Brewing demand with guest WiFi

With the goal of serving the best coffee to cool people, Augie’s Coffee opened its first store in 2009 in Redlands, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The company expanded to four locations in Southern California, putting green coffee buying at the forefront to offer high quality drinks and transparency to customers, while still focusing on partnering with the community. 

Augie’s Coffee also hosts coffee tasting and other community events, as well as selling coffee and other products online. Promoting the brand, particularly what makes them unique, is very important to Augie’s Coffee. However, it had no easy way of collecting contacts to promote events and sales.

The owners of Augie’s Coffee wanted to bring more customers to their tasting events. They knew they needed a better way to capture customer contact information and promote these free events to customers, and they wanted to leverage email as a way to reach them.

Challenge: Grinding out emails

Augie’s Coffee used the email equivalent of a mortar and pestle to grind out its emails. The staff would update an email list manually with a paper sign-up sheet located in stores. Not only would customers ignore the paper list, updating it was a time-consuming and tedious task that was quickly abandoned. 

With only 1,000 emails in their database, Augie’s Coffee found it difficult to promote their coffee tastings and other events. While customers knew the in-store experience intimately, telling them about upcoming events was hard with no way to target the right people and share the news. 

Owner Austin Amento began looking for a better way to collect customer contact details and profile info. After learning about Adentro, he contacted the company to learn how to use in-store WiFi to collect customer contacts.

“Adentro made it easy for us to collect contacts and promote our events. We’re able to see the results of our email marketing and test which messages are more likely to get opened”

Tim, Augie’s Coffee

Solution: Sweetening customer relationships

Impressed with the idea of using existing technology – the in-store guest WiFi network – to exponentially grow  Augie’s Coffee’s email list, Austin decided to expand customer relationships by implementing Adentro. Customers could log in through an Augie’s-branded portal to access free WiFi by simply providing their email address. 

To make matters even more valuable, Austin discovered that setting up Adentro was super simple. The team participated in two meetings to run through the product setup and dashboard. From there, Augie’s Coffee plugged its hardware into their routers and instantly started collecting contacts. Now, when customers log in to the free WiFi at Augie’s Coffee locations, Augie’s automatically adds their email addresses to its customer list and tracks their visits, whether or not they log on to WiFi.

Results: A tasty email marketing program

Augie’s Coffee has collected over 21,000 contacts since it began using Adentro. By leveraging email marketing, Augie’s Coffee has seen a 12% Walk-Through Rate™ as customers return within 7 days after receiving smart email messages. Additionally, the smart message open rate is 35%, well above industry average.

This has translated into real ROI for Augie’s Coffee – and dramatically increased demand for Augie’s coffee tastings. A packed warehouse for their coffee tastings showed that customers are reading the emails and getting more information on events. In fact, the events have become so popular that a trainer suggested charging admission to deter interest. In addition, warehouse sales have outperformed in-store merchandise sales. Hundreds of people show up to these events that are only advertised on the email list– nowhere else – and help cement Augie’s Coffee as a unique coffee brand. Email blasts also encourage return visits, as demonstrated by the strong Walk-Through Rate™. 

By that alone, Austin believes Adentro creates exceptional value by keeping Augie’s Coffee top of mind. They’re able to see which messages are opened most often to fine tune their  offers and subject lines. Augie’s Coffee is able to expand their strong brand and grow its coffee tasting events with the help of Adentro.