A look back at 2021 at edrone

It’s that time again, when no one can resist the temptation to summarize what the last year has looked like as we get ready to turn the calendar ahead. Here at edrone, 2021 was an amazing year full of lots of great things to share so, yes, we’re definitely going to add another retrospective summary of accomplishments to your reading list.

Be fair – with all things that happened at edrone in 2021, how could we not want to take another trip through what was a fantastic time in our history? So, join us as we travel back in time and recap some of the highlights of the last year.

Improvements & additions to the edrone platform

This is a good place to start, right? After all, it’s the effectiveness and functionalities of the edrone platform that makes all of our successes possible. We’re constantly developing, testing, updating and perfecting new additions to edrone so our clients can achieve even better results with a tool that is easy to work with. Here are the highlights of the additions and changes we made in 2021:

• Database segmentation by gender. Every point of differentiation helps to further focus your target group around a common characteristic. Now it’s easy to make one of the most fundamental differentiators for many product fields the basis for targeted messaging.
• Refer-a-Friend Program. This is a great addition to the toolbox of every marketer. A huge portion of every customer database is open to the idea of getting rewarded for spreading the word about a product or service. Now, edrone makes it easy to design and implement a referral program tailored to your needs.
• Drag & Drop Editor. No, we didn’t invent it, but our totally rebuilt editor is about as simple to use as it gets while still giving you unlimited creative options. Designing your own completely customized content for newsletters, pop-ups & more has never been easier.
• Dashboards. This is a great new way to simply organize all the data, metrics, functionalities and more that you have access to when using edrone. Log in, get direct access to what you’re looking for and get to work with this easy-to-navigate interface with your edrone account.
• edrone Workspace. When using edrone as part of a team, now you can share the authority to access different part of a client’s account, ensuring greater data privacy by restricting it to necessary team members only.
• Inbox. With so many customer communication channels – email, chat, social media and more – documenting your history with a particular customer can get messy fast. With our new Inbox feature, you get all this history combined and organized in one place, making customer care, among other things, faster and more effective.
• Lots of updates. When there’s a better way to do something or a way to make our clients happier with features they want, we’re ready to introduce new updates. Among other things, 2021 saw updates in the general UX of our platform, the process for importing contacts, improvements to our Marketing Machine, optimizations to on-site elements that brought a 28% decrease in loading times, new reports and more!

Conferences & Events

It’s true that the in-person event scene is still not back to 100% strength yet, but 2021 was still able to stage a number of conferences for those in the marketing automation, e-commerce and tech fields.

These are a great opportunity for us to not only get the word out about edrone, but to keep our finger on the pulse of change in the industry and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the relentless pace of innovation.

We look forward to an even busier, more complete event calendar in 2022.

Here are a few of the events we attended in 2021:

• Slush 2021
• e-commerce Dinner Fair in Warsaw
• VoiceFest
• Retail Challenge
• e-commerce DigitalDay by ECU
• e-Retail Congress

AVA takes another step forward & other company news

2021 was also a great year for edrone’s AVA, a project that will define the role of voice commands in e-commerce in the years to come. Our researchers passed some extremely impressive technical milestones and further developed the algorithms and cutting-edge technologies that will help to break new ground in the field of voice-powered e-commerce.

We can’t wait to share more about AVA, but for now just let us say that 2021 was a fantastic year for the further development of a next-generation tool that will transform the way we shop online. We wish we could share more details but it’s all part of the mystery for the moment — watch this space for more updates soon!

In other company news, we grew a lot in 2021. Our staff grew by 350% in less than a year, up to 140 people. This kind of expansion is a challenge under the best of conditions but doing it in the grip of the pandemic was an outstanding achievement for our recruiting and HR teams.

We also added a great new library of materials for anyone looking to learn some of the basics of e-commerce (and edrone) — edrone Academy. Not only did we put together a great resource to introduce everyone to the fundamentals of the industry, but we made it available in three languages.

And one more reason to celebrate 2021…

As proud as we are of everything we’ve already listed here, we just have to mention one more thing that ranks very highly on the list of things we want to celebrate from this year. We’ll just let the picture speak for itself:

Yes, the first marketing automation platform for e-commerce created the first beer for e-commerce. Just go with it — it was that kind of year.

Thanks to all the friends, coworkers, partners, clients & others who helped to make 2021 such an outstanding year at edrone. Let’s do it all again and MORE in 2022!