What this drinks retailer did to boost customer conversion to almost 100%

The ability to measure deliverability and increase customer engagement drove Shorty's Liquor, Australia's leading drinks retailer, to uplift its marketing programs on Dotdigital. Shorty's services corporate customers and on-premise venues in Sydney with a vast client list of several financial services, legal and advertising businesses. The business has since grown from when it was first founded in 2001 to launching Dan's Gifting Hub in 2019. 
 
The new initiative aims to simplify gifting by offering a carefully selected range of gifts with the advantage of the gift giver only needing to know the recipient's email address, not their postal address. At the time, emails were sent from Adobe Commerce, making it difficult for the team to have visibility into customer engagement and develop follow-up emails. Without a reliable solution in place, there was an average non-gift confirmation rate of almost 27%.
 
Shorty's saw a change was needed. They enlisted their agency partner, Webqem, to enhance gift redemption rates using the Dotdigital platform, which handles automation, personalisation, and retargeting marketing campaigns. By leveraging Dotdigital's SFTP contact and insight data importer, Shorty's team and Webqem were able to create a personalised gifting and reminder system for customers.
 
The first step was using Dotdigital's segmentation tool to sort between the engaged and unengaged customer cohorts. They used these cohorts to send targeted reminders to customers who did not respond to their first email, making sure they would receive a personalised follow-up email.
 
The segmentation was effectively built so that customers would be funnelled to an updated list of recipients and have their statuses updated against existing recipients. This allowed Shorty's to ensure the customers who failed to redeem their gift would receive a follow-up email. This four-part email follow-up flow concludes by informing both the recipient and the gift giver that if the recipient does not accept the gift, it will be donated to charity.
 
As a result of the personalised reminder program on Dotdigital, Shorty's saw a conversion rate greater than anything they initially expected. From a non-confirmation rate of 27%, they saw an uplift to 99% of contacts redeeming their gifts. This strong follow-up program saw approximately 62% of total emails sent in the first email and a high engagement rate of 59% email open rate. They were also able to simultaneously reduce the need for manual administration across the marketing and customer functions through the automated functions of the program.
 
Shorty's next step will be to focus on a cross-channel re-engagement customer journey using email, social re-targeting, and SMS. This will continue to help them reach unengaged customers and create more opportunities for higher-value customers.