How Typeform and Integromat helped Outshinery scale free trials

All you have to do is take a photo of each product, upload them, and hit publish, right? 

Well, in the wine industry, where you need to take pictures of wine bottles, photoshoots are actually one of the toughest processes to wrangle. Shipping physical samples to a photography agency (or hiring a professional photographer) is usually a necessity. Ensuring each photo has the same brightness and is taken from the same angle is also required. This last part is nearly impossible and can take up a lot of time and money. 

If you don't nail it, your product shots could all vary slightly when they're side by side on your website, plummeting professional appeal and your business' potential sales. Fortunately, Outshinery has an innovative solution for this: They create vivid, consistent digital bottle shots. 

Their process requires users to enter their bottle's shape, glass color, liquid color, paper texture, and its finishing details into a Typeform on their website, and within 48 hours, they'll deliver the bottle shot.

Pre-Automation: A Completely Manual Process

Seems like a smooth process, right? Not exactly, because for Outshinery, it was overwhelmingly manual and time-consuming. Even though they were using the latest tools to collect information on their customers' bottles, most of the workflows between these apps weren't integrated.

As a result, the Outshinery team had to spend two business days just to create one "free test shot", the company's free trial offering of one digitally rendered image.

Outshinery offers these test shots to potential customers with the hope that they’ll use their services for their entire wine catalog. But with this process taking up so much time, they knew automating it was essential for growth.

Here’s what it looked like before automation. After a customer filled out the Typeform, Outshinery’s operations lead would manually: 

• Open tasks and subtasks in Asana 

• Create 30 nested Dropbox folders 

• Upload images to Dropbox 

• Put all the form information into Airtable 

• Manually communicate with the client through email

This took one business day. But there was still more to do. The Design Team would then spend another business day to actually create the test shot. 

Eventually, Outshinery's CEO, Laurie Millotte, realized it was time to automate this workflow in order to save time and money.  

Post-Automation: From 10 test shots per month to 10 per week 

With the help of a freelance no-code expert, Outshinery whittled this completely manual process down to two automations that include 80-90 steps each with the iPaaS solution Integromat. 

Here's how it works: 

After a potential customer fills out the Typeform with their personal details (name, email, phone, etc.), the first automation creates their contact in ActiveCampaign.

The customer is then redirected to a second Typeform, where they fill out a questionnaire about their bottle image requirements. This triggers the second automation, which uploads all of the information from the second Typeform into ActiveCampaign. Next, a Slack message is sent to the Outshinery team, notifying them that they can start creating the free test shot.

Using their old workflow, Outshinery could've handled up to ten free test shots per month. They can now process ten per week.  

Adopting automation throughout the business

After witnessing the power of automation, Outshinery decided to automate other manual processes that could lead to even more growth for their business. 

1. Helping customers choose the best-fit subscription plan

When someone wants to subscribe to a plan on Outshinery’s website, they can fill out a form that will help them choose the best-fit plan for them. That person will answer a few questions. Then, Outshinery automatically scores them and emails them with their recommendation. 

Here’s the automation they built in Integromat to automatically email potential customers their recommended plan.  

2. Automatically generating images of bottles

When ordering bottle shots, potential customers need to fill out a typeform that has a lot of dependencies and questions about their bottles, like its shape, cap, material, color, etc.

Outshinery built the workflow below to take this information and automatically generate a bottle shot with it. The Design team could then polish the shot and add any finishing touches to it, instead of making it from scratch. 

Key wins

By using Typeform and Integromat together, Outshinery has been able to:

• Significantly scale their free trial program 

• Free up time spent on manual work to focus on long-term strategies to grow their business (they have grown from 4 employees to 12)

Manual work is not only tedious but it's also a bottleneck for your business. And as you can see with Outshinery, automating this type of work, especially when it impacts a crucial part of your business, can help you expedite important workflows, deliver products to your customers at a significantly faster rate, and free up your time to focus on the work that matters most to you.