Shorty's Liquor uses reminder program to drive 99% gift redemption rate

Shorty’s Liquor is a leading drinks retailer servicing corporate customers and on-premises venues in Sydney. The company was founded in 2001 by entrepreneur David Short and is headquartered in Ultimo. Its client list includes several prominent financial services, legal, and advertising businesses.

Over the years, Shorty’s team and business have grown. Team members include hospitality experts, client advocates, digital marketers, and delivery drivers. The team is driven by a clear vision and goes above and beyond for its clients. 

Challenge

The retailer launched Dan’s Gifting Hub in 2019 with a simple mission: to make gifting easy. It was an initiative to provide customers with an incredible, curated range of gifts. But, a major challenge for the retailer was not being able to measure deliverability.

Their emails were sent from Adobe Commerce and the team had limited visibility into customer engagement, which prevented them from developing follow-up emails. As a result, there was an average gift non-confirmation rate of 27%. Following up with these unconfirmed gifts was tedious and took up a lot of time.

Solution

According to David Short, the Managing Director, using Dan’s Gifting Hub has a unique advantage: the gift giver only needs to know the recipient’s email address, not their postal address. After purchase, the recipient receives an email notification of the gift and is then directed to a landing page to confirm their postal address. The order is then shipped to the confirmed address.

Shorty’s aimed to enhance gift redemption rates by using targeted reminder campaigns. Next, the team segmented engaged from unengaged customers using Dotdigital’s segmentation tools.

The whole digital campaign was assisted by Shorty’s agency partner, Webqem who helped empower and unlock greater efficiency using the Dotdigital platform. As a result, Shorty’s team was able to target a specific audience with follow-up emails. The team could also send timely reminders based on their engagement with the gift campaign.

Shorty’s team along with Webqem created a personalized gifting and reminder system for customers by utilizing order data synced with Dotdigital’s SFTP contact and insight data importer. They then built personalized individual, multi-channel gifter, and giftee reminder programs. This solution has not only reduced Shorty’s non-confirmation rate for recipients to zero but also reduced the need for manual administration. Therefore, this improved the overall customer experience for the company and team efficiency.

As a result, the retailer was able to reach out to the unengaged audience through follow-up emails.
Using Dotdigital, the team segmented and funnelled the customers to an updated list of recipients and incorporated the current statuses of existing recipients in case any recipient failed to confirm within a few days.

They sent the third reminder email to the recipient and the gift giver. Should the recipient still not confirm, a final email is sent indicating that the value of the gift will be donated to charity within 24-hours of the recipient receiving the email.

Results

Thanks to Dotdigital, Shorty’s have experienced an unbeatable uplift in conversion rates from all its reminder programs, with 99% of contacts redeeming their gifts. Approximately 62% of the total emails sent were part of the first reminder program. The reminder campaign has a high engagement rate, as evidenced by its 59% open rate. These results were more than the company could have hoped for.

Looking Ahead

For campaigns to work effectively, any business needs to maintain good database hygiene. Shorty’s Liquor plans to prioritize this and is looking into a re-engagement customer journey that leverages email, social re-targeting, and SMS. By using this seamless cross-channel approach, Shorty’s will reach its audience and unlock opportunities for higher-value, unengaged customers.