Sonoma County wine marketing tech startup VinterActive recognized in WINnovation Awards for AI-based email system

Editor’s note: Wine Industry Network recognizes notable beverage alcohol-related companies for WINnovation Awards during the Business Journal’s annual Wine, Spirits + Beer Industry Awards.

PreferencePro, developed by VinterActive, is an automated marketing solution that repurposes some of the world’s most powerful email marketing technology software, makes it accessible and customizes it specifically to benefit wineries.

“We are giving wineries access to the same tools that the most successful brands (in other industries) use to generate email communications. These techniques have been used for 20 years and we have adapted them to the wine industry,” says Bryan St. Amant, founder and CEO of VinterActive.

The technology combines automation and artificial intelligence to ensure the right message is delivered at the right time to engage the consumer, improve brand connections and grow sales. Early adopters of PreferencePro are seeing opening and response rates improve by 40% to 50%.

Adopting new technologies, even ones promising great benefits like PreferencePro, can be a daunting task, but VinterActive has lowered the barrier by making sure that its powerful APIs make integration with existing point-of-sale systems seamless, and though the PreferencePro offers nearly endless opportunities for customization, it also provides a host of templates that wineries can use to quickly get started.

“This has been a very powerful tool in our arsenal,” says Sandra Wiens Williams, an owner at Wiens Family Cellars and early adopter of PreferencePro. “The unsubscribe and resubscribe options are easy to manage. The filtering system makes it easy to target the emails to the customers who will find them the most relevant. The integration of the email lists with our online store accounts mean that email address additions and updates occur automatically without intervention on our part.”