Kele shares good fortune and increases online sales by 26% with Chinese New Year 2025 email campaign

Kele began as a bakery in Western Singapore in 1983. Since then, the company has featured in the prestigious Michelin Guide and is famed across the country for its signature traditional pineapple tarts, which can be ordered online, alongside its collaboration collection with brands such as Pokémon, Whittard, and Gryphon Tea.

Improve customer engagement to capitalize on the biggest sales opportunity of the year

With the pineapple being a symbol of good fortune, Chinese New Year (CNY) is an important date in the Kele calendar, with many customers ordering its range of products for their celebrations and to give as gifts. To ensure the company was ready to maximize its online sales for the period it wanted to transform how it used email to engage with its 20,000-strong customer database.

The company was using an email system, however, it lacked the levels of automation and analytical insight that the team at Kele wanted, to optimize the CNY campaign for success. To provide these advanced capabilities Kele looked at the choices available and selected Dotdigital and its email marketing automation platform.

Kele kickstarts its CNY 2025 campaign with new email marketing automation

The CNY 2025 project began in October 2024, giving the Kele team several months to achieve its targets for the promotional period ahead of the January celebrations.

Using the Dotdigital platform, the Kele team built an email strategy that began with sending an Early Bird pre-order email to its customer database in early October, offering a 20% discount. At the same time, customers who had previously purchased a value package received a different incentive, while a small group of VIP customers were presented with a different special offer.

A personalized follow-up email to customers who did not order from the initial invitations was automatically sent ten days later, reminding them that they had until November to take advantage of their offers. The messages included the use of a countdown timer (a function available with the Dotdigital marketing email automation platform) to create a sense of urgency and help customers know how long they had to place their orders.

Improved click-to-open and conversion rates

The CNY campaign was a success for Kele, with its new email strategy achieving an impressive 66% increase in click-to-open rate and a 26% higher conversion rate, compared to other promotional emails sent by the company the same year.