DHL improves productivity by 75% and delivers stellar results with creative tweaks

DHL eCommerce Solutions is the newest division of DHL, the global shipping and logistics leader that offers everything from express shipping to complex supply chain management. The division, headquartered in Germany, but operating with offices around the world and around 45,000 people, focusses on the e-commerce market, helping e-tailers expand and offering custom solutions for both small and large e-commerce businesses, as well as private customers.

Challenge

DHL’s primary challenge was to support and enable some of its smaller markets while also migrating larger countries off legacy solutions, pulling together disjointed email marketing accounts to a new platform that could manage and optimize them all under one roof. The team also wanted new, easily accessible accounts for future marketing projects, fresh templates across 10 accounts in multiple languages, plus custom training sessions for different countries. With this in mind, DHL looked to Dotdigital to match its individual requirements. Discussions about the migration and onboarding process began in mid-October, with deadlines set for the middle of January. Both Dotdigital and DHL eCS teams would have to work against the clock to stick to timelines.

Solution

Some of DHL eCommerce Solutions’ accounts were sat under a sister division’s account, which restricted the team from an accessibility and functional perspective. More than that, with more countries coming on board and in need of a simple, yet powerful tool, it was clear that Dotdigital’s ease of use and sophisticated features, felt like the right fit.

Once conversations began it became clear that creative help was on the agenda. The Dotdigital creative services team was enlisted to analyze and review new template designs, and code them up according to best practice – ready for use in the platform’s easy editor. What’s more, with accounts spread across multiple regions, all new templates had to have language variations.

With mid-January looming, training plans were finalized to equip the team to hit the ground running on day one. There was added pressure since the templates had to be coded and signed off, ready for the training session. This had to be custom-tailored to DHL’s needs, with a particular focus on template usage for platform users. Having the newly coded templates set up in the relevant accounts would ensure swift and successful training.

DHL Commerce Solutions’ set-up had become multifaceted, so an onboarding plan to organize and time deliverables was a must. A dedicated onboarding package was necessary because of the various account creations, numerous data migrations and extra creative requests. Regular catch-up calls were scheduled to keep track of important tasks and provide updates for stakeholders.

Results

Co-operation between Dotdigital’s teams and DHL not only meant that all targets were met, but that the expectations were exceeded. DHL team members were delighted with how well everything went and were particularly impressed with the expert training session.

In addition Lee Nelson states “DHL estimates a 75% gain in productivity when creating content, reducing from 140 minutes to just 20 minutes since implementing Dotdigital.”

Looking ahead

There are several solutions in the platform that DHL isn’t using right now. However, the main focus is to build on the already impressive stats the team is producing. So, Lee Nelson says, “we’re keen to use landing pages as we see them as an opportunity to build on our email marketing efforts and help to improve conversion rates.”