Sourcetop engages

Christopher Kimball's Milk Street

Maintaining a multi-channel brand and launching an exclusive members club.

Sourcetop inherited a nicely designed and well thought out site, but Milk Street needed advanced technical capabilities and wanted to launch a members only program for exclusive behind-the-scenes content, live Q&As and store discounts. This required a host of technical challenges.

The site was at the edge of its capabilities experiencing periodic downtime, especially when marketing campaigns went out. This daily occurrence was preventing them from expanding with new offerings. So before tackling the Insider program we rearchitected the site with better caching, streamlined content delivery and increased the site's capacity (concurrent users, page speed, etc.). With the base site now able to handle a five-fold increase in users we moved on to launching the Insider program.

The hardest part of launching an exclusive club is the promotion, up-sell and management of the payment process. Myriad scenarios need to be methodically thought out, integrated with email, social and physical mail campaigns – all with A/B testing – narrowing down the best combination of price and benefits.

Milk Street uses our Live Chat plugin for live streamed Q&A events. A producer can manage viewer's comments, queue up questions and virtually interact with the hosts and audience. Hosts can move the show along through an iPad with a cue-card type interface.

For store discounts and free shipping we leveraged Shopify's API to build a custom workflow ensuring Insider members receive the proper credit even if they come to the store without being logged in through prompts directly in the shopping cart during check-out.

The Milk Street Insider program has driven new revenue, increased user engagement and expanded Milk Street's footprint in the competitive cooking space.

I've worked with Sourcetop for 4 years and been very happy with their development services.
David Mack
VP, Marketing
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