Pedders increases email click-to-open-rate by 373% with Dotdigital

Pedders Scales Global Reach with Smarter, Personalized Marketing

Pedders Suspension & Brakes is Australia’s leading undercar specialist and one of Australia’s largest automotive aftermarket brands. Founded in 1950, it is a family-owned franchise business with around 120 outlets nationwide and a global presence in over 40 countries across America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Pedders enlisted the help of Dotdigital to uplift their marketing through creating personalized and engaging emails that leveraged multi-channel marketing strategies.

When the car is the star but the data isn’t there

Pedders’ marketing approach is anchored in the principle that the car is the star. Yet without accurate insight into each customer’s vehicle, it proved challenging to recommend relevant products and personalize at scale. While efforts were made to capture this data during email sign-up, incomplete responses by subscribers on free text forms and surveys created a host of data quality issues, making it almost impossible to segment customers based on their current vehicle.

Consequently, the team resorted to sending generic monthly emails to the entire database, focusing on different vehicles and products. This was a big gap for their marketing strategy, not because they didn’t have an email marketing system, but because they didn’t have the right data.

As a result, Pedders not only had a low open and click-through rate on their emails, but most crucially, they were at risk of becoming a flat and forgettable brand.

How Pedders built scalable segmentation through real-time vehicle insights

Pedders launched a “Target Vehicle Campaign” that centred around promoting shortlisted vehicles that it manufactures upgrade parts for. This was a huge uplift from the brand’s marketing team and involved creating and integrating forms using the Dotdigital platform into Pedders online booking request process. Upon completion of this form, a customer’s vehicle registration number triggered a real time search in the National Exchange of Vehicle and Driver Information System, which returned rich customer data on the Make, Model, Year, Series and Variant of the submitted vehicle. With this standardized data, every form fill allowed Pedders to build and store a reliable and scalable dataset of every customer in Dotdigital.

The power behind this data was immense. Pedders built robust audience profiles segmented by granular details of their vehicle. With these profiles, customers would flow into various email campaigns built for their vehicle and interests with themes such as ‘4×4 vehicles’ or ‘performance vehicles’. These campaigns followed on from their welcome series and were personalized to the subscriber’s interests, highlighting upgrades, new products and services specifically relating to their vehicle.

With the subscriber data, Pedders also built lookalike audiences for retargeting across Meta using the custom product feeds from their website to create campaigns and catalogues based on vehicle ownership and interest.

Pedders sees triple-digit growth in email performance and ad efficiency

The results? Game-changing. The ‘Target Vehicle Campaigns’ did not just drive performance, they redefined how Pedders engages with its audience and showed what precision-targeted and segmented customer data can achieve. Since the launch of their email campaigns, they saw a 54% increase in open rates, and a 373% increase in click to open rate. Not only that, they also increased their website traffic from email-started session by 25% as well as an increase of 18.2% in conversion with email as the session source.

In addition to improving customer email engagement, Pedders also took the opportunity to enhance its advertising activity with Meta, using its Dotdigital enriched data for retargeting and to create lookalike audiences. It was able to increase conversion rates by 32.5% whilst reducing cost-per-click by more than 30%, compared to the same creatives used without custom audiences from Dotdigital.

What Pedders learned

1. Consistent and structured data powers your personalization. Having the integration to assign the exact make, model, year and brand of subscribers’ vehicles in a reliable and consistent format to the Dotdigital platform was the key to success for its campaigns.
2. Connect the dots through multi-channel campaigns. By leveraging existing customer data through the creation of lookalike audiences on Meta, Pedders successfully can target potential customers that works for its brand.

Learn more about retargeting with our guide here