Dotdigital blog

2021 – 5 New Year’s resolutions for every digital marketer

December is the month we all love. It's when we all take a break from work and jump on the festive bandwagon. This is also the time when customers and businesses refuel by looking back at the year that was, to identify their wins and more importantly their losses, allowing them to strategize for the coming year. This approach is similar for digital market space, too.

As a business development representative for dotdigital in APAC, I speak with digital marketers daily. Often, these digital marketers express their struggles on how to better engage their customers and boost their conversion rates.

I have put together this blog, ‘5 New Year’s resolutions,’ taking inspiration from some of our customer success stories. I hope these resolutions will help you set in place your marketing strategies for the new year, to ensure you hit your marketing goals for 2021.

New Year’s resolution #1: Automate and retarget

  • How can I talk to my customers via different touchpoints?
  • How can I keep customers engaged with my brand?
  • How do I build brand advocates and loyalty?

If these are questions that you are looking to answer, consider checking out our client TRAPO, the Malaysia-based leading car accessories provider in Asia.

TRAPO needed to move from its existing complex ecommerce website to a much simpler, centralized and personalized system. Additionally, the company was on the lookout for a platform that would easily sync with all the other marketing tools it had in place to better streamline the process. By centralizing their marketing, TRAPO automated its communications and retargeted its customers via different touchpoints, improving brand loyalty and skyrocketing revenue by 300%.

“The challenge for us as a business was the delivery of consistent and constant customer engagement. And with the industry becoming increasingly competitive, the key is to remain relevant and keep the audience engaged. However, with dotdigital on board, we were able to achieve that competitive edge with our creative and tailormade campaigns,” said Ionut Danifeld, Chief Marketing Officer at TRAPO Asia.

Read the full customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #2: Personalize and segment

Perhaps most important for digital marketers, is staying ahead of the game by keeping up to date with the latest market trends.

As digital marketers, we look to constantly improve processes to help drive efficiency and conversion. To start, we should identify a couple of goals we’d like to fundamentally achieve. For example:

  • Gain a competitive edge over competitors
  • Streamline current processes
  • Run more targeted campaigns to drive more conversions

Understanding of your customers’ interests will drive more revenue when you send marketing communications to them via dynamic content, catered uniquely to their individual needs. For example, Australia’s largest sampling service, bellabox, personalized its communications and segmented customer profiles, witnessing a 22.5% return rate and a click-through open rate of 51%. This in turn led to an increase in email marketing revenue of 156% in the past 12 months to August 2020.

“Our partnership with dotdigital has been highly rewarding and has enabled us to overcome challenges, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. dotdigital has not only allowed us to update our email marketing creatives and create strong retention strategies, but also capitalize on lapsed customers and win them back. Recently, we hit a milestone by selling three million boxes! I can’t wait to see where we go from here,” added Alana, Customer Marketing Manager at bellabox.

Read the full bellabox customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #3: Capture abandoned cart customers

These are the questions we should be asking as digital marketers.

Did you know that 79% of carts are abandoned globally? By deploying abandoned cart automation, businesses see a huge conversion recovery ratio.

Furniture retailer Miss Amara partnered with dotdigital to explore its automation functionalities and solutions. By using dotdigital, Miss Amara is currently running automated abandoned cart programs, allowing them to recover 51.6% of carts abandoned, which directly translates to $6,998,817 in recovered revenue!

Read the full customer success story here.

New Year’s resolution #4: Recency, frequency, and monetary analysis

We often find clients not utilizing their data to engage with their customers more relevantly.

Australian natural health retailer Caruso’s Natural Health’s ‘Singles’ Day campaign’ focused on an omnichannel strategy, customer engagement, and digital support. The key differences became evident once dotdigital implemented its latest recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) value model and dashboards. By using RFM analysis, Caruso’s Natural Health had an in-depth understanding of its customers based on clear customer segments. Through this, Caruso’s Natural Health saw a 25% increase in revenue.

By taking the RFM approach, you will gain a clear understanding of your champion vs. inactive customers. Using this knowledge, you can start rewarding your customers for their loyalty. For example, to ensure you don’t erode revenue you might want to send a larger discount offer to re-engage your inactive customers, as opposed to your champion customers, who are already spending big with you.

Diana Uribe, Digital Specialist at Caruso’s Natural Health said, “We wanted to use dotdigital to understand how to better communicate with our customers in a conceptual and personal manner. The RFM personas have enabled us to refine our customer database and build improved segments while delivering tailored campaigns for existing and new customers alike.”

Read the full Caruso’s Natural Health customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #5: Utilize product recommendations

Finally, product recommendations!

This is an essential step for all digital marketers to deploy as it provides upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

The world’s most successful non-alcohol spirit distributor, Lyre’s, does this perfectly by sending across campaigns with relevant product recommendations. With an ever-growing product line up, Lyre’s used dotdigital’s product recommendation algorithm to upsell and cross-sell to its customers, by recommending the next best product. Through this, Lyre’s saw a 53% increase in conversion rates and 65% growth in click-to-open rates.

Ashleigh Murray, VP Global eCommerce at Lyre’s, “Memorable customer experience remains a top priority for businesses, which is impossible to achieve without the proper understanding of who your customers are. As the industry becomes competitive and content-driven, it’s important to remain relevant and engaging at the same time. Partnering with dotdigital enabled us to leverage the data collected through the automation tools, segment them, and create highly engaging content for our customers.”

Read the Lyre’s customer success story.


I hope you can utilise these 5 “New Year’s Resolutions” achieve your digital marketing goals for 2021 and help you drive revenue for your business in 2021. We are happy that this post was picked as one of top pieces to be included in the email marketing trends post for 2021 from emailmonday. Be sure to check it out for even more trends and predictions.

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to contact me at aloysius.soh@dotdigital.com to have a quick chat, or sales@dotdigital.com if you’re outside APAC. If you’d like a quick demo of Dotdigital.

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