A premium homewares brand built on craftsmanship, design, and customer trust

Wallace Cotton is a New Zealand lifestyle and homeware brand known for its approach to everyday living – blending timeless design, natural fabrics and effortless luxury across premium bed linen, home textiles and sleepwear.

Founded in 2005, the brand has built a loyal following through its considered aesthetic, quality craftsmanship and commitment to creating pieces that feel as beautiful as they are lived in. With a strong retail footprint across New Zealand and a rapidly growing ecommerce presence, Wallace Cotton continues to cultivate long-term relationships with more than 95,000 customers who value comfort, style and thoughtful design.

A Dotdigital customer since 2023, Wallace Cotton expanded its partnership in 2025 with the addition of Dotdigital Personalization, helping translate the same curated, on-brand experience customers love in-store into every touchpoint of the online journey.

Translating a premium brand promise into an efficient website experience, without resorting to discounts

Wallace Cotton has built its reputation on thoughtful design, premium quality, and timeless homewares. Customers come to the brand expecting a considered, considered, on-brand experience – one that reflects the care and craftsmanship behind every product. However, this premium positioning was not fully carried through to the website experience.

Without website personalization, every customer was met with the same generic journey, regardless of browsing behaviour, preferences, or purchase intent. This limited Wallace Cotton’s ability to guide customers toward relevant products, curate meaningful experiences, or increase average order value in a way that felt natural and on-brand.

Compounding the challenge, revenue growth could not rely on traditional retail levers like discounting. Protecting price integrity was critical to maintaining the brand’s premium perception, leaving little room to drive performance through promotional tactics without risking long-term brand value.

Turning the mini cart into a personalized styling experience with Dotdigital Personalization SmartBlocks

To create a brand world that communicated the premium brand promise and aligned it with the website shopping experience, Wallace Cotton partnered with Dotdigital Personalization to introduce website personalization – starting with a strategic focus on the mini cart.

In 2024, the team was first introduced to Dotdigital Personalization at a Dotdigital Masterclass in New Zealand. They were a perfect candidate – with Dotdigital already directly integrated, and a tech stack spanning Shopify & OnTempo, the decision was straightforward: one connected platform that could power email, SMS and website personalization without adding integration overheads. Dotdigital stood out in the selection process, offering a frictionless direct integration between 2 platforms.

The experience uses real-time behavioural data (e.g. products viewed, items added to cart, and previous browsing patterns) to intelligently recommend complementary and higher-value items aligned with each shopper’s interests.

The real time personalization opportunity allowed Wallace Cotton to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and instead guide customers toward thoughtfully curated product combinations – such as coordinating bedding, cushions, and accessories – that felt natural, considered, and true to the brand.

The mini cart became more than a transactional touchpoint; it evolved into a personalized styling moment that reflected Wallace Cotton’s attention to detail, craftsmanship, and customer-first philosophy.

Importantly, this level of personalization delighted their audience, allowing Wallace Cotton to increase average order value and drive incremental revenue. Rather than incentivizing customers with discounts, the brand used relevance and inspiration as its primary growth lever – reinforcing its premium positioning while delivering measurable commercial impact.

Dotdigital Personalization, has helped us create more personalized recommendations and experiences that resonate with our customers. We’re already seeing the value of using our customer insights in a more considered way, and with a strong roadmap ahead, it feels like we’re only getting started.

Ben Harris – Ecommerce Manager

The results highlighted the commercial impact of relevance-led website personalization, demonstrating that meaningful revenue growth can be achieved without relying on discounting.

• Average order value 20% higher than the site-wide average
• Measurable ROI over 800% in first 6 months
• SmartBlocks contributed 6% of total website revenue

Dotdigital SmartBlocks turned website personalization into a significant performance driver. Within six months, SmartBlocks contributed 6% of total website revenue, with customers engaging in personalized content consistently achieving an average order value 20% higher than the site-wide average.

Beyond topline revenue uplift, the programme delivered a strong commercial return, achieving an estimated ~800% ROI over the measurement period, driven purely by personalized experiences rather than promotional incentives.

Crucially, these results were achieved without compromising price integrity. By focusing on thoughtful, relevant product recommendations at moments of high purchase intent, Wallace Cotton was able to grow conversion and order value while reinforcing its premium brand positioning and long-term brand value.

Multi-platform expansion of personalization

Building on its success, Wallace Cotton plans to expand personalized product recommendations across the website and into email, delivering a more cohesive end‑to‑end customer experience. Key next steps include enhancing abandoned cart and re‑engagement emails with personalized product recommendations to drive relevance, re‑engagement, and conversion.

Two years ago, Bradley Stokoe’s line manager called an unscheduled meeting. No agenda beyond the word “meeting.” Fifteen minutes of silence before he found out why: two members of his six-person team, more than 20% of it, were being made redundant. The CRM team was outperforming every target at the time, heading straight into Black Friday.

“How am I supposed to deliver more when I’ve suddenly got less?” Bradley remembers thinking. The commercial targets didn’t move. As CRM Manager for Parkdean Resorts, the UK’s leading holiday park operator with more than 60 destinations from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Bradley was already running a full-service team sending close to 100 million emails a year across 150-plus automated campaigns. What came next wasn’t about working longer hours. It was a complete rebuild of how the team worked, with Dotdigital at the center of it.

The challenge was clear

Every campaign built from scratch

Once the shock settled, the team filled a Miro board with everything they worked on and asked a hard question: what was taking the most time, and what could be cut without losing impact? The answer was obvious fast. Every campaign was fully bespoke, new images, new copy, new design, every time. Once an email sent, that work was gone for good.

Consistency was accidental

Fonts and button styles stayed on-brand, but beyond that, customers had no consistent cues for what a Parkdean email was asking of them. A resourcing problem had quietly become a clarity problem, and a scalability problem too.

Building a modular system that scales

A small, deliberately limited content library

The team turned to Dotdigital’s custom-saved content blocks to build a modular design system: four hero blocks, eight body blocks, three footer banners. Nothing more. Each block was stress-tested across device types, screen sizes, and dark mode, and paired with a ready-made Photoshop template for fast image production. When the team considers adding a new block today, they retire one to keep the library lean. “More options doesn’t always create better results,” as the team learned. Fewer, better-tested components, saved once and reused everywhere, meant simpler testing and more consistent results, whether the send was a one-off, a triggered abandonment email, or an automated anniversary message.

Personalization that layers on top

The library became the foundation for something sharper: dynamic content overlaying browsing data, search behavior, and abandonment data on top of booking data, personalizing down to 65 park types across 13 regions. Dotdigital’s link grouping feature let the team tag individual links inside otherwise generic content, quietly building data around preference signals, accommodation type, budget, region, time of year, without ever asking the customer directly. Those signals fed straight back into the dynamic content rules driving future sends.

We lost 20% of our team overnight, right before Black Friday. Dotdigital’s modular tools let us rebuild everything faster and smarter than before, and grow revenue 20% in the process.

Bradley Stokoe, Parkdean Resorts

Results

“The result: a 90% increase in conversion rate among non-booker audiences in a single year, without sending a single additional email.

Not doing anything different, not targeting different people, just making sure the content we give them is relevant.”

A deeper layer with Liquid

The team’s most technical addition was Liquid, Dotdigital’s built-in scripting language, pulling live booking and search data straight into email copy. A generic “book your next holiday” message became specific: a countdown to an upcoming trip, a direct link to manage that exact booking, available upgrades, activity booking windows, all generated automatically from data already sitting in the platform. Bradley credits Dotdigital’s team for helping the group get comfortable with it.

The same logic rescued abandoned browsing sessions. Instead of letting an abandonment journey dead-end into standard sales emails, the team used Liquid scripting to resurface a customer’s most recent search inside emails they were already sending. No new segment, no new journey, just one reused banner querying live browse data. That single addition lifted click-to-conversion rates by 15% and delivered-to-conversion reates by 9%.

Looking ahead

Two years on, the team treats the framework as a living system, not a finished one. Every quarter, they repeat the exercise that started it all: laying out the last quarter’s creative, checking brand alignment, and honestly assessing which content blocks still earn their place. They track shifts beyond their own campaigns too, like AI-generated inbox summaries and reduced Apple Mail previews, then leave each session with a fresh testing plan built on Dotdigital’s testing tools. Recent tests, comparing button CTAs against hyperlinks against image-overlay copy, have overturned the team’s own assumptions more than once.

“If you’re ever asked to do 20% more with 20% less,” Bradley told the room at Dotdigital Summit, “you could end up creating something better than you ever thought was possible.” For Parkdean, that meant turning Dotdigital from an email tool into the engine behind every personalized send, one saved block, one Liquid rule, one quarterly review at a time.

Millie’s Cookies has spent more than 40 years living off a single, reliable moment: the smell of fresh cookies pulling shoppers in on impulse as they walked through a shopping center. That moment built the brand. It also meant the business had almost no relationship with its customers beyond the till. As footfall declined and store count fell from around 150 to 45, that impulse-driven model stopped being enough to build a business on, and Millie’s had to become a brand people could find, join, and buy from without ever walking past a store.

10x+ return on investment

Dan Hall joined Millie’s in 2025 to lead that shift. “Our natural place in the market was in decline,” Dan says. “We had to pivot from a one-size-fits-all, in-store approach to something built around an actual, ongoing customer relationship.” The clearest proof that the shift was working wasn’t a big campaign. It was a free cookie.

Awareness was the real barrier, not appetite

Millie’s had run an online business for about a decade already, but most customers didn’t know it existed. “A lot of people still think you have to go into town to get a Millie’s cookie,” Dan says. “Even after ten years online, we’re still working against that assumption.” The challenge wasn’t convincing people to like the brand. It was convincing them the brand existed somewhere other than the shopping center.

Building a reason to go online

The team’s answer wasn’t a discount blast. It was the free birthday cookie: sign up to the database, get 10% off a first order, and a QR code lands on your phone good for a free cookie in any store within 30 days of your birthday. “On paper, giving away a free cookie isn’t particularly massive,” Dan says. “But it’s been one of the sharpest, lowest-cost moves we’ve made toward getting people to actually engage with us online instead of just walking past us in a shopping center.”

“It’s not the flashiest thing we’ve built, but it’s the one I’d point to first if someone asked what actually got customers to make the leap online.”

It worked because it gave people a real reason to sign up. Every redemption meant another verified, opted-in contact, captured and managed through Dotdigital, and another customer who now had an online relationship with Millie’s that didn’t exist a year earlier. Email, SMS, and WhatsApp all sit in one place for the team now, rather than stitched together across separate platforms, which Dan says makes it easier to actually build the journeys instead of managing the tools.

Proving the shift to the business

Getting a traditionally in-store business to invest further online meant proving the case first. “You show up with a small idea, a clear result, and you let the numbers do the arguing,” Dan says. Once redemptions started tracking alongside real online sales, the internal conversation changed. “The moment finance can see a straight line from a free cookie to online sign-ups to repeat online revenue, you stop having to sell the shift. You’re just reporting on it.”

Dotdigital has been the engine behind a 10x return on our CRM investment. It’s not just a platform, it’s how we finally built a real relationship with our customers.

Dan Hall, Millie’s Cookies

The numbers tell the story

The CRM program, run through Dotdigital, now returns more than 10 times what’s invested in it, evidence Dan points to whenever the business questions further investment in online channels over physical retail. “I feel as though Dotdigital has kind of been the engine behind that activity,” Dan says. More than a year on, roughly three-quarters of the online database remains actively engaged, well above what a typical reactivated list tends to hold onto, proof that the online relationship is sticking, not just spiking around a single campaign.

Looking ahead

Dan sees the biggest opportunity as still being awareness, not tactics. “Even after ten years of having an online business, we’ve still got a huge way to go in getting people to realize they don’t need to go to a shopping center for this,” he says. The plan is to keep building simple, low-cost reasons for offline customers to engage online, the way the birthday cookie did, while widening into SMS and WhatsApp, both a natural fit for a customer base that buys last-minute.

Co-branded partnerships, with the likes of Jet2, and conversations underway with other retailers, are stacking on top of that same goal: reaching people where they already are, and giving them a reason to find Millie’s online instead of waiting to walk past a store. “We’re still just scratching the surface,” Dan says. “The brand’s been around 40 years in people’s memories. Now we’re building the version that lives in their inbox.”

Warners Group Publications connects people with their passions, in print, digital, live shows, audio, travel, and education, across 25 brands and more than 5 million people. Running that many brands with a lean team means constant pressure to do more without more budget, more headcount, or more hours in the day.

Ben Romaine, Marketing Manager, and Katherine Brown, Head of Marketing and Advertising for BirdGuides, opened their Dotdigital Summit session by asking the room a simple question: who in here feels time poor, under pressure, and expected to deliver more with less? Every hand went up. It set up exactly the problem they’d spent the last year solving. Not by doing more, but by finally using the data they already had.

The same problem, showing up twice

For years, Warners Group leaned on paid advertising to reach interest-based audiences, and it worked, but it wasn’t cheap or precise. “Historically we’ve been paying a premium across paid advertising channels to reach those interest-based audiences,” Ben explained, “mainly because we have no control over these audiences.”

Meanwhile, the data that could have fixed this was sitting right there, just disconnected from anything useful. The shows team had rich purchase data from ticket sales running through Eventbrite. BirdGuides had web behavior data clearly showing which visitors were spending time in its most valuable membership-gated feature. In both cases, the signal existed but nobody was acting on it.

“We had the data but we weren’t using it where it mattered most,” Ben said of the shows business. Katherine put the BirdGuides version of the same problem more bluntly: “We had the data and an opportunity to convert, but we just weren’t doing it.”

Building one connected data foundation

The fix started the same way in both cases: making Dotdigital the central hub for customer data rather than a bolt-on email tool. For the shows team, that meant syncing Eventbrite ticket sales so every purchase became order insight against the customer record, then layering in subscription, membership, and ecommerce data on top. The result was what Ben called “a rich profile of that user,” a genuinely holistic view instead of scattered fragments.

From there, the real shift was exporting those segments straight into Google and Meta instead of keeping them siloed in email. Past show attendees got excluded from campaigns advertising that same show. High-value segments got prioritized for spend. Email and paid social stopped being two separate channels and became one connected story, powered by the same first-party data.

“So why guess when the data is already telling us who matters?” Ben asked the room. That line is the whole session in one sentence, and the shows team’s numbers back it up: total ticket purchases up 56% year over year, return on ad spend more than doubled, and cost per purchase down roughly 7%.

We stopped guessing and started letting Dotdigital tell us exactly who mattered. Ticket sales, membership conversions, ad spend, all of it got sharper the moment we connected the data properly.

Ben Romaine, Warners Group Publications

Turning intent into memberships

BirdGuides took the same foundation and pointed it at a more specific problem: converting the anonymous intent from those sightings-page visits into paying members. The team built an automation that enrolled those visitors, minus existing members, into a series designed to educate first and sell second, then extended the same segments into paid social so the message followed people across channels, not just their inbox.

For the free trial specifically, sign-up stayed deliberately frictionless, just an email and a phone number, and they ran a 54-day, seven-email journey using Dotdigital. The tone shifts on purpose as the trial progresses. No mention of pricing in the early welcome emails. A soft upsell once a week remains. A clear reminder of what’s about to disappear once the trial ends.

“It works because it’s simple, it works because it’s replicable, and it works because it’s proof.”
Katherine Brown Head of Marketing and Advertising, BirdGuides

The program converted at 12.3%, against an industry standard of 5 to 10%, and generated £10,000 in revenue in year one. Two emails alone, the seven-days-to-go message and the expiry-date message, accounted for 68% of that total. A related automation targeting high-intent, non-member visitors added another £6,000 in direct revenue on its own, converting 70 new memberships at an average value of £82 each, with lifetime value still to come on top.

Backing instinct with proof

Both teams tested their way to certainty rather than relying on gut instinct. When BirdGuides A/B tested send day, midweek against weekend, weekends won clearly. “Rather than relying on our gut,” Ben noted, they had the data to support the call instead of just a hunch about what people do on their days off.

Looking ahead

Warners Group has recently onboarded Dotdigital’s Personalization, and because the business is fundamentally about content, that means recommending the right article, video, or podcast to the right reader, not just the right product. The next step is extending the shows team’s Meta and Google integration into the BirdGuides free trial programme, so every touchpoint tells the same story no matter where a customer encounters the brand.

“Get the fundamentals right,” Ben told the room. “Good use of data beats complicated automation.” For Warners Group, that’s meant one platform, one connected data foundation, and two very different problems solved the same way.

Macmillan Cancer Support is one of the UK’s largest charities, providing physical, financial, and emotional support to people living with cancer. With around 15 internal teams running fundraising and engagement campaigns, their marketing operation is complex, cross-functional, and always busy.

Alice French, Email Marketing Manager, and Michelle Escobar, Email Marketing Executive, sit within the Strategic Engagement Planning team, making sure every message lands.

Great content, wrong channel

Macmillan had been email-first for years. Supporters going through fundraising campaigns like Brave the Shave and Mighty Hikes received automated journeys full of useful content like:

• Event reminders
• Fundraising nudges
• Good luck messages
• Post-event follow-ups

The problem? Some of these emails were landing at exactly the wrong time. For Mighty Hikes, the good luck and well done emails were the lowest-performing messages in the entire journey. Supporters were out on the trail with no signal, or too busy on event day to open their inbox. Event packs weren’t being read. Post-hike photos weren’t being downloaded.

Meanwhile, one team had been experimenting with SMS through a separate provider. “There was no reporting and no way to see what supporters were receiving across channels. so that’s when we started looking into the Dotdigital offer,” Michelle explains.

Making SMS count

Alice and Michelle took a phased approach, with one guiding principle: every SMS has to earn its place.

“The email world is part of that trust building before we’re just sending texts,” Alice says.

Consolidating SMS into Dotdigital

Step one was moving existing SMS into Dotdigital. The switch delivered a 22% cost saving per message, and for the first time, the team could see everything a supporter was receiving across email and SMS in one place.

Brave the Shave: proving the value

The team ran a controlled A/B test. Within seven days of signing up, if a supporter hadn’t started fundraising, those with a mobile number were split 50/50 between receiving an SMS nudge or not. Those without a number got the same test via email. The wording was kept as close as possible to keep it fair.

SMS hit a 45% click-through rate versus 7% for email. Based on the control group, supporters who received and engaged with the SMS also showed a higher likelihood of starting fundraising and exceeding their target compared to the non-SMS group. It’s worth noting this is a small sample and the SMS and email audiences aren’t directly comparable, but the directional signal was strong enough to build on.

Mighty Hikes: replacing the weakest links

For Mighty Hikes, they replaced the lowest-performing emails entirely with SMS. Because supporters provide their mobile number as part of their fundraising registration details, the team were able to reach them via SMS at exactly the right moment. The good luck text now goes out two days before the event, pointing supporters to everything they need to know for their hike. The well done text goes out the day after, linking to event photos they can download and share.

“We’d converted the lowest performing emails to some of the best performing content,” Alice says.

Spreading across teams

Other teams across Macmillan noticed. Michelle built a bank of templated SMS copy backed by performance data, so teams could adopt the channel with confidence.

The Legacies team, Macmillan’s biggest income stream, added an optional mobile number field to registration forms and now sends SMS reminders minutes before webinars and the day before in-person events. Both hit around 50% click-to-deliver rates.

“People forget, they see the email afterwards and miss the webinar completely,” Michelle explains. “The SMS reminder is just perfect timing.”

You would text your friend to say good luck on the day, and we’re able to nurture that kind of relationship with our fundraisers. People weren’t giving that feedback about the emails, even though we were sending them. They do give that feedback about the SMS.

Alice French, Email Marketing Manager, Macmillan Cancer Support

The right message, in the right place

Brave the Shave:

SMS click-through rate of 44.88% vs 7.14% for email. Based on the control group, SMS recipients showed a higher likelihood of starting fundraising and exceeding their target, though the sample size is small and the two groups are not directly like-for-like.

Mighty Hikes:

53.19% click-to-deliver rate, highest-engaging SMS across Macmillan. Supporters now reading event packs and sharing post-hike photos on social media.

Legacies:

~50% click-to-deliver rates on webinar and event reminders.

Consolidation:

22% cost savings moving SMS to Dotdigital, plus full cross-channel reporting for the first time.

Everything so far has been operational; reminders, nudges, event logistics.

Marketing SMS is next.

Until now, Macmillan’s CRM integration with Dotdigital only synced email unsubscribes, because it was built before SMS was on the table. That meant there was no way to manage SMS marketing consent at scale.

Dotdigital’s integration with Apteco FastStats has changed that, giving the team a route to sync consent both ways and making marketing SMS a real possibility. It’s firmly on the 2026 roadmap.

“Now that we have the FastStats integration, we should be able to actually make those improvements,” Alice says. “Watch this space.”

Plugin Boutique has grown into the world’s biggest music software marketplace since launching in 2012, selling over 9,000 products from 300+ brands.

Part of the Beatport Group, they serve everyone from first-time producers downloading a free plugin to seasoned composers scoring feature films. It’s a vast, specialist catalog with an audience that knows it inside out.

You can’t fake relevance with this crowd

Plugin Boutique’s customers are not passive shoppers. They know what they want, they know what they already own, and they notice instantly when a recommendation misses the mark. Serve a techno producer a film scoring library and you’ve lost them. Show a plugin collector something they bought six months ago and you’ve wasted their time.

For Simon Parry, Senior Marketing Manager, this was the core problem. With a small digital marketing team sending at least one campaign a day across over 300 brands, each with their own partnership commitments and promotional priorities, meaningful email personalization felt like something that needed a bigger team or a different approach.

Plugin Boutique weren’t starting from scratch. They’d been using another provider for on-site personalization, but managing multiple suppliers as a small team was time consuming. When Dotdigital acquired its personalization technology, the decision to switch was straightforward.

“We’d been on Dotdigital for years and had full confidence in the platform. When the personalization technology came into the ecosystem, it just made sense to bring everything together under one roof. The reliability Dotdigital had shown us over the years made it an easy call.”

Personalization that works as hard as your team does

Instead of segmenting every email, Plugin Boutique sends to their full database and Dotdigital personalization SmartBlocks do the heavy lifting, making every campaign feel relevant to whoever’s reading it.

Here’s how.

1. Email blocks that make every send count
   
   Each email carries a personalized block built around that customer’s browsing history and price point preferences, so every send feels like it was picked for that person specifically.
   
   “Personalization adds a diversity to our campaigns that we couldn’t get any other way. When you’re sending at this volume, every marginal gain matters.”
   
2. A welcome series that meets customers where they are
   
   New customers are greeted with a curated entry point – Dotdigital personalization blocks surface trending products and items under $20, giving first-timers an easy, low-commitment way in before nudging them toward a first purchase.
   
3. A homepage with a strategy behind every slot.

On the website, Dotdigital personalization powers most of the homepage, with each section built around a distinct purpose. The hero carousel handles promotions. Further down, personalization gets more individual. “Jump back in” picks up where a customer left off. “Recommended for you” draws on behavioral signals. And bestsellers runs on a custom algorithm that Dotdigital built at Plugin Boutique’s request, weighing both units sold and revenue to reflect what “bestseller” means for their business.

“Dotdigital personalization powers so much of what we do on the front page. We needed a tool we could rely on to handle a catalogue this size. That’s exactly what we got.”

I’ve always championed the support we get from Dotdigital. When you’re a small team working at serious volume, knowing there’s a reliable platform and a real person behind it when you need them, that’s not something you take for granted.

Simon Parry, Senior Marketing Manager, Plugin Boutique

The clicks they wouldn’t otherwise have

A 248% increase in email content revenue year on year, with over 250,000 clicks generated by personalized email blocks alone. For a team of two, sending daily without restructuring a single campaign or adding headcount, that works out at a 7x return on investment.

The “Recommended for You” blocks across mobile and desktop have generated millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of clicks that, in Simon’s words, simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

It’s also worth noting how those numbers are counted. Plugin Boutique uses Dotdigital personalization’s last click (product only) attribution model, the strictest available. Revenue is only credited when a customer clicks a product recommendation and buys that specific product. No click, no credit. So, the 248% figure isn’t padded by purchases that would have happened anyway. It reflects direct, attributable impact, which makes it more significant.

“These are clicks we wouldn’t have got. The Dotdigital personalization blocks add something to every campaign, whether the rest of the send is directly relevant to that person. That’s what makes it worth it.”

More automation, more precision

The foundations are in place and Plugin Boutique is ready to go further. Triggers are next: browse abandonment, wish-list alerts, post-purchase sequences, re-engagement flows. Alongside that, Simon is working through an internal data project to align their order schema, which will open up persona-level segmentation and lifecycle marketing through Dotdigital.

“We cater for all levels. Someone downloading their first free plugin and a professional buying high-end tool, those are completely different journeys. Getting that right is what we’re going after.” Simon Parry, Senior Marketing Manager, Plugin Boutique.

Ultima Media publishes four specialist B2B titles for the global automotive industry: Automotive Logistics, Automotive Manufacturing Solutions, Car Design News, and Automotive Digital Transformation, covering the full automotive value chain, from design and manufacturing through to supply chain and technology.

Each brand serves a distinct professional audience with its own content, events, and commercial objectives. They need a marketing platform sophisticated enough to hold all that together.

A platform that had stopped keeping up

Before Dotdigital, Ultima used Spotler. It had come bundled with their CRM, which made it convenient, but it hadn’t kept pace with the business. No dynamic content meant automation was barely worth building. No segmentation within the email builder, limited A/B testing, no multi-channel capability. Just static email sends, and not especially reliable ones.

“It felt like it had stayed behind the industry,” says Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data. For a team managing four brands with data coming in from multiple sources simultaneously, something had to change.

Worth noting: when Ultima went to market, cost wasn’t the driver. They knew they’d be paying more to switch. This was purely a capability decision.

Why Dotdigital?

Dotdigital made the shortlist on its own merits, but it was the acquisition of Fresh Relevance, announced mid-way through the sales process, that sealed it.

“This wasn’t a cost decision. We knew we’d be paying more. But Spotler had stopped evolving, and we needed a platform that could actually keep up with what we were trying to do. When Dotdigital came to the table with personalization across email and web, that was what sealed it for us.” James Rankin, Head of Marketing, Ultima Media

Every automation, channel and brand in sync

The sophistication of Ultima’s setup isn’t any one thing. Data flows into segments, segments feed automations, automations span multiple channels, and Dotdigital’s personalization capability ties it all together across email and web. For a B2B media business where audience quality underpins the entire commercial model, having all of that working in sync is the whole operation.

Data moves continuously between Dotdigital and their CRM, pulling in website registrations, event sign-ups, sales contacts, and form submissions in real time. Separate preference centers for each brand keep audience data clean across all four titles, and the ongoing shift from static lists to dynamic segments means marketers can now build complex audience criteria themselves, without routing every request through the data team.

“The complexity of what we’re managing across four brands used to mean everything had to come through the data team. Now marketers are building their own segments, handling cross-brand selections, suppressions, all of it, directly in the platform. That’s a genuine shift in how we operate.” Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data, Ultima Media

70+ automations, that do the heavy lifting

The automation program splits into two distinct types of work.
Always-on lifecycle automations handle welcome and onboarding series, free trial nurture sequences designed to convert trial users into paid subscribers, and re-engagement journeys running continuously in the background across all four brands.

Then there are the product-specific automations, which operate on a different logic entirely. Ultima runs more than 20 live streams and webinars a year, each triggering a reminder sequence from a week out to an hour before the event. Many of these are sponsored, so attendance is directly tied to revenue.

More recently the team has started automating lead gen nurture too. Download a sample industry report and a follow-up sequence kicks in, a journey that simply didn’t exist before Dotdigital.

Personalizing experiences across WhatsApp and web

At in-person events, delegates are on the floor, not at their desks. Hoping someone checks their email inbox during a conference session is a stretch. Getting them to notice a WhatsApp notification is not.

The team started with SMS for event reminders before moving to WhatsApp, which offered richer content and significantly higher open rates. In March 2026, WhatsApp open rates across their campaigns averaged 89%. The use case is event-focused for now, but mobile numbers are being collected across website forms and digital product registrations too, so the audience is growing. The next step is folding WhatsApp into the automation program itself, reaching contacts on a different channel when email alone hasn’t landed.

Dotdigital’s personalization capability currently powers behavioral content recommendations across all four sites and data capture for live stream registrations. The personalized automations already running are showing stronger engagement than what came before, and a structured roadmap is in place to go deeper on web personalization and dynamic content journeys this year.

Spotler had stopped evolving, and we needed a platform that could actually keep up with what we were trying to do. When Dotdigital came to the table with personalization across email and web, that was what sealed it for us.

Andrew Randall, Product Lead, Ultima Media

The results

Moving from Spotler, where average open rates sat at 14% and CTOR at 8%, the improvement across the board has been significant.

• Free trial to paid subscriber conversion on Car Design News has grown from 2% to 35%
• WhatsApp campaigns averaged an 89% open rate in March 2026
• Livestream automation programs are consistently hitting 47-53% open rates and 22-28% CTR
• 70+ automations now running across four brands
• 95% of data selections moving to dynamic segments

WhatsApp:

• Average open rate of 89% across campaigns in March 2026

For over 30 years, Dreams has been the UK’s leading bed retailer, with stores across the country and a growing online presence. But here’s the thing about selling beds: people don’t impulse-buy them. It’s a considered purchase that often involves multiple touchpoints before someone commits.

Dreams needed to strike a delicate balance.

Their in-store presence is core to who they are, but online customers want something different. Online shoppers love a bargain and quick purchases. In-store customers want the full experience. Email sits in the middle, sometimes driving online conversions, sometimes reminding people about that sale before they head to a store on Saturday.

Dreams were using website personalization, but it lived separately from their email platform. When Dotdigital acquired Fresh Relevance, Dreams saw an opportunity: bring everything under one roof and set themselves up for the sophisticated cross-channel personalization they needed.

“We needed a platform that could handle the complexity of a big-ticket purchase without slowing us down,” Campaign Marketing Manager, Lucy Gaughran explains. “Buying a bed isn’t impulse, it’s considered.”

One platform, endless possibilities

In 2024, Dreams moved their marketing automation platform to Dotdigital. The decision came down to flexibility, easier creative execution, deeper AI capabilities, and seamless data integration.

Product recommendations that doubled conversions

With their email and website personalization under one roof, Dreams were able to redesign their entire recommendation experience to align with what customers see on the website. They use AI data sources like “People Like You Buy” and “People Like You Browse,” and they go one level deeper with category and size attributes.

“If we’re sending an email about mattresses, we don’t want to recommend pillows at the bottom,” Lucy says. “It has to feel cohesive. Now everything we recommend is relevant to what we’re actually talking about.”

Now, if the email is about mattresses, the recommendations are for mattresses. If it’s about single beds, you’re not getting recommendations for king-size frames.

The results? They tested AI data sources against crowd-sourced data points like “most carted” and “most browsed.” The AI sources delivered roughly twice as much revenue with similar click-through rates.

Triggered programs that work around the clock

Dreams runs abandoned browse and cart programs which now include the AI-powered product recommendations blocks. Since redesigning these programs, they’ve seen meaningful uplift in clicks and engagement.

Up next? Moving to category-based abandoned browse programs. Instead of one-size-fits-all, customers will get tailored follow-ups based on which product categories they explored.

Data that flows online and offline

Every day, Dreams imports offline store purchase data into Dotdigital. When someone buys a mattress in-store on Tuesday, that data connects to their online profile by Wednesday.

This means smarter customer journeys. The team knows who’s already purchased, can exclude recent buyers from certain campaigns, and can trigger post-purchase journeys that feel relevant whether someone bought online or in-store.

Dreams is also exporting Dotdigital data to build lookalike audiences for paid campaigns, making advertising spend more effective and stretching the ROI of Dotdigital much further than the platform itself.

On-site data capture launching in 2026

Dreams is rolling out data capture forms across different site sections, each with different creative and objectives. The “Inspire” hub gets one approach with a split test. The “Sleep Matters Club” hub focuses on sleep tips. The rest of the site highlights offers.

The goal? Understand what customers actually want, then build automated journeys tailored to each mindset.

“We’re gathering the data first to understand appetite, then we’ll build the automations,” Lucy says. “There’s no point setting up complex journeys if we don’t know what our customers are actually looking for.”

The support is exceptional. You always get quick answers. But more than that, the platform just works. It’s intuitive, powerful, and it’s helped us build the kind of personalized experiences our customers deserve.

Lucy Gaughran, Campaign Marketing Manager at Dreams

Results that prove the value

Dreams’ triggered campaigns have delivered a 20x return on their Dotdigital investment over the past year.

Since redesigning their product recommendation strategy, they’ve seen noticeable uplift in clicks and engagement with abandoned browse and cart emails.

Best of all for the marketing team? The business has taken notice. The e-commerce team is actively collaborating on the roadmap, pushing for more personalization features like dynamic “your nearest store” banners in emails.

“Everything we’ve put forward has been well received,” Lucy says. “The business sees the impact. Nobody’s questioning whether this is worth doing.”

Taking personalization further

• Expanding the welcome journey from a single email to a full multi-touch program
• Category-based abandoned browse programs with personalized follow-ups based on what customers were viewing
• Lifecycle automations that nurture customers through the entire buying cycle
• Dynamic store locators with “your nearest store” banners bridging online and in-store experiences
• More AI testing to find what drives the most revenue for their customer base

The team might be small, but their ambition isn’t. With Dotdigital, Dreams has the tools to build the sophisticated, personalized customer experience their audience deserves.

Arena Racing Company (ARC) is the UK’s largest horse racing operator, with 16 racecourses and 5 greyhound tracks spread across the country. On any given week, there are dozens of events to promote, thousands of tickets to sell, and a customer base that spans casual day-trippers and die-hard racing fans.

Managing all of this falls to a team of just two, including CRM Manager Beth Sargeson. That’s two people, 21 venues, and a lot riding on the tools they use.

When the platform gets in the way

For a team running at full capacity, the last thing you need is a platform that creates more work than it saves. But that’s exactly where ARC found themselves on Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Some of the issues they faced included:

• The API broke regularly and nobody got notified when it did, meaning contacts and transactions would stop syncing without the team knowing.
• Attribution was unreliable, which made board-level reporting an exercise in guesswork.
• Abandoned cart emails were generic, with only a “you left something behind, click here” message that told customers nothing useful about the product they’d been looking at.
• Abandoned browse wasn’t even an option.
• Sharing first-party audience data with their paid media agency meant manually exporting lists from the ticketing system and uploading them to Google and Meta manually for every campaign.
• Support was “non existent”.

Something had to change.

Finding a platform that fit

Beth had experienced Dotdigital’s technology in a previous role, so it was already on her shortlist. But what pushed it to the top wasn’t familiarity. It was the people. “Horse racing is a complex industry,” Beth says. “The fact that Dotdigital already had experience with other racing operators really helped build confidence. They understood the issues we were going to have, and came with solutions.”

ARC evaluated several platforms during the process, including Bloomreach and Iterable. Beth held firm on what mattered most for a team of two. “Some of the other options had impressive tech, but you need a big team and a lot of infrastructure to get the most out of them. We’re just not at that stage.” Dotdigital offered something more valuable for ARC’s situation: a platform powerful enough to grow with them, but easy enough to actually use right now.

Phase 1: An onboarding that set the tone

ARC’s transition to Dotdigital received praise internally for how smooth it was, and Beth is clear about why. The onboarding was proactive, structured, and communication never dropped. “We never had to chase,” she says. “It was always clear what was coming next. There’d be regular updates on progress, and we didn’t have to go looking for them. That’s just not been our experience with other platforms.” With 21 separate accounts to configure, one per venue plus a central transactional account powering pre-arrival emails, surveys, and service messaging, getting the setup right from the start mattered.

ARC’s small team of two can now manage all accounts from one platform, where duplicating segments, content and programs across accounts is easy.

Phase 2: Automations built for how people actually behave

Once the foundations were in place, the team rebuilt ARC’s automation program with personalization at the center. Abandoned cart emails now show customers exactly what they had in their cart, not a generic prompt to return to the website. This change has increased click through rates from 6.4% to 10.9%, making a huge impact on revenue for no extra effort.

Abandoned browse was built from scratch, triggering when someone viewed a specific race day or event page and left without booking.”The revenue we’re seeing from abandoned cart and abandoned browse is really impressive,” Beth says. The transactional account is delivering too. Post-visit survey emails are generating exceptional returns, with a conversion rate 5 times higher than the racecourse account average and revenue per recipient running at 4 times higher. Customers who engage with post-visit content don’t just open and move on, they come back and spend.

Phase 3: Centralized data that makes the full picture visible

For years, ARC had gaps in their customer view that were simply impossible to fill. Not anymore. Dotdigital now serves as ARC’s central data hub, removing the need for a separate CDP entirely. Horse racing has a data problem that most sports don’t. One person buys five tickets, and you only capture one name. One way that Dotdigital is helping to solve this problem is by pulling Wi-Fi login data via SFTP from their racecourses and ingesting daily survey responses the same way, ARC can now match attendees who didn’t book directly. Someone who logged into the Wi-Fi on race day is no longer invisible. Someone who scanned a QR code and filled out a survey is now a known contact. The picture is getting clearer. And on the paid media side, first-party audience data now flows directly from Dotdigital to Meta and Google, replacing a manual export process that was eating up time and degrading audience quality.

Fresh Relevance: Fuelling automation with thousands of new contacts

ARC is still in the early stages of using Dotdigital’s advanced personalization platform Fresh Relevance, with their account director keeping a deliberate strategic pace, getting the fundamentals right before layering in more complexity. But even at this stage, the numbers are talking.

Data capture pop-ups, deployed across all 16 racecourse websites, have brought in 22,000 new contacts in just six months. For a business where growing the database is a board-level KPI, that’s a result that gets noticed. “Data is a huge priority for us,” Beth says. “People are always asking for new contacts. Those pop-ups have delivered.”

Dotdigital had perfected the ease of doing things. You understood where we were as a company and came with solutions. The speed and ease of working across multiple brands really sets you apart.

Beth Sargeson, Arena Racing Company, CRM Manager

What two people can do with the right platform

In their first full year using Dotdigital, ARC grew CRM revenue by 79% compared to their last full year on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Abandoned cart click rate jumped from 6.4% to 10.9%, and abandoned browse, a channel that didn’t exist before, is now generating revenue across 16 racecourses. “The reliability we’ve seen with Dotdigital is just a lot higher,” Beth says. “I can trust what I’m reporting now.”

The results have changed how email and CRM are perceived internally too. A cleaner data picture, stronger automation performance, and a paid media partnership running on better audiences all add up to a CRM program that’s more than pulling its weight.

Bigger ambitions, better foundations

ARC’s multi-channel strategy is just getting started. With Dotdigital handling the data and the automation, adding new channels like SMS is a natural next step rather than a project that requires starting from scratch.

There’s more to do when it comes to advanced personalization, too. Product recommendations, weather banners, and dynamic countdown timers are all in progress, and with web developers currently building event countdowns by hand, the case for a drag-and-drop solution is already obvious.

The bigger ambition is a complete view of every customer, across every venue, at every touchpoint. With the foundations now in place, and a platform that scales across 21 brands without needing a team of 21 people, that ambition looks a lot more achievable than it did two years ago.