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.”
