is just over $600 USD. In the six months from October 2015 to March 2016, the share of customers in this segment who exclusively use mobile devices to access the internet increased by two-thirds, while desktop and combined usage tanked. The mobile-only share rose by almost 10 percent overall, to a quarter of all users.

So Evino built an iOS app that gives users the full functionality of the website, but adapted for mobile devices. It launched in November 2015. But just launching the app in the Store isn’t enough to gain new customers. More than 90 percent of all apps launched in the iOS App Store don’t show up in top list rankings. Also, since Evino is selling a product most consumers wouldn’t actively search for, it’s unlikely that the app would attract many consumers just by being on the App Store.

The Evino team based its mobile strategy on three pillars:

1. To grow the audience and reach new customers, the marketing team needs to rapidly try out different types of ad campaigns to find out which messages reach the right audience.
2. Evaluating and changing advertising campaigns should be based on the actual return on investment — so the team needs a dashboard that shows how well different activities perform, and how often users convert into paying customers.
3. The well-established email newsletters should quickly and easily redirect iOS users onto the mobile app, and immediately show them the right offer — but how can you create a single link for the email campaigns that dynamically redirect different users based on their platform? And how can you most easily show users the right offer at the right time?

Evino integrated adjust’s open-source SDK from the get-go.

The basic integration with adjust allowed Evino to track the number of people who had downloaded and installed the app, as well as how many times the users opened the app afterward. Additionally, by implementing in-app event tracking, the company could also see the number of sign ups, logins, products viewed, and the number of times a user added a bottle of wine to the in-app cart.

Evino also integrated its servers with Adjust so that it could connect the actions that a user made in the mobile app with actions they may have made on the desktop website. The integration uses callbacks, also known as postbacks or webhooks. These are essentially messages representing a specific event, sent from Adjust’s servers to Evino’s as the event is tracked. By using customer IDs or encrypted email addresses to match up data from the website with the mobile app, the Evino team had access to granular detail about the way users behaved.

With Adjust’s real-time dashboard, these numbers are all available to Evino whenever it needed answers to a question. Tests of different ideas and concepts can be quickly evaluated. This is particularly useful when the tests don’t show the desired effect, as we’ll discuss further on.

Adjust’s open-source SDK gave Evino the ability to track every interaction and in-app event – and gave the marketing team full access to summarized as well as granular data.

Advertising on social media, like Facebook and Twitter, was a huge mobile opportunity for Evino. The average Brazilian has around 450 Facebook connections, whereas the global average inches closer to a third of that number. The relatively low cost of mobile Facebook advertising in Brazil also meant that Evino could reach a very large audience for their budgets (with average cost-per-install being around a dollar).

On these networks, the team is able to target very specific customer segments by demographics. Facebook is one of very few platforms able to leverage user-submitted data on gender, age, location and interests. But in order to achieve positive ROI, the Evino marketing team needed to be able to evaluate how likely different targeted customer groups are to become regular wine consumers.

Facebook and Adjust are integrated to allow Evino’s Facebook campaigns to be evaluated based on the data collected by Adjust. This data is required for the Facebook campaigns to operate in the first place — and only a handful of “Facebook Marketing Partners” worldwide have access to the API. The integration is set up in the Adjust dashboard just by typing in a Facebook app ID.

Then the campaigns are displayed in the adjust dashboard as soon as they start running. The users that install the app after having seen or clicked a Facebook ad are attributed to that campaign. Each campaign, creative, or ad group has an associated group of users that were driven from that campaign. The activity that those users trigger, whether directly after the install or many weeks later, is attributed back to that initial conversion.

Adjust sums up all of the sessions, purchases, or other user activity for each Facebook ad campaign, displaying it either in the dashboard or in CSV reports.

Evino’s marketing team was then able to log into the Adjust dashboard and see which Facebook campaigns resulted in the highest long-term user engagement. Day by day, they knew which campaigns deliver results, and which don’t.

With Adjust integrated as a tracking service, the Evino marketing team could access a combined dashboard where its social network advertising could be directly compared to organic performance or the engagement of users acquired with other media. When the Facebook campaigns are fully optimized, the team plans on easily plugging in additional inventory like Google.

The final riddle was how to engage users through strong email lists, even on mobile. Evino extensively use email campaigns to promote specific offers on a daily basis. Those campaigns naturally also include new subscribers that have been acquired in the app.

To send users from email campaigns into the iOS app, Evino needed to embed links that were able to distinguish whether the users were clicking the links on a desktop or a mobile device. Users on a desktop computer should be sent to the main website, whereas mobile users would be sent to the app. On top of that, all of these users should be shown a specific offer that is promoted in the newsletter. Evino need to be able to quickly generate adaptable, dynamic links that fit every newsletter.

To achieve that, Evino first implemented Universal Links via Adjust. Universal Links is a feature on iOS that allows an app developer to create associations between a website and a mobile app. Adjust simplifies the process by allowing app developers to associate their app with an app-specific subdomain hosted by Adjust’s servers. When a user clicks on a link to this subdomain, Adjust communicates directly with the app (via the adjust SDK) which opens the relevant content.

In the email campaigns themselves, the team implemented Adjust tracking URLs as newsletter links. The devices which subscribers are using are then automatically identified. Users on a desktop computer are filtered out immediately, and shown the offer on the web. iOS users are instead offered the Universal Link. Users who installed the app previously are shown the offer in the app automatically, whereas users who haven’t yet downloaded the app are sent to the App Store.

An innovative technique was then applied when the second group of users (those who didn’t have the app installed) open the app for the first time. Adjust immediately provides the app with information about the user’s ad clicks. The Evino app can then determine if the user should be sent to the original offer, or if the user should be shown another offer. With that information, the app can also tailor the initial user experience based on what offer the user was interested in.

The new email campaigns had a single set of links that intelligently determined whether users should be redirected to the desktop website, to the App Store, or directly into a specific offer in the app. All Evino had to do was implement the Adjust SDK.

Evino rapidly increased the usage of its mobile app — either through people who had already subscribed to their email newsletters, and were then presented with a much smoother and more seamless experience, or through the new mobile-first customers that were acquired over Brazil’s bustling social networks.

The quarterly average number of weekly active users increased more than seven-fold over the year, starting in Q4 2015.

Over the summer, Evino’s cost-per-acquisition (CPA) decreased by two thirds as a result of constant evaluation and tinkering with the ad creatives the team ran on Facebook. The winning creatives featured fewer pictures of the app itself, and instead showed a filling wine glass.

Experiments with couponing showed less potential. Giving away a R$ 20 coupon (roughly $6 USD) didn’t sufficiently increase engagement with the ads to lower the CPA. Since the team had performance data on all of the campaigns at its fingertips, they were able to quickly evaluate the experiment and reduce the volume on that campaign.

In particular, the team noticed a very specific behavioral trend: people made more purchases through their mobile devices on the weekend, which had been a slow time for the business in the past. This insight let the team adjust its campaigns to emphasize weekends for mobile users, in order to drive more direct responses.

“The point is that we unlocked an entirely new customer segment through our mobile app. We would not have been able to reach mobilefirst customers without smooth email-to-app transitions,” says Alegria, ”and being able to hit just the right audiences on Facebook has been one of the key drivers of those new users.”

The high user engagement and growing user base was also reflected in the startup’s App Store positioning. Evino consistently ranked eighth on Brazil’s Food & Drink lists, among leading brands like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Foursquare. The high ranking also contributed to steadily growing organic user acquisition, further establishing Evino as a category leader in Food & Drink.

With the iOS app launched and fully integrated into the flow, the team hopes to repeat the success on Android; the Android app already has deep links integrated right out of the box. With Adjust, the company is able to send email and target advertising directly to Android users.

The next challenge is to further explore ad networks and promotional alternatives beyond the social networks. Display ad banners, video advertising, and even Google searches can be fully added into the Adjust dashboard, measuring the performance of each as they go.