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.

Customer segmentation in retail has changed in recent years. Where it once meant grouping customers into broad demographic buckets like “female, 18–25,” it’s now far more dynamic, shaped by things like behavior, intent, and real-time signals.

That shift reflects a wider change in marketing. Generic, one-size-fits-all campaigns are being replaced by more personalized experiences that speak to individual needs and behaviors. Research from McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions, setting a clear benchmark for how brands need to show up.

But personalization only works when you’ve got clear customer segments to work from. It helps retailers group audiences in meaningful ways so they can prioritize high-value customers, re-engage lapsed buyers, and focus spend where it actually drives growth.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) have made this easier by bringing data together in one place, making it usable in real time, and simplifying the creation of accurate, useful customer segments. So, segmentation has gone from a nice-to-have optimization to something that directly supports growth across acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

So, we know that segmenting customers is important. Let’s take a look at real-world examples of retailers who used smart segmentation strategies to deliver better results.

A real-world example of successful segmentation: Mountain Khakis

What needed solving

Heading into Black Friday, Mountain Khakis needed to strike a balance between driving strong sales and clearing excess inventory without relying on broad discounts that could dilute brand value.

The segmentation strategy behind the campaign

Mountain Khakis segmented their database by customer value, gender, and purchase recency. This allowed them to deliver personalized Black Friday marketing that matched each segment’s likelihood of converting. By tailoring both creative and offer strength to each segment’s characteristics, Mountain Khakis ensured their most valuable customers felt recognized while efficiently allocating promotional budget across the database.

Results

• 49% year-over-year increase in revenue during Black Friday
• 47% increase in total customers transacting compared to the previous year

Read more: How Mountain Khakis turned $600,000 (AUD) of excess inventory into a 150% revenue increase

Step-by-step guide to segmenting customers

Before you build your targeted marketing campaigns, you first need to segment your data. Here’s how to do it. 

Step 1: Define your objectives

Start with what you’re trying to achieve, because that will shape everything else. If retention is your focus, you’ll want to look at things like purchase recency and engagement patterns. If acquisition is the priority, focus on your best existing customers and use those traits to build lookalike audiences.

Step 2: Audit available data

Take stock of the data you already collect and where it lives. This could include:

• Point-of-sale systems
• Ecommerce platforms
• Email service providers
• Loyalty programs
• Customer service systems
• Social media

Identify gaps in your data collection and prioritize which additional data points would most support your objectives.

Step 3: Unify your customer data

This is where many retailers run into challenges. When customer data is spread across disconnected systems, it’s hard to build segments that reflect the full customer relationship. For example, someone who shops both in-store and online may appear as two separate profiles rather than a single connected view.

CDPs help solve this by bringing everything together into a single unified customer profile. They combine touchpoints across channels and keep profiles up to date as customers interact with your brand. Without that unified view, segmentation is limited to whatever sits within individual systems, rather than the full picture of the customer.

Step 4: Identify initial segments

This is where the fun starts. You can start with segments that balance business impact with how easy they are to activate, especially if time or resources are limited.

Here are some common starting points:

Value-based segments

• High lifetime value customers (top 10-20% of spending)
• High potential customers (frequent engagement, growing spend)
• At-risk high-value customers (historically valuable but declining activity)

Behavioral segments

• Recent purchasers (bought within 30-60 days)
• Lapsed customers (previously active but no purchase in 6-12 months)
• Browser non-buyers (regular site visits, no conversions)
• Category enthusiasts (repeated purchases in specific product categories)

Lifecycle segments

• New customers (first purchase within 90 days)
• Developing customers (2-3 purchases, establishing patterns)
• Loyal customers (consistent repeat purchase behavior)
• Dormant customers (no activity in 12+ months)

Don’t try to build every possible segment at once. Choose 5-8 segments that support your objectives and have sufficient size to justify targeted campaigns. You can always expand your segments later.

Step 5: Build your segments

Use your CDP to define clear criteria for each segment. The more specific you are, the more reliable your targeting will be.

For example:

• Lapsed customers: no purchase in 180 days and at least 2 previous purchases
• High value customers: top 20% of lifetime spend or average order value above $X
• Category enthusiasts: 3+ purchases in a single category, or that category makes up more than 60% of their total spend

Step 6: Develop your strategies and activate

For each segment,  decide how you’re going to speak to them. That includes your messaging, positioning, and the channels you’ll use. This should all come back to the data you’ve used to define the segment in the first place.

 Once you’ve got your strategy in place, it’s time to activate it. Most CDPs connect directly with your marketing tools, so you can push segments into campaigns without a lot of manual effort. It’s also worth setting up automated segment updates so customers move between segments as their behavior changes, without manual updates. 

Remember, your segments shouldn’t stand still. They should evolve with your business. For example: 

• Seasonal brands might add weather-based segments
• Retailers expanding into new categories may introduce product affinity segments
• Growing businesses often add geographic segments as they enter new markets

What do I need to get started with customer segmentation?

Many retailers understand why segmentation matters, but sometimes struggle to actually do it. In most cases, it comes down to data and infrastructure. If your data isn’t connected or usable, it’s hard to put segmentation into practice effectively.

The data challenge: unified customer profiles

One of the biggest challenges with segmentation is still fragmented customer data. In most retail organizations, customer information lives across multiple disconnected systems:

• Your POS system knows what customers bought in-store
• Your ecommerce platform knows their online browsing and purchase behavior
• Your email system tracks opens and clicks
• Your loyalty program holds a points balance and a tier status
• Your customer service platform logs support interactions

Each system holds valuable information, but none of them gives you the complete picture. Without unified customer profiles, segmentation ends up based on fragments rather than the whole relationship. You might identify someone as a “lapsed online customer” while missing that they’ve been actively shopping in-store. Or, a website visitor might be treated as a “new customer” even though they’ve been shopping with you across different channels for years.

Customer data platforms can help solve this. They pull data from different systems, match records using identifiers like email addresses, phone numbers, loyalty IDs, and device data, and continuously update each profile as new interactions happen.

Final thoughts

Customer segmentation has moved from a “nice to have” to a core part of retail marketing.

Across the examples in this guide, the pattern is consistent: better segmentation leads to better performance, stronger customer value, and more efficient marketing.

If you’re looking to move beyond broad demographic segments and one-size-fits-all campaigns, the focus is:

• Start by getting your data in one place
• Build a small number of high-impact segments tied to your goals
• Test what resonates, and refine as you go

 Ready to get started with customer segmentation? Talk to Lexer today

Kat is Lexer’s resident Marketing Manager, obsessed with helping retail and ecommerce brands across AUS and the US hit their biggest growth goals. She’s all about explaining how to turn messy customer data into clean, measurable strategies that actually move the needle. You’ll find her writing on everything from using AI to grow your business to boosting LTV without breaking the bank.

About Lexer

Lexer is a customer data platform built for retail and ecommerce brands. It consolidates customer data from point-of-sale, ecommerce, email, loyalty, and other systems into a single unified profile per customer, then makes that data actionable through segmentation and direct integration with marketing execution tools. Retail and ecommerce teams use Lexer to understand who their best customers are, identify who’s at risk of lapsing, and activate both groups successfully.

For over 70 years, Max Spielmann has been helping UK customers turn their memories into something they can hold. As part of the Timpson Group, Max Spielmann specializes in photo printing, personalized gifts, and same-day services across stores in supermarkets and high streets nationwide.

When Alannah Sneyd joined as Digital Marketing Manager in August 2024, she knew there was work to do.

The challenges were clear

Legacy database dragging performance down

Hundreds of thousands of inactive contacts from in-store photo kiosks were inflating email send volumes but contributing almost nothing to engagement or revenue.

Batch-and-blast approach

Segmentation was based solely on open rates (increasingly unreliable), with a “sales are down, let’s send another email” mentality rather than strategic engagement.

Generic automations with zero personalization

Browse abandonment didn’t show customers the products they’d viewed. Welcome emails didn’t check if someone had already purchased before asking for reviews.

No dedicated owner

Email had been managed as an afterthought rather than a strategic channel.

For a small team managing marketing across multiple Timpson Group brands, it was time for a change.

Rebuilding email from the ground up

Working closely with her Dotdigital Customer Success Manager, Alannah took a phased approach to transforming Max Spielmann’s email program.

Phase 1: Getting the data right

The first priority was audience quality. Alannah discovered that engagement from contacts acquired through in-store photo kiosks was dramatically lower than those who signed up via the website.

The solution:

• Introduced double opt-in for all new kiosk sign-ups to ensure quality over quantity
• Rebuilt segments based on click behavior, browsing activity, and recency – not just opens
• Removed long-term inactive kiosk customers, reducing average newsletter sends from 323,000 to 63,000

“People get nervous about reducing volume, but with the right insights in place, testing it on a handful of newsletters is often enough to show the impact,” Alannah notes.

Phase 2: Automation with actual intelligence

Next came a complete overhaul of Max Spielmann’s automations.
Key improvements:

Browse abandonment that actually works

Customers now see the exact products they browsed, not generic category links.

Extended abandonment series

A follow-up email added to the browse abandonment journey.

Welcome series with logic

Added purchase checks so customers who’d already bought didn’t get irrelevant “leave a review” emails, and those who didn’t purchase received a reminder to use their offer.

“It was a mix of everything – technical setup, design refresh, messaging, and adding sophisticated rules that just weren’t there before,” Alannah explains.

The team also tested continuously throughout the year to understand what resonated before peak season.

Phase 3: Smarter seasonal strategy

With cleaner data and better automations in place, Max Spielmann approached peak season differently – sending more strategically while actually reducing overall volume.

“Even with additional sends during peak, volume was down year on year,” Alannah says. “It’s about sending to the right people, not just the most people.”

For Christmas (when December 23rd is consistently their biggest day), the team pulled back on discounting and focused on convenience messaging for last-minute shoppers.

Working with her Dotdigital Customer Success Manager made the transformation possible, Alannah says “with our Customer Success Manager’s support, we’ve been able to achieve things that would normally require a much bigger team or agency support. The relationship is more like a consultant-client dynamic – I come with challenges, and he gives me the blueprint to execute.”

With our Customer Success Manager’s support, we’ve been able to achieve things that would normally require a much bigger team or agency support. The relationship is more like a consultant-client dynamic – I come with challenges, and he gives me the blueprint to execute.

Alannah Sneyd
Digital Marketing Manager

The numbers tell the story

Peak period 2025:

• Total email revenue increased 41% YoY
• Email sends reduced 63% YoY
• Open rates increased from 35% to 42%
• Click-through rate improved from 1.58% to 3.17%

Automation performance:

• Revenue up 78% YoY
• Automations now account for 38% of total email revenue, up from 30%
• Conversion rate increased from 17% to 37%

Impact beyond the metrics

The efficiency story resonated with leadership too. “Senior people in the business like efficiency. The fact the results have been driven from fewer sends – and we didn’t have to spend more – that went down really well. Especially when other channels are getting more expensive year on year, having email working better is just a good story internally.”

Looking ahead

With solid foundations in place, Alannah is eyeing bigger opportunities:

Unlocking in-store data

“We could almost replicate all the campaigns we’ve got just around those kiosk machines if we sorted out the data.”

Multi-channel expansion

SMS and WhatsApp remain untapped. “For customers using their phone to get photos onto the kiosk, it makes sense to explore.”

“Dotdigital has been really good for us,” Alannah notes. “The drag-and-drop builder means I can do things myself. The automation builder with visual notes means I can document why I built things a certain way. For a generalist marketer managing multiple brands, that matters.”

Anthem Publishing runs six core magazine brands. With titles like Vegan Food & Living, Women’s Running, Classic Pop, and Colouring Heaven, they’re all about helping people dive deeper into their passions. Each brand has its own editorial site, shop, newsletter, and community.

Anthem has a small team wearing a lot of hats. Digital Editors double as Client Managers. Marketing Managers handle everything from Black Friday campaigns to automations.

A disconnected web experience

The editorial websites had basic article recommendations built by developers, but they weren’t always serving the right content. Recipe lovers sometimes get news articles instead of more recipes.

With the business relying on banners for advertising as well as promoting relevant content, there wasn’t enough banner space to go around. There was no easy way to promote magazine subscriptions without showing the same offers to existing subscribers. Marketing and the Ad Sales team were getting frustrated.

Once on the site, the team was reliant on text links in articles to generate leads. Pop-ups and forms were separate, rather than embedded, with the extra step causing traffic to drop off.

And with separate editorial and shop websites, connecting the two took manual work.

High-effort email builds

On top of managing the website, the team was building three email newsletters a week for Vegan Food & Living alone, plus weekly sends for other brands. Every article link in the emails was manually chosen, which was very time-consuming.

The team needed a solution that could deliver more personalized experiences across web and email, across multiple brands, without scaling headcount.

The solution

Dotdigital personalization provided the perfect solution for both the marketing and editorial teams. Rachel Smith, Digital Editor on Vegan Food & Living, summed up the appeal: “We’re quite a small company with really limited resources. Anything that helps us boost our traffic without us having to do lots of extra work was really appealing.”

Tailored website experience that supports everyone’s objectives

Dedicated website banner slots with smart targeting rules were set up using location, subscriber status, and visit frequency to show a relevant message to each visitor.

New visitors now see a lead generation message encouraging them to sign up for the newsletter. Return visitors, or those already in the email list, see a subscription offer tailored to how new they are. Existing subscribers never see subscription offers.

The marketing team can tailor the right content to everyone. No more negotiating with Ad Sales. Best of all, the results picked up. Brands that hadn’t converted from web banners in years started converting.

Content recommendations that keep visitors on site

Rachel replaced the old content recommendation system that appears on article pages with SmartBlocks. Rules like “last browsed” and “frequently browsed” surface more relevant article recommendations that encourage people to keep reading. Pages per visit have since jumped from 1.6 to 1.82 — a 14% increase.

This approach has also been used to keep sponsors happy. A bespoke recommendations block was built for an energy company who sponsor a category on the site. The block only shows on their articles, keeping readers engaged with their content and boosting reach without constant manual promotion.

Email conversions on autopilot

The power of Dotdigital is being able to create a joined-up, personalized experience across all marketing channels.

Like on the website, Rachel added automated SmartBlocks to the weekly newsletters, showing articles and recipes the recipient has previously browsed on the website. Clicks from these emails drive 500 extra visits to the website per send, at very low effort.

The health newsletter now has a fully automated section where the platform picks the most relevant lead article from its catalog of thousands. It often surfaces older articles that the team had forgotten about. The result: 1,000 extra clicks per newsletter – a 30% lift on previous performance.

And it’s not just about adding personalized content into existing emails to increase conversions. A new, fully automated monthly round-up has been introduced to engaged subscribers with personalized carousels from major site categories. It launched recently and is already generating 1,000 extra website visits per send.

The Shop team also now sends two monthly automated emails showing things like “recently browsed but not bought.”

Encouraging action using countdown timers
Both the editorial and shop teams use real-time countdown timers to drive urgency. Editorial uses them for advertiser deadlines, marketing drops them into Black Friday campaigns.

As a small company with limited resources, anything that helps us boost our traffic without requiring lots of extra work is invaluable. Dotdigital has been really good for that – the SmartBlocks do the heavy lifting for us.

Rachel Smith, Digital Editor on Vegan Food & Living

Results

14% increase in pages per visit (1.6 to 1.82)
30% Increase in clicks from newsletters (1,000 additional clicks on baseline of 3,500)
5.7x ROI in the last year

For more than 70 years Essentra Components has been manufacturing precision metal and plastic products to support projects across the globe.

When Essentra’s customers get in touch, they’re often building something big – and they need the right part, fast. Keeping Essentra top‑of‑mind with buyers and engineers has been Simon Wade’s mission since he joined as E‑CRM Manager in 2020.

Back then, the list of challenges was long:

• No CRM integration or email editor meant building emails, segmentation and automation was only possible with knowledge of coding. Looking to scale his team, Simon needed a platform where non-technical marketers could be self-sufficient.
• Management of multiple brands, teams and languages was difficult – slowing down campaign roll-outs with lots of duplicated work
• Revenue opportunities missed as more B2B buyers moved online but left without making a purchase and couldn’t easily be retargeted.

On top of that, Essentra’s setup with their previous ESP was clunky and hard to scale and the support was poor, with a revolving door of account managers. “We needed a platform that works for an international B2B business without slowing us down,” says Simon.

After demoing various B2B marketing platforms, Dotdigital ticked every box, and became the foundation for a smarter, faster, more connected marketing operation.

Talking to 1.25 million contacts — in 17 languages

Five years on, Simon’s small-but-mighty team of three now speaks to 1.25 million contacts across 30 countries, in 17 different languages. That adds up to around 25 million targeted emails every year.

Here’s how…

Connected data for easier, smarter segmentation

Before Dotdigital, Essentra could only segment customers by location. Now, thanks to Dotdigital’s integration with its Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, the team can target by industry, product type, buying stage, whatever’s relevant.

“Dotdigital and Dynamics talk to each other,” says Simon. “It means we can send the right product to the right person, at exactly the right time.”

With 45,000 products in the catalogue, that matters. An alert about the right add‑on can turn a small order into a big one, and makes life easier for the customer.

Automation that saves days

Gone are the days of batch-and-blast campaigns. Now, data passes from its CRM and website to Dotdigital in real-time. This means Essentra is able to run over 1,900 automated campaigns across its multiple accounts, including 1,500+ one-off transactional emails and 400+ automated journeys.

Now the team runs fully automated customer journeys, from abandoned cart nudges and prospect follow‑ups to retention emails, all without touching a line of code.

Child accounts that make scaling simple

With child accounts set up for each region, (EMEA, Asia-Pacific, US and Canada, Brazil and Mexico) plus separate accounts for internal comms and other Essentra brands like Wixroyd and Reid Supply, the team can quickly replicate winning campaigns across markets and see what’s working with cross-account analytics.

Simon comments, “This is another reason of why Dotdigital has been really good for us, it’s allowed me to add additional accounts for reasonable cost”. This is particularly important when dealing with multiple market and languages.

“We build the master in English, send it for translation, get approval from the teams, and we’re ready to go,” Simon explains.

The next step? Using Dotdigital’s AI tool not just for subject line ideas but to automatically translate and localise content. That’s going to make the team even faster.

A partnership built on consistency and trust

Simon’s experience with Dotdigital stands in sharp contrast to his time with their old supplier, where he had four different account managers in just over a year and “no real connection.”

With Dotdigital, he’s had the same dedicated Customer Success Manager, for the entire four years since joining. That consistency has built trust and deep understanding of Essentra’s unique needs.

“It’s hugely valuable to work with someone who knows our setup inside out,” Simon says. “I’ve also been able to feed ideas into the product roadmap and I’ve seen a lot of improvements to the platform over the years”.

When we went looking for a marketing automation partner, yes, we wanted great features. But more than that, we wanted a team willing to work with us, give advice, and help a small Email marketing team with big ambitions. We found that in Dotdigital.

Simon Wade, E‑CRM Manager

Results that speak for themselves

Essentra’s email click‑throughs have surged by 52%, rising from around 57,000 to almost 87,000 unique clicks – thanks to always‑on, automated campaigns. That’s tens of thousands more customers visiting product pages, exploring the catalogue, and moving closer to purchase.

Word also got around internally. Dotdigital is now used for employee communications too.

After five years with Dotdigital, Simon’s advice to any B2B or B2C marketer is clear: “Hook Dotdigital up to your CRM, add product and order data, and watch your campaigns fly.”

Start with abandoned carts, he says. “It’s so easy to set up, and even in B2B the response surprised us. Remind people about what’s left in their cart and they come back to buy.”

Deeper integrations

The next step is to integrate their websites directly with Dotdigital to further enhance personalization, targeting and programs. After experiencing the benefits of Dotdigital’s integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, the Essentra team is also exploring using other integrations with platforms like Trustpilot, Bynder and LinkedIn to automate more of its marketing processes and provide more personalized experiences.

“When we went looking for a marketing automation partner, yes, we wanted great features. But more than that, we wanted a team willing to work with us, give advice, and help a small Email marketing team with big ambitions,” he says. “We found that in Dotdigital.”

Würth UK is a B2B company supplying essential products to the automotive, agriculture, and construction industries. Its online store stocks more than 60,000 items.

Taking a more personalized and customer-centric approach

Würth UK has consistently achieved year-on-year ecommerce growth, supported by Dotdigital’s personalization platform.

But they wanted to take their marketing to the next level.

Their current email marketing system was stifling their ambitions due to its lack of personalisation and triggered email capabilities. They also had plans to introduce a new website and wanted to create a more joined-up experience across their website and other channels.

A fully integrated ecommerce and marketing platform

The Dotdigital implementation was led by the Head of E-Business at Würth UK, Reece Smith. He explains: “We’ve been using the Dotdigital for several years and it has made a massive impact on our customer experience.”

The team has used product recommendations, dynamic banners, and data capture popovers to expand its database and deliver impressive results. Würth UK has achieved a 72.4% increase in revenue and a 12.8% gain in average order value. In the past year, its abandoned cart emails have generated almost £800k in additional income.

The experience using the platform and the proven results instilled Reece and the team with confidence that Dotdigital’s approach to marketing automation was the right fit for Würth UK. He adds, “A big advantage of Dotdigital is the fact that it is a single centralized platform. It gives us full control to create effective, highly personalized, and fully automated content and campaigns.”

Dotdigital is a vital component in our e-commerce and marketing ecosystem

Reece Smith, Head of E-Business

The sky is the limit!

“The more we can automate, the more we can focus on the things that matter to our customers and us. We see the sky as the limit with marketing automation!” adds Reece. The team is now rolling out new automated emails, including:

• Price drop alerts – letting customers know when products they’re interested in go on sale.
• Back-in-stock notifications – to ensure customers never miss out.
• Browse abandonment emails – helpful reminders about products they were interested in but have not yet purchased.

They’re also using A/B testing to fine-tune campaigns and ensure every message hits the mark.

By combining Dotdigital’s marketing automation and personalization platforms, Würth UK will take the company’s philosophy of operating as a truly multi-channel organization to the next level. “We want to help our customers throughout their lifecycle. By ensuring our core systems talk to each other and automating wherever we can, we can go further and do even more,” concludes Reece. “Dotdigital is a vital component in our ecommerce and marketing ecosystem.”