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

Firestar Toys is one of the leading producers of custom-printed LEGO parts and accessories. Founded in 2008, the UK-based company designs, prints, and 3D-prints minifigures and upgrade parts that LEGO doesn’t make.

Despite being a team of just 15, the company ships globally, with 50-60% of revenue coming from the US. Their customers are fiercely loyal. When a fire destroyed Firestar’s HQ and all stock in September 2023, the community rallied around them as they rebuilt from scratch.

​​Lisa Nicholls joined in 2021 to run a website migration and never left. Today she manages ecommerce, ops, project management, and HR. When she puts her marketing hat on, that’s where Dotdigital Personalization and Dotdigital come in.

The foundation was there, but the full picture wasn’t

​​Firestar Toys had been using Dotdigital Personalization for years, and it was doing serious work. Product recommendations, browse and cart abandonment triggers, price drop alerts. All running across the site and driving real revenue.

​​But the other half of the equation wasn’t keeping up. Their previous email provider offered limited functionality, virtually no support, and no way to act on the behavioral data Dotdigital Personalization was collecting. Contacts were being added to mailing lists automatically without proper opt-ins, bloating the database with disengaged subscribers and dragging down deliverability.

​​For a team of 15 with no dedicated marketing function, the result was a disconnect. Dotdigital Personalization was doing the heavy lifting on-site, but the email side was running on autopilot with no strategy, no segmentation, and no one to call when something needed fixing.

“I’m very acutely aware that Dotdigital and it’s personalization tools don’t get the time, attention, and love they deserve on our side,” Lisa admits. “I could do an 80-hour week just looking into the stats and where we can tweak things. But sadly, I’m not at that stage. I’ve got too many other hats on.”

The customer base deserved better, too. Firestar’s fans care about the brand on a personal level, but there was no welcome journey, no birthday program, and no real strategy for rewarding that loyalty. The data to make it happen was there, but it was scattered.

“I literally have data in so many places,” Lisa says. “That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to what Dotdigital could do. I could finally see everything in one place.”

Dotdigital Personalization: the engine already running

Dotdigital Personalization had been embedded across Firestar’s site for over six years before Dotdigital entered the picture. For a business selling to obsessive collectors, personalization isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how the audience shops.

Browse and cart abandonment triggers are the biggest revenue driver in the business. A three-step series with a 10% discount catches browsers and cart abandoners with personalized reminders. Cart abandonment alone accounts for over 56% of all trigger revenue, with browse abandonment driving another 39%. ​​Together with low stock, back-in-stock, and price drop triggers, Dotdigital Personalization campaigns account for more than 10% of total site revenue.

“It only takes a fraction of a percentage in the positive direction to make a huge revenue difference for us,” Lisa says.

Product recommendations run on the homepage, product pages, and cart page, showing collectors upgrade parts and related figures based on their browsing and purchase history. Price drop, low stock, and back-in-stock triggers round it out, all running on autopilot.

A homepage popover is now collecting mobile numbers too, laying the groundwork for SMS. The plan includes transactional updates to reduce service queries and product drop alerts to catch fans while they’re still excited.

Dotdigital: connecting the dots

The switch to Dotdigital was about bringing the email program up to the same standard as what Dotdigital Personalization was already doing on-site.

​​”The way our personalization and email tools work together and seamlessly use that data, to us, that was fantastic. This made our lives easier.”

The first win was cleaning up the database. Dotdigital made it easy to spot disengaged contacts who’d been added without opt-ins. A sunset campaign now manages them automatically. From there, the team built out a welcome series, lapsed buyer campaign, and geo-targeted on-site banners, with Lisa able to create and target content herself. No dev team needed.

“With Dotdigital, I can just do it. I don’t need to brief our dev team, wait for changes, review it. I can make it myself and target it to exactly the right audience.”

The partnership that ties it together

For Lisa, the standout isn’t a feature. It’s the people.

“Almost all of what we’re doing now is a result of recommendations from the team. They’re forever saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got this really cool thing, it might work for you.’ It’s not just an account manager who checks in at renewal. They genuinely care.”

Dotdigital and Dotdigital Personalization feel like an extension of our team. For a company our size, with the ambitions we have, that’s everything.

Lisa Nicholls, Firestar Toys Ltd

Two platforms, one connected strategy

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 16x ROI on Dotdigital Personalization. The platform has returned 16 times its annual cost in directly attributed revenue.
• 10.6% of total site revenue from triggered campaigns. Browse and cart abandonment, low stock, back-in-stock, and price drop triggers all running without manual input from the team.#
• 9.3% increase in average order value. AOV has climbed since moving to Dotdigital, driven by smarter targeting, more regular campaigns, and better segmentation.
• Cleaner data, better deliverability. The sunset campaign cleared out disengaged contacts that were dragging down sender reputation.
• Everything visible in one place. For a team that previously had data scattered across multiple tools, having Dotdigital Personalization and Dotdigital working together finally gave them a single view of what’s working.

Making the site a destination

Firestar’s roadmap is ambitious, and largely shaped by conversations with the Dotdigital and Dotdigital Personalization teams.

Loyalty expansion and gamification. The StarPoints program already rewards purchases and referrals. The plan is to gamify it, rewarding actions like logging in, sharing content, and engaging with new releases to make the site a destination, not just a store.

SMS for product drops. Firestar releases new products every Friday. Customers literally sit on the site refreshing the page. SMS alerts will catch fans the moment a drop goes live.

Growing trade. With global shipping costs rising, dedicated welcome journeys and segmented comms for trade resellers are a strategic priority.

“We’re a very small team, but we want big things. Dotdigital and Dotdigital Personalization give us the tools and the support to actually go after them.” Lisa Nicholls, Firestar Toys

For more than 25 years, Glasscare Ltd has been the UK’s leading independent car glass claims specialist. They partner with all major approved windscreen repair and replacement providers, delivering seamless claim handling for insurers and fleets, from policy validation to fraud prevention, backed by consistent quality and guaranteed workmanship.

Even with strong partnerships in place, accurate damage assessment was happening too late in the claims process.

Insurers and service providers were under increasing pressure to hit repair percentage targets, reduce unnecessary replacements, cut down failed visits, and give customers a better experience. The old manual assessment approach wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Engineers would show up to jobs without full visibility of the damage type or repair requirements. Insurers lacked confidence in remote validation capabilities. Customers waited days for assessments. And the cost per claim stayed stubbornly high.

“We knew we needed to remove friction from our claims process if we wanted to keep customers happy and reduce insurer costs,” says Graham Clarke, Managing Director at Glasscare Ltd.
The challenge intensified when Glasscare started scaling internationally. Setting up consistent damage recognition and assessment processes across multiple countries, with different insurer criteria, local requirements, and support needs, added serious complexity.

They needed a solution that could deliver fast, accurate windscreen damage assessments at scale, anywhere.

AI meets SMS for smarter claims

Glasscare built an AI-powered windscreen damage recognition platform and needed a simple way to get damage images from customers fast. That’s where Dotdigital’s SMS API came in.

The workflow is straightforward: when a claim is logged, Glasscare’s system triggers an automated SMS via Dotdigital asking customers to upload photos of their damaged windscreen through a simple web-based application.

Once submitted, Glasscare’s AI engine analyzes the images instantly to:

• Identify damage type and characteristics
• Determine whether repair or replacement is required
• Apply insurer-specific repair criteria
• Support fraud prevention and policy validation

The SMS layer drives customer engagement. The AI platform delivers intelligent damage assessment. Together, they create a frictionless claims experience.

By the time an engineer is scheduled, the repair decision has already been made with clarity and confidence.

Built for speed and scale

From a development perspective, the integration was refreshingly straightforward. Simple REST API calls over HTTPS with basic authentication. No complex dependencies or over-engineered features.

“The full end-to-end implementation can be completed in just a couple of hours,” Glasscare’s team notes. “It’s deliberately lightweight.”

That meant rapid deployment across new markets without disruption to existing claims management systems. And once live, minimal maintenance required.

Dotdigital’s technical team supported the international rollout, helping navigate setup complexities in each country.

“Dotdigital were instrumental in getting the product off the ground internationally,” the Glasscare team says. “Their knowledge and after-sales service were second to none, particularly in navigating the complexities of setting up the service in each country.”

Support that scales with you

“Our Customer Success Manager has consistently provided outstanding support,” the team says. “Always available, responsive, and proactive in ensuring success. Nothing has ever been too much trouble.” That consistency matters when deploying AI-driven automation across borders with different regulatory requirements in each market.

Dotdigital were instrumental in getting the product off the ground internationally. Their knowledge and after-sales service were second to none. Our Customer Success Manager has consistently provided outstanding support. Always available, responsive, and proactive in ensuring success. Nothing has ever been too much trouble.

Graham Clarke, Managing Director, Glasscare Ltd

Proven at serious scale

The combination of AI damage recognition and SMS automation delivered measurable impact:

• Used more than 2 million times, the service is proven at serious scale
• Successful deployment in over 10 countries, including Australia, the US, Italy, Denmark, the UK and Ireland
• Increased repair percentages, helping companies consistently meet insurer targets
• Fewer failed visits, engineers arrived fully informed about damage type and repair requirements
• Reduced cost per claim through faster assessment and better resource allocation
• Improved customer satisfaction, driven by immediate engagement and faster resolution

“One customer summed it up: “Submitting damage photos instantly saved me days of waiting. My windscreen was replaced within 24 hours.”
For insurers, remote validation became reliable. For service providers, scheduling became more accurate. And for customers, the whole experience just worked better.

Glasscare continues to expand

Glasscare continues to expand its AI-powered claims platform internationally. They’re currently testing WhatsApp integration for customers in South Africa, exploring richer multimedia engagement alongside SMS.

With a proven model combining intelligent damage assessment and automated customer communication, they’re looking forward to working with Dotdigital as they scale into several new markets.

Key takeaways

• AI-driven automation needs simple customer engagement, SMS provides that frictionless gateway
• Remote damage assessment scales when the tech is lightweight, rapid deployment across markets becomes possible
• Intelligence and simplicity win together, sophisticated AI analysis paired with straightforward customer communication
• Partnership matters at scale, consistent technical support enables confident international expansion

Harlow Timber Group isn’t your average timber & associated products supplier. Based in the Midlands, with a wide network nationally covering all your timber needs. From various Timber Centre stores, to a multi million pound growing E-commerce business along with dedicated Timber Systems, Stables & Shelters and Manufacturing departments.
Their marketing team? Just two people. That means every campaign has to count, and every channel has to prove its worth.

Rebecca Bailey at 8 Group first connected with Harlow Timber and suggested trialling a direct mail campaign. But rather than traditional print marketing, they built the entire strategy on Dotdigital’s platform – using its segmentation, automation, and data capabilities to power personalized direct mail through integration partners ZAP~POST and 8 Group. What began as a small test soon shaped into a full cross-channel re-engagement strategy.

A cold audience and a sceptical business

For Harlow Timber, the brief was simple enough: wake up dormant e-commerce contacts and get people shopping again, online and in-branch.

The reality was trickier. Their ERP made data segmentation a nightmare. Trade and retail customers needed different messages, but often sat in the same data pool. The team had to work around complex audience models while tracking results at branch level with little more than a pen and paper.

Convincing the wider business to spend money on print wasn’t easy. There was a strong belief that it no longer paid back, and with limited time and staff, the marketing team needed to keep things simple, repeatable, and worth the effort.

The combination of tactical segmentation and improved branding made this campaign a success. We’ve finally proven that print can work – when done right.

Holly Unwin, Group Marketing Manager, Harlow Timber

Proving data-driven print can deliver

The numbers spoke for themselves. The campaign brought 600 inactive customers back into the fold from a pool of 8,000 – a 7.5% reactivation rate that exceeded all expectations.

The e-commerce re-engagement segment delivered average order values north of £500 – well above their typical AOV of £200–£300, proving that dormant customers weren’t just coming back, they were spending more.

Branch campaigns captured six tracked orders across branches, each between £500–£1,000, delivering a 3:1 ROI on the print investment.

Meanwhile, the warm-lead nurturing continued to deliver: a Black Friday email (triggered by the direct mail engagement data flowing through Dotdigital) earned an eye-popping 88% open rate among 12,000 contacts.

Beyond the raw stats, the campaign changed perceptions internally. Print was no longer a risky spend – it was a measurable, targeted part of their marketing mix, powered by the same data and automation capabilities as their email program.

Harlow Timber’s marketing team is exploring “thank you” campaigns sent by mail to customers post-purchase.

For marketers, the takeaway is clear: when you use Dotdigital to power both digital and physical channels with the same data, you can track every touchpoint – no guesswork required.