Arena Racing Company grows CRM revenue by 79% after switch from Salesforce to Dotdigital

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

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

When the platform gets in the way

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

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

Something had to change.

Finding a platform that fit

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

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

Phase 1: An onboarding that set the tone

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

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

Phase 2: Automations built for how people actually behave

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

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

Phase 3: Centralized data that makes the full picture visible

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

Fresh Relevance: Fuelling automation with thousands of new contacts

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

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

What two people can do with the right platform

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

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

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

Bigger ambitions, better foundations

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

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

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