Marshalls Garden grows revenue from email marketing by 61% to £1.7 million with Dotdigital

Marshalls Gardens is a UK online specialist gardening retailer that is run by gardeners for gardeners. Founded over 75 years ago, the company’s heritage and expertise is the supply of vegetable seeds and plants, including seed potatoes, onion sets, fruit plants and trees, to grow-your-own gardens.

Making the move from mass email marketing to hyper-personalized automations

Gardening is one of the most popular pastimes in the UK and Marshalls Gardens aims to provide a service to everyone. From green-fingered growers to those who are starting their horticultural journey, with little or no experience of what to grow, when and where, whether in a garden, balcony or allotment.

Pre-ordering garden supplies online makes perfect sense, as it ensures customers receive their seeds and plants at the optimal time to give them every chance of success in the growing season ahead. However, the changeable nature of the British weather and shifting seasons, as well as the emergence of new varieties of plants, means that Marshalls Gardens needs to be proactive in sharing its knowledge with customers to ensure they make the right choices.

Email is the main channel the company uses to share time-sensitive information with its customers, but it lacked the personal touch. Paul King at Marshalls Gardens explains, “When I joined Marshalls Garden in 2022 the email strategy was to send every campaign to every contact on the database. The bounce rate was high and open rates were low. One of my first tasks was deciding the best way to segment the database so that customers only received relevant content.”

Gaining a deep understanding of customer buying and browsing behaviour

Marshalls Gardens turned to Dotdigital to help develop a strategy to introduce segmentation, personalization and automation into its email marketing. Success in gardening and email marketing requires the right groundwork. The first step was to segment the customer database into the company’s four main areas of business – Grow Your Own, Ornamental, Seeds and Gardening (compost, feeds, tools etc). Identifying buying behaviour was made easier through an integration between Dotdigital and the Shopify system being used by the company.

To improve the quality of new customer data and to encourage greater engagement, the Dotdigital Professional Services team built a Customer Preference Centre. The page on the website encourages visitors to share details about themselves, their type of gardening and information they would like to receive.

A new email strategy was developed to deliver hyper-personalized product recommendations and care advice via campaigns and automations. Paul adds: “At this point, we also decided to move our cart abandonment campaigns from Shopify to Dotdigital, so that we could execute and manage our entire email strategy through a single platform.”

Today, Marshalls Gardens sends a wide range of emails that include personalized product recommendations, post-purchase advice on how to care for crops, cart and browse abandonment, and replenishment reminders, as well as its monthly email newsletter. Paul explains: “We are now able to recommend products we think the customer will like, along with the quantity they need, based on the size of the space they have told us they are working with.”

Segmentation, personalization and automation see revenue grow to £1.7 million

This proactive way of working is also allowing Marshalls Gardens to run follow-up campaigns, with decision nodes dictating if a contact is eligible for a resend, or whether they are enrolled in an automation and don’t need to be followed up within the original programme.

The impact has been impressive with Marshalls Gardens growing its email list by more than 44,000 contacts in the last 12 months. By engaging and sharing its expertise with more customers the company has also seen a huge increase in revenue from its email activity, with a 61% increase to £1.7 million in its 2023/2024 financial year.