Parkdean Resorts grows revenue 20% with a 20% smaller marketing team

Two years ago, Bradley Stokoe’s line manager called an unscheduled meeting. No agenda beyond the word “meeting.” Fifteen minutes of silence before he found out why: two members of his six-person team, more than 20% of it, were being made redundant. The CRM team was outperforming every target at the time, heading straight into Black Friday.

“How am I supposed to deliver more when I’ve suddenly got less?” Bradley remembers thinking. The commercial targets didn’t move. As CRM Manager for Parkdean Resorts, the UK’s leading holiday park operator with more than 60 destinations from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Bradley was already running a full-service team sending close to 100 million emails a year across 150-plus automated campaigns. What came next wasn’t about working longer hours. It was a complete rebuild of how the team worked, with Dotdigital at the center of it.

The challenge was clear

Every campaign built from scratch

Once the shock settled, the team filled a Miro board with everything they worked on and asked a hard question: what was taking the most time, and what could be cut without losing impact? The answer was obvious fast. Every campaign was fully bespoke, new images, new copy, new design, every time. Once an email sent, that work was gone for good.

Consistency was accidental

Fonts and button styles stayed on-brand, but beyond that, customers had no consistent cues for what a Parkdean email was asking of them. A resourcing problem had quietly become a clarity problem, and a scalability problem too.

Building a modular system that scales

A small, deliberately limited content library

The team turned to Dotdigital’s custom-saved content blocks to build a modular design system: four hero blocks, eight body blocks, three footer banners. Nothing more. Each block was stress-tested across device types, screen sizes, and dark mode, and paired with a ready-made Photoshop template for fast image production. When the team considers adding a new block today, they retire one to keep the library lean. “More options doesn’t always create better results,” as the team learned. Fewer, better-tested components, saved once and reused everywhere, meant simpler testing and more consistent results, whether the send was a one-off, a triggered abandonment email, or an automated anniversary message.

Personalization that layers on top

The library became the foundation for something sharper: dynamic content overlaying browsing data, search behavior, and abandonment data on top of booking data, personalizing down to 65 park types across 13 regions. Dotdigital’s link grouping feature let the team tag individual links inside otherwise generic content, quietly building data around preference signals, accommodation type, budget, region, time of year, without ever asking the customer directly. Those signals fed straight back into the dynamic content rules driving future sends.

We lost 20% of our team overnight, right before Black Friday. Dotdigital’s modular tools let us rebuild everything faster and smarter than before, and grow revenue 20% in the process.

Bradley Stokoe, Parkdean Resorts

Results

“The result: a 90% increase in conversion rate among non-booker audiences in a single year, without sending a single additional email.

Not doing anything different, not targeting different people, just making sure the content we give them is relevant.”

A deeper layer with Liquid

The team’s most technical addition was Liquid, Dotdigital’s built-in scripting language, pulling live booking and search data straight into email copy. A generic “book your next holiday” message became specific: a countdown to an upcoming trip, a direct link to manage that exact booking, available upgrades, activity booking windows, all generated automatically from data already sitting in the platform. Bradley credits Dotdigital’s team for helping the group get comfortable with it.

The same logic rescued abandoned browsing sessions. Instead of letting an abandonment journey dead-end into standard sales emails, the team used Liquid scripting to resurface a customer’s most recent search inside emails they were already sending. No new segment, no new journey, just one reused banner querying live browse data. That single addition lifted click-to-conversion rates by 15% and delivered-to-conversion reates by 9%.

Looking ahead

Two years on, the team treats the framework as a living system, not a finished one. Every quarter, they repeat the exercise that started it all: laying out the last quarter’s creative, checking brand alignment, and honestly assessing which content blocks still earn their place. They track shifts beyond their own campaigns too, like AI-generated inbox summaries and reduced Apple Mail previews, then leave each session with a fresh testing plan built on Dotdigital’s testing tools. Recent tests, comparing button CTAs against hyperlinks against image-overlay copy, have overturned the team’s own assumptions more than once.

“If you’re ever asked to do 20% more with 20% less,” Bradley told the room at Dotdigital Summit, “you could end up creating something better than you ever thought was possible.” For Parkdean, that meant turning Dotdigital from an email tool into the engine behind every personalized send, one saved block, one Liquid rule, one quarterly review at a time.