Marshalls Gardens grows email revenue to £1.7m, then takes personalization beyond the inbox

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.

Getting more from every visit

When Paul King joined as Email Marketing Manager in 2022, every campaign went to every contact. Bounce rates were high, open rates were low. Working with Dotdigital, Paul built a Customer Preference Centre, segmented the database across four business areas, and moved cart abandonment from Shopify into Dotdigital so everything could be managed in one place. Email revenue hit £1.7m, a 61% increase.

With email performing, attention turned to a stubborn problem: AOV had been stuck at around £30 for years. Product recommendations on-site were largely static. If something went out of stock, someone had to remember to manually update them. And browse abandonment emails were nudging customers back to products that were already sold out.

“We had a lot of calls into customer service saying, ‘Why are you telling me to come back and buy something that’s out of stock?'” says Paul.

Both problems pointed to the same answer: web personalization.

Bringing Fresh Relevance into the mix

Marshalls was already on Dotdigital, so adding Fresh Relevance for advanced personalization was the natural fit. For Paul, keeping everything under one roof wasn’t just convenient, it was strategic.

“It was always going to be Fresh Relevance rather than a different platform,” he says. “We wanted one support team who could look at an issue affecting both platforms, rather than two different teams pointing fingers at each other.”
Three new tactics went live in early 2026.

Cart page upsell recommendations

The first, and standout, use case surfaces products that other customers have bought alongside whatever’s in the current cart. Where Marshalls has multi-buy offers, it gets smarter: if a customer has one pack of onion sets in their cart but the deal kicks in at two, the block flags the saving and recommends other varieties to add.

“The onion, shallot, and garlic upsell has an AOV of £71,” Paul says. “Against our standard site AOV of £30, more than double. The potato one is £50. Even the generic recommendations block has an AOV of £49.”
Across the first four months, the cart recommendations block attributed £48,800 in revenue. It’s fully dynamic, no manual curation required. “We’re not telling it to always show a compost or a feed,” Paul explains. “It’s based purely on behavior and data from previous customers.”

Browse abandonment emails with stock-aware recommendations

The browse abandonment program stays in Dotdigital, but now uses Fresh Relevance SmartBlocks to power the recommendations inside those emails. The key difference: Fresh Relevance checks stock availability in real time, so it won’t serve a sold-out product. That one change resolved the customer service issue entirely, and the numbers back it up.

Comparing January to April year-on-year, Marshalls sent 50% fewer browse abandonment emails, yet AOV from those emails rose 9% to £40.42 and revenue per email sent increased 3% to £0.66. Sending less, to better audiences, with smarter content.
“We haven’t had those calls come in since we made the change,” Paul says.

Returning visitor popover

The popover runs three versions depending on who’s returning: complete your cart, pick up where you left off, or here’s what’s popular right now. That last version matters for a seasonal business, because what someone browsed six months ago probably isn’t available today.

Early revenue has been modest compared to the cart upsell, so Paul is already iterating, testing an add-to-basket popup that fires curated recommendations before customers even reach the cart page.

“If someone adds a tree, we’d recommend the right compost, a tree support kit, and a tool,” he says. “The bones of it are built.”

Strong early signals

It’s only been live since the start of 2026, but the numbers are already making the case. The cart recommendations block has driven £48,800 in its first four months, with AOV more than doubling for customers who engage with it. Browse abandonment is doing more with less: half the sends, higher AOV, better revenue per email. And the customer service calls about out-of-stock products have stopped.

Email revenue for the financial year to date is tracking 3% ahead of last year at £1.1m, with the full year still ahead.

Paul’s next move is rolling out product-specific popups at add-to-basket across more categories, working with the horticultural team to map the right complementary products for each one. Alongside that, a tighter product range (down from 6,000 SKUs to around 1,500) is making personalization both easier to manage and more useful for customers.

“Sometimes you can be paralyzed by choice,” Paul reflects. “If you’ve got a hundred different tomato options and they’re all just round and red, cutting that down and using personalization to help someone find the right one for their space, that’s where we’re heading.”