Bullseye! Pivotal scores an 11x increase in email revenue for Red Dragon by applying precision targeting

Red Dragon Darts was founded in 1975 by two automotive engineers who developed a passion for the sport and decided to turn their skills to creating the perfect dart. The duo established a top-flight darts operation in Wales that quickly became a leading producer of tungsten darts – the kind professional darts players use. The online store sells darts, boards, and accessories to players in over 100 countries.

Learn how email automation combined with personalisation fuelled customer acquisition and generated more repeat business

Challenge

Compared with its paid marketing channels, Red Dragon’s email marketing was underperforming. The dart maker was using Mailchimp to ‘batch and blast’ subscribers with news and offers several times a week. Engagement was low with email averaging a 29% open rate, and there were no automations in place to nudge warm customers through the sales funnel. As a result, email converted just $13.5K of revenue in two years.

The brand’s marketing agency Pivotal saw huge potential and was confident it could get more out of the email channel.

Our goal was to combine email automation with personalisation to fuel Red Dragon’s customer acquisition and generate more repeat business from the existing customer base.

Solution

Pivotal switched Red Dragon Darts from Mailchimp to Klaviyo and integrated the store’s Adobe Commerce site with Klaviyo to create a powerful marketing automation platform. For the first time, the brand had insight into subscribers’ purchases, browsing history, and engagement, and could use this customer data to make its emails more personalised.

Following the migration, Pivotal created a new sign-up form to accelerate list growth, and six automated email flows in the customer journey. Within a month, 27% of the brand’s revenue was being attributed to email – and that figure has since grown to 32%. In the same period, Klaviyo’s pop-up form collected data for 3.2K new subscribers, with a 5.15% submit rate.

Strategy

Red Dragon’s welcome email series offers subscribers a discount when they sign up, and the first email has a strong open rate of 79%. A conditional split means that once the welcome offer has been redeemed against a purchase, it’s no longer mentioned in the flow. Instead, the emails focus on helping players improve their game and introducing Red Dragon’s pro players. 

The brand uses three more automated flows to engage with shoppers who’ve shown interest in making a purchase but exited the website before completing an order: abandoned browse, abandoned cart, and abandoned checkout. Together, the automations are driving significant growth for the email channel, as the 11x increase in revenue shows.

With Mailchimp, Red Dragon generated just £13.5K of revenue from email in two years. That’s about 15% of the revenue we’re generating with Klaviyo every month!

To fuel cross-sell, the brand includes product recommendations in post-purchase emails. That makes great sense because the flow sent to dartboard buyers, which features tips on dartboard set-up, has an 84% open rate. It therefore provides the perfect opportunity to talk to customers about dartboard surrounds and cabinets, and ask them to write a product review. Via another flow, players who’ve purchased a set of darts receive an email promoting personalisation of their dart ‘flights’ (the fins at the back of a dart) and other useful kit, such as mats to protect the floor. 

To overcome the issue of low email engagement and improve email performance, the brand now limits the number of messages subscribers receive by using Klaviyo’s engagement segments. The most engaged subscribers receive pretty much every email, whereas the less engaged receive higher-converting campaigns only, such as ‘dart of the week’. The least engaged might only receive one email per month. 

As a result, the average open rate has increased by 66% to 48%, and the average click rate is now 20%.

Pivotal’s email marketing strategy has been highly successful for Red Dragon Darts. We’ve used Klaviyo to drive significant increases in revenue, engagement, and email list growth.