HobbyKing expands ‘Toys and Hobby’ market with Dotdigital’s automation solutions

International marketer of R/C products, HobbyKing, captures expanding ‘Toys and Hobby’ market with Dotdigital’s automation solutions.

The need for automation and personalized campaigns

With the expansion of its customer database, HobbyKing was averse to reaching out to new customers as the then system lacked efficiency and seamless collaboration across typefaces. The manual process of loading data resulted in both financial and product loss. Hence, the need for a new and advanced system was vital.

The company also experienced setbacks when creating new marketing campaigns. Producing new content and sending it over to international customers in a timely manner was a growing concern. The automation aspect of any campaign is seen as a cornerstone to effective marketing. Therefore, HobbyKing wanted to customize and personalize their campaigns to reflect each customer’s preferences.

Successful collaboration with Dotdigital for enhanced email marketing

In May 2018, HobbyKing entrusted their business with Dotdigital as their email marketing and automation technology provider. Through the onboarding process, HobbyKing’s team of developers worked closely with Dotdigital’s support team to test the Magento connector on the staging website prior to production. During this process, the team performed both subscriber and API imports manually, to cut down the initial ‘sync’ time between the two systems. This enabled HobbyKing’s marketing team to focus on getting the newsletters out while maintaining overall site traffic and revenue during the cutover period.

Currently, HobbyKing is running eight programs with Dotdigital such as Magento events, customer engagement, post-purchase, site-activity, and anniversary events to name a few. In fact, 9.5% of total email revenue is generated via the eight automation programs, which also include a welcome series, win-back, wish-list, birthday, and half-birthday campaigns…

Transformation of email marketing strategy

The Dotdigital platform has allowed HobbyKing to work around the content and funnel it into tailored automated campaigns targeted at specific audiences. Also, the company can now easily track revenue attribution for each source.

According to Rebecca Bestawros, Digital Marketing Manager at HobbyKing, “With Dotdigital on board, we were able to maximize our efficiency with email, accounting for almost 13% of our total revenue. The user-friendly interface made it easy for us to create dynamic content, making our electronic direct mail (EDM) process easier and quicker.”

Furthermore, the personalization elements within the automation programs have also resulted in a revenue uplift. “In the past, any small change in the content based on region or language had to be a completely different campaign, with a separate send-out process. However, with Dotdigital, the personalization has become more streamlined with their dynamic content blocks,” commented Rebecca. “These seemingly small features of the platform have made a world of difference in how quickly we are able to create a campaign on the platform,” she added.

The company is now looking at growing their loyalty database with the use of Dotdigital’s cross-channel capabilities by leveraging social retargeting, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. Integrating Dotdigital with a personalized mail provider is also on the agenda. With this, the team will be able to target its higher-end VIP customer segment, providing more advanced and personalized customer service and marketing.