How Tip Top Made World-Class Cocktails More Accessible and Easy to Order Online
After creating a world-class cocktail in easy-to-serve tiny cans, they needed an eCommerce partner who valued quality and convenience as much as them. AccelPay’s customer experience checked all of these boxes and helped Tip Top sell over 50,000 cocktails in their first 90 days.
As the holidays approach, expect an influx of gift purchases across the next few months — an annual event that’ll only be heightened by the post-COVID e-commerce shopping boom.
Even more so, broader delays in global supply chains are trickling down to affect availability and shipping for e-commerce brands across all segments. Our recommendation? Beat this year’s slowdown by getting a head start on your seasonal campaigns, promotions, and more.
We’ve laid out four steps below that every alcohol brand should take to beat the annual gift rush, while also maximizing the profitability and potential of this concentrated shopping period.
Step One: Time Blocking
First, you can start building out a major messaging campaign by looking ahead on your calendar and selecting key dates to lay out a time frame from early November up until Christmas.
Specifically, we recommend blocking out three primary phases for your campaign delivery.
Pre-Black Friday
By pushing messaging campaigns out as early as mid-November, you’re gearing folks up for the holiday season around the corner, as well as letting potential buyers know to keep an eye out for a promotion in the works.
More importantly, you’re setting your brand up to start the season on a strong note — and to not get caught unprepared by the sudden arrival of Thanksgiving crunchtime.
Thanksgiving & Late November
From Thanksgiving onward, particularly that first weekend including Black Friday, you’ll want to host and advertise some kind of actionable event, i.e. a special release or promotional discount, to jumpstart customers into their seasonal shopping cycles.
Cutoffs for Christmas
Finally, you’ll want to round out the season by selecting a cutoff date for placing new orders.
Seven to 10 days before December 25th is a safe bet for buyers to receive a bottle at their door by Christmas Day, and reminders should be sent out in the days leading up to this cutoff.
In terms of the broader time crunch that’s anticipated due to global supply chain slowdowns, you should emphasize the convenience of purchasing from a domestic brand paired with the reliability that you offer for a timely, safe delivery of your product.
Step Two: Spice Up Your Specials
Once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, it’s time to elevate your campaign by crafting it into something creative and exciting for the spirit of the season.
In other words, your buyer’s inbox may be flooded by holiday deals, but you can capture their attention and help them recognize the thoughtfulness through your core brand messaging.
For instance, Far North Spirits is offering a holiday two-pack for drinks that’ll warm you up in the colder months. Imagine a whiskey, rye, or bourbon for your spicy cocktail or mulled wine.
Ultimately, you’re working with the inventory you have and considering which themed products can play into people’s holiday spirit — even better if it’s in a bundle to boost your AOV.
On the other hand, this period offers a practical opportunity to look back at the year’s releases and offload any remaining inventory through a unique discount or exclusive holiday promo.
Step Three: Ramp Up Your Promotion Game
Next, consider the tactical logistics of your promotions. After all, it can be tricky to time promo launches, depending on whether your customer pool skews toward early or late gift grabbers.
There are two general approaches you can take: 1) offering enticing deals early on to preempt other sales or 2) holding off until late in the buyer’s window to pull the trigger on your promo.
The former can snag early shoppers, or at least convince late shoppers to try an early purchase, but could also lose its appeal by mid-December when fresher deals are dropping every day.
The latter can appeal to buyers who play the long game and wait it out for the most optimal deal, but can still ultimately result in you losing out on early or average shoppers.
Ultimately, there’s no gold-standard method and you’ll need to use your judgement depending on what aligns with your brand’s target demographic, metric goalposts, and even inventory.
For instance, returning to your campaign calendar, you can skew discounts away from marking down products and toward offering cheaper, faster shipping as Christmas creeps closer.
Step Four: Email Marketing On Deck
As we pointed out in our advice for email marketing, setting up your email flow so your comms can run seamlessly is a simple yet essential step of the process that’s easily overlooked.
We recommend starting with a quick info sweep: pull last year’s seasonal purchase data and make sure that customer cohort is consistently re-engaged early on.
In turn, your team won’t be stressed out and frantically attempt to piece together the perfect layout in MailChimp just a few days before Thanksgiving — which circles back to our larger point: the holidays are a time of year with promise of high ROI for your alcohol brand.
You can utilize this opportunity to the max by planning thoroughly and creatively, not stressfully executing a last minute, makeshift campaign.
If your brand has these moving parts staged within the first weeks of November, you should be ready to hook the earliest seasonal shoppers and take full advantage of the holiday rush.
Sit Back and Enjoy the Holidays!
Once you’ve got these steps locked in — a killer campaign calendar, creative promos, and ready-to-launch email marketing — you’ll be the one leading the holiday rush, not falling behind.
Whether your user base is composed of individuals shopping for friends and family or corporate customers with high-volume needs, Accelpay is the platform of choice for your alcohol brand.
To get access to our instant storefront setup and stress-free bulk ordering, get started here.
Tip Top Proper Cocktails
Making world-class cocktails accessible and easy to order
The Tip Top team believes that good stuff should be accessible. After creating a world-class cocktail in easy-to-serve tiny cans, they needed an eCommerce partner who valued quality and convenience as much as them. AccelPay’s customer experience checked all of these boxes and helped Tip Top sell over 50,000 cocktails in their first 90 days on the platform.
Turning "ready to drink" into "ready to order"
Classic cocktails within reach
Tip Top was founded by music industry veterans who had seen the demand for high-quality cocktails increase, but recognized the difficulty in serving them in the high-volume environments at concerts and festivals. They sought out to create a convenient, easy-to-serve solution without sacrificing the quality craftsmanship of a proper cocktail.
Easy, convenient ordering
After partnering with James Beard finalist bartender Miles Macquarrie of Kimball House to perfect their recipes, Tip Top knew they achieved their initial goal of making a high-quality cocktail that was easy to serve to the masses. Now it was time to figure out how to ensure that Tip Top cans were as easy for consumers to purchase as they were to pour.
"Creating a high-quality, convenient cocktail that could be enjoyed anywhere was just the first step. We quickly realized that making our products easily accessible online was going to be a major challenge,” said co-founder Yoni Reisman. “With so many different platforms and compliance considerations, we worried about finding the best way to get Tip Top Cocktails in the hands of our customers."
Finding a partner with similar values
Ease and consistency
Tip Top was introduced to AccelPay in early 2022, and immediately recognized that they placed a shared importance on ease-of-use and a consistent customer experience. For Yoni, the ability to offer consumers a custom-branded online shopping experience without ever having to leave the Tip Top website was a huge selling point.
After focusing so much attention on the quality of their product, they wanted to have the same level of control over their eCommerce flow.
“With AccelPay, we added a mobile-friendly branded store to our existing website,” confirmed Reisman. “We didn’t need to bounce customers out to a different domain, which means we kept full ownership of the shopping experience, as well as all the customer data.”
Simple setup process
Tip Top loved that AccelPay was able to keep the implementation of their online store simple and straightforward. Not having to change anything about their Shopify store made getting ramped up extremely quick and easy. They were a small team juggling lots of responsibilities and working hard to build a successful brand, so limiting the amount of technical obstacles to start selling was a must.
As Yoni put it, “As a growing team with limited resources, we needed an e-commerce partner that could get it done while ensuring acceptable margins. AccelPay freed us up to focus on building our brand and growing our business, rather than spending time and resources on complex technical integrations."
Successful launch of online sales
50,000 units sold in 90 days
“We own all of the customer data from those sales, which has made remarketing and repeat business really strong going forward. We’re excited to see what’s next,” said Yoni Reisman.
Since launching their e-commerce operations with AccelPay, Tip Top’s performance has been strong, exceeding the founders’ expectations in the first 90 days. From Apri; 2022 to July 2022, the team sold 50,000 canned cocktails through their online store. They’ve also seen tremendous value in the brand and data ownership AccelPay allows.
"The alcohol business is tough. Just perfecting our recipes and finalizing branding was hard enough, I can’t imagine having to navigate all of the eCommerce hurdles without AccelPay. Their platform helped us bust through all of those hurdles and get our online business cranking. So glad we found them!”
Yoni Reisman
Co-Founder and CEO of Tip Top
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Braxton Freeman
Grolsch