Parcelhero delivers four-fold revenue growth with Dotdigital

Each year billions of packages are sent using a highly competitive courier service industry. The market is growing rapidly the global market is expected to be worth $648bn and the UK market £25bn by 2030. Driving this growth in the UK is Parcelhero. The market leading online parcel delivery service operates a popular price comparison website, that brings together the delivery services of the world’s biggest carriers, including UPS, DHL, FedEx and DPD to offer customers savings of up to 60%.

Three days to create, segment and send a marketing email

Parcelhero’s small marketing team work hard to ensure that whenever a package needs to be delivered, customers know to visit the website for the best prices and delivery times. The team have found the one of the best ways to communicate with customers is through timely and helpful emails.

Until November 2023, Parcelhero was using MailChimp to send relatively low numbers of marketing emails to customers. The team wanted to increase the volume, frequency and type of messages being sent to customers, but it was not possible, as the Head of Digital Marketing, Johana Kedjam explains: “You need to be quick and adaptable in the courier business, but it was taking us three days to build an email, segment the database and send it. We needed a marketing platform that could match our fast pace.”

Johana had used the Dotdigital marketing automation platform before joining Parcelhero in 2022 and instantly recognised an opportunity to lay new foundations for the team ambitious email strategy.

Dotdigital enables automated email campaigns and programs

Parcelhero is using Dotdigital for a wide range of email campaigns and programs. Campaigns are centred around events including Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, school holidays and graduation. Programs include welcome and membership activity, re-permission and re-engagement communications and a cart abandonment strategy. These activities are supplemented by additional brand awareness and customer education emails.

“Every email is easy to create using Dotdigital,” says Johana. “We have branded templates and a toolkit that enables us to simply drag and drop content and widgets from our library to make emails that we know will resonate with our customers.”

The team has also taken advantage of Dotdigital’s WinstonAI to add greater levels of personalization within these messages, as Parcelhero’s Email, eCRM & Lifecycle Manager, Alethu Sive Bam, explains: “A unique feature of WinstonAI is the ability to incorporate personalization within sentences and not just the subject line of an email. It is a subtle touch that makes the message feel more engaging.”

A four-fold increase in revenue from email

Before Dotdigital, Parcelhero did not have a cart abandonment program and the impact was instant. “The sharp rise in sales was incredible and it kept growing and growing,” comments Johana. Moving to Dotdigital has made a massive impact, in numerous ways:

• Improved communication with customers – 29 campaigns executed in the first 11 months vs. 4 in the same timeframe with Mailchimp.
• Huge increase in revenue – 4x increase in revenue from email
• Automating processes to save time and stay compliant – through automated abandoned cart, re-permission and re-engagement programs
• Improved results through easier A/B testing – constantly looking at what customers want to see and how conversion rates can be improved.

This huge increase in productivity has enabled the team to increase the number of emails it delivers to customers from 33k to 1.3 million. All of this additional activity has generated an almost four-fold increase in revenue from email.

And the cherry on top? Parcelhero’s marketing team won Marketing Team of the Year at Dotdigital’s 2024 Dotties, a well-earned nod to their results and creativity.