Abbey England turns one-off emails into always-on revenue

About Abbey England

Abbey England has been supplying the raw materials behind other people’s craft since 1982. Leather, hardware, textiles, and tools go out to saddle and bridle makers across the equestrian world, still the core of the business, but the range (over 20,000 products) stretches into fashion, pet products, medical services, and film. The company has held a Royal Warrant since 1995, supplying first the late Queen and now King Charles.

It’s a family business, now in its third generation, with a team of around 48 and a turnover of roughly £5 million. Marketing runs on a team of three: Ishbel Watson (Marketing Manager) and two colleagues.

No safety net for lost sales, no real view of the customer

Abbey England moved to Dotdigital from Mailchimp, which could send newsletters but couldn’t show what they were worth. For a business that judges marketing on return, email needed to become a revenue channel, not just a way to announce things.

• No automation at all, just planned newsletter sends
• No way to recover a sale once someone left the site without buying
• Reporting stuck at opens and clicks, with no way to connect activity to revenue
• A standalone platform with zero crossover to the website or customer data
• Manual, error-prone reporting pulled from their internal system, which only stores a single contact field rather than first and last names, and was out of date within a day of running it

None of that gave a three-person team a real view of who they were talking to, or a way to catch the sales that were quietly slipping away.

Building sophistication into a team of three

Phase 1: Catching the sale that used to just disappear

The clearest gap was abandoned cart. Before Dotdigital, Abbey England had no way to follow up with someone who filled a basket and left. Once the automation went live, that changed completely: it now brings in an average of £15k a month. Ishbel and her team are candid that not every recovered cart converts, but as she puts it, it’s part of the sales funnel now in a way it never was before, and there’s no reason to stop something that’s clearly adding revenue that didn’t exist a year ago.

Phase 2: A single view of the customer

Next came getting data to talk to itself. Customers now tell Abbey England their sector at registration, feeding straight into Dotdigital and unlocking industry-specific guides and landing pages. Order history, browse behavior, and last purchase date all sit in one place instead of a manual report someone has to run and immediately watch go stale. Forms and surveys moved in-house too, replacing a clunky combination of separate tools with something that feeds data directly into the platform.

Phase 3: Spotting the segments, then automating for them

With better data flowing in, Ishbel noticed two groups showing up again and again at registration: hobbyists who needed guidance more than a sales call, and a growing wave of pet product manufacturers who didn’t know where to start on a 20,000-product site. She built tailored automated programs for both, pointing each group toward the guides and products actually relevant to them instead of the whole catalog at once. A welcome program, a customer loyalty program, and a lapsed customer program rounded out the six automations now running quietly in the background.

Personalization is the newest layer on top, starting with recommended products in the welcome program and across the website, with more pages to follow. That includes product personalization blocks on the cart page and across the site, as well as a subscriber pop-up banner that has taken daily new subscribers from 1-2 to 7-9.

Before, we couldn’t segment to that level of detail, so it was more a case of sending messages and hoping. Now we can say, with confidence, this group of customers has told us they’re pet manufacturers, we know they’ve bought certain products, so we’re going to send them this campaign. It’s given us a lot more control back and enables us to keep our communications relevant to the end customer.

Ishbel Watson, Marketing Manager, Abbey England

Revenue that runs itself

• Abandoned cart automation now brings in an average of £15k a month, up from nothing. That’s around £180k a year in business that wasn’t being recovered before
• Manual customer reporting, once a task that was already out of date by the next morning, now happens automatically, saving around 5 hours a week
• Six automated programs now run without daily input from the team

Beyond the numbers, Ishbel reports open rates that keep the brand front of mind even without an instant click, which she’s used to make the case internally that email is doing more than the last-click numbers suggest.

Looking ahead

• Using the new personalization features to push abandoned cart revenue toward £20k a month
• Rolling recommended products out across more landing pages
• Building browse abandonment, which isn’t live yet
• Refining the lapsed customer program to segment by individual purchase frequency rather than one flat 90-day rule
• Exploring SMS later in the year, starting with updating the phone number field to capture mobiles specifically

“We’ve gone from sending messages and hoping to knowing exactly who we’re talking to and why,” Ishbel says. “There’s so much more we can do with the data we’ve got now.”