How The Wine Society uses Contentsquare to make faster, more confident trading decisions

The company

The Wine Society is a British member-owned wine retailer built around long-term value for its members. The business has 182,000 members, and its website is at the heart of how it serves them. With 90% of its business coming through the website, The Wine Society needed a faster, more confident way to trade its biggest revenue period.

Yasmin Bines, Head of Ecommerce Trade at The Wine Society, is leading this digital transition—investing in the tools and technology to improve the member experience. 

The challenge

For decades, The Wine Society was print-first. Its website mainly existed to house the products and campaigns featured in print, while the digital team operated as a service team. Decisions started with what the business wanted to promote—not necessarily with what members were trying to do.

As the company has shifted toward a more member-led digital experience, Yasmin’s team needed to change how it traded the website, especially during its most important commercial moment: Christmas. The six-week period is The Wine Society’s biggest revenue driver of the year.

The team faced three core challenges:

• Campaign tunnel vision: they based digital decisions on print campaign performance and marketing insights, rather than on how members behaved across the website.

• Insight without speed: even when data was available, they weren’t always sure what it meant or how to act on it quickly.

• Limited resources: as a small team of three, they needed to quickly analyze digital behavior and surface the right opportunities.

Over the past couple of years, we've been in a digital transition. We started investing in the tools in our teams to understand our members properly, and we started to do that through the digital lens. That’s where our partnership with Contentsquare came into play.

Yasmin Bines

Head of Ecommerce Trade

The solution

The Wine Society brought in Contentsquare’s experience platform to better understand its members, improve digital experience, and optimize its peak trading period performance.

In the first year, The Wine Society relied on Contentsquare’s Professional Services to help build its data analysis foundations through weekly analyst check-ins, and hands-on support throughout the Christmas trading period. In the second year, the focus shifted to preparing dashboards, and checklists before peak season began.

This approach helped the team build confidence in the platform and develop the skills to ask better questions, prioritize opportunities, and make faster decisions.

We worked with Contentsquare to identify our pain points, understand our own capabilities, and figure out what approach would actually work for both sides.

Yasmin Bines

Head of Ecommerce Trade

How Contentsquare helped The Wine Society

1. Turning behavioral data into trading decisions

One of the team's first key findings the team made was on their membership email journey. 

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis revealed that email traffic landing directly on a product listing page (PLP) was causing a high exit rate. So they tested driving traffic to specific campaign landing pages—instead of PLPs. The result? Richer, deeper journeys, and higher conversion rate and revenue.

2. Removing friction from product discovery

Before Contentsquare, design decisions were often made on gut feel, with no data to back them up. One of those decisions was adding a filter element to the hero banner of their PLPs.

Using heatmap analysis, the team could see that this decision was actually making it harder for members to reach products. By removing the element, they instantly increased product exposure and click rate, while also contributing to higher conversion and revenue.

3. Monitoring checkout data in real time

Ahead of their second peak Christmas period using Contentsquare, The Wine Society built custom dashboards to track peak performance in real time. 

The team used them to monitor checkout stages, session metrics, revenue, and engagement—and see where drop-offs happened down to individual product and campaign pages without stitching data together mid-trade. 

The dashboards have now become a core part of the team's daily work—and many are used year-round to monitor digital performance.

The results

The first year of the partnership established a repeatable operating model for peak trading. Using Contentsquare, the team identified 90 recommendations and made 76 changes.

In the second year, the team went into peak with its reporting and checklists already in place. The team made 80 changes based on Contentsquare insights, increasing conversion by 1 percentage point, and delivering a revenue uplift of +2.6%.

But the impact goes beyond the numbers. Yasmin's team now makes faster, more confident decisions—improving the member experience based on data, not opinion.

Every part of our website is now traded based on behavioral data. It’s no longer being led by our marketing team and our print campaigns, which is a great place to be in.

Yasmin Bines

Head of Ecommerce Trade

What’s next

The Wine Society is now accelerating experimentation. With year-round Professional Services support, the team is preparing its peak analysis earlier and using it to shape the experiments it will run throughout the year.

The business is also working toward a unified view of each member. Data Connect will play a role in helping its tools work together, while further use of Contentsquare’s AI agent, Sense Analyst will support the shift toward more relevant, personalized experiences.