From Excel to Excellence
DHL elevates events to a 9.1 with Spotler Events

DHL is a globally recognised delivery service. With more than 50 years of experience, DHL operates in over 220 countries and territories worldwide. The company focuses on fast shipping, personal service and high reliability in global deliveries. But that is not all. DHL actively supports social initiatives, is taking steps towards more sustainable logistics, and invests heavily in its own employees.

An important way DHL brings this mission to life is through organising various events. Well-known examples include customer events such as the ABN AMRO Open, visits to the DHL Innovation Centre and the F1 Dutch Grand Prix. To organise these events, DHL uses Spotler’s event software: Spotler Events.

DHL makes extensive use of Spotler’s event software

Robin Koedood, Event Manager at DHL eCommerce: “Spotler Events is not only used by our team, but also by other departments and divisions. For example, the DHL Express division uses Spotler Events for organising customer events, just as we do. Another example is our External Communications department, which uses Spotler Events to communicate about the opening of new locations. In addition, all training modules are distributed through Spotler Events. The Spotler Events event software is important across many areas within DHL, and we use it extensively.”

Reasons for using Spotler Events

One important reason for implementing Spotler Events was the need for standardisation and automation of recurring tasks. Before using Spotler Events, all event processes were managed through Excel spreadsheets. This involved a lot of manual work and was prone to errors.

Another key reason was the growing number of events. Robin organises around 30 events each year for DHL eCommerce. To manage all the administrative work involved, reliable event software is essential. That leads to a third important reason for using Spotler Events: maintaining a clear overview of all events.

Spotler Events: essential for many event processes

For DHL, Spotler Events is a powerful tool for event registration and invitation workflows. It plays an important role in designing event pages, publishing event programmes, creating guest lists, registering attendees, sending emails and surveys and tracking event statistics.

In the spotlight: Dutch Grand Prix networking event

For the Dutch Grand Prix customer event, DHL rents a beach pavilion in Zandvoort for three days. The first day of the event, the Friday before the GP weekend, is reserved for internal audiences and local sorting centres (CityHubs). These are colleagues who have won tickets. During the race weekend, customers are invited. DHL organises this event for three main reasons:

• Relationship marketing with existing customers
• Relationship marketing with CityHubs
• Employee engagement

DHL has more than 140 hubs where parcels are consolidated for delivery to households, businesses, service points and parcel lockers. DHL aims to operate climate-neutral distribution centres and actively contributes to making urban environments more sustainable.

How Spotler Events supported the GP event

For the Grand Prix event, Spotler Events was used for the invitation workflow, as a trigger to build excitement and as the registration tool. Through Spotler Events, DHL maintained full control over inviting and registering 460 customers.

Using Spotler Events also enabled DHL to present all elements of the event and its programme components consistently. This ensured a professional and coherent experience across all online event processes.

Managing a registration like this is possible with Outlook and Excel, but it involves a lot of manual work. The risk of errors also increases when you have to manage message flows for hundreds or even thousands of invitations. Not to mention the significant amount of time required for such manual processes.

Still using Excel and Outlook for your event registrations?

Consider using Spotler Events when you start organising multiple events for larger audiences.

Measuring success with surveys

Events are successful when visitors say they are. Surveys and feedback can easily be set up in Spotler Events, which is another major advantage of our event software for DHL.

If you organise multiple events and ask the same types of questions each time, you automatically create a valuable benchmark. Through Spotler Events, DHL can easily compare how different events perform and draw insights from the results.

The key results: the Dutch Grand Prix customer event achieved an NPS score of +72 and an average rating of 9.1.