How Ultima Media keeps four B2B brands, a global audience, and 70+ automations running in sync

Ultima Media publishes four specialist B2B titles for the global automotive industry: Automotive Logistics, Automotive Manufacturing Solutions, Car Design News, and Automotive Digital Transformation, covering the full automotive value chain, from design and manufacturing through to supply chain and technology.

Each brand serves a distinct professional audience with its own content, events, and commercial objectives. They need a marketing platform sophisticated enough to hold all that together.

A platform that had stopped keeping up

Before Dotdigital, Ultima used Spotler. It had come bundled with their CRM, which made it convenient, but it hadn’t kept pace with the business. No dynamic content meant automation was barely worth building. No segmentation within the email builder, limited A/B testing, no multi-channel capability. Just static email sends, and not especially reliable ones.

“It felt like it had stayed behind the industry,” says Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data. For a team managing four brands with data coming in from multiple sources simultaneously, something had to change.

Worth noting: when Ultima went to market, cost wasn’t the driver. They knew they’d be paying more to switch. This was purely a capability decision.

Why Dotdigital?

Dotdigital made the shortlist on its own merits, but it was the acquisition of Fresh Relevance, announced mid-way through the sales process, that sealed it.

“This wasn’t a cost decision. We knew we’d be paying more. But Spotler had stopped evolving, and we needed a platform that could actually keep up with what we were trying to do. When Dotdigital came to the table with personalization across email and web, that was what sealed it for us.” James Rankin, Head of Marketing, Ultima Media

Every automation, channel and brand in sync

The sophistication of Ultima’s setup isn’t any one thing. Data flows into segments, segments feed automations, automations span multiple channels, and Dotdigital’s personalization capability ties it all together across email and web. For a B2B media business where audience quality underpins the entire commercial model, having all of that working in sync is the whole operation.

Data moves continuously between Dotdigital and their CRM, pulling in website registrations, event sign-ups, sales contacts, and form submissions in real time. Separate preference centers for each brand keep audience data clean across all four titles, and the ongoing shift from static lists to dynamic segments means marketers can now build complex audience criteria themselves, without routing every request through the data team.

“The complexity of what we’re managing across four brands used to mean everything had to come through the data team. Now marketers are building their own segments, handling cross-brand selections, suppressions, all of it, directly in the platform. That’s a genuine shift in how we operate.” Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data, Ultima Media

70+ automations, that do the heavy lifting

The automation program splits into two distinct types of work.
Always-on lifecycle automations handle welcome and onboarding series, free trial nurture sequences designed to convert trial users into paid subscribers, and re-engagement journeys running continuously in the background across all four brands.

Then there are the product-specific automations, which operate on a different logic entirely. Ultima runs more than 20 live streams and webinars a year, each triggering a reminder sequence from a week out to an hour before the event. Many of these are sponsored, so attendance is directly tied to revenue.

More recently the team has started automating lead gen nurture too. Download a sample industry report and a follow-up sequence kicks in, a journey that simply didn’t exist before Dotdigital.

Personalizing experiences across WhatsApp and web

At in-person events, delegates are on the floor, not at their desks. Hoping someone checks their email inbox during a conference session is a stretch. Getting them to notice a WhatsApp notification is not.

The team started with SMS for event reminders before moving to WhatsApp, which offered richer content and significantly higher open rates. In March 2026, WhatsApp open rates across their campaigns averaged 89%. The use case is event-focused for now, but mobile numbers are being collected across website forms and digital product registrations too, so the audience is growing. The next step is folding WhatsApp into the automation program itself, reaching contacts on a different channel when email alone hasn’t landed.

Dotdigital’s personalization capability currently powers behavioral content recommendations across all four sites and data capture for live stream registrations. The personalized automations already running are showing stronger engagement than what came before, and a structured roadmap is in place to go deeper on web personalization and dynamic content journeys this year.

Moving from Spotler, where average open rates sat at 14% and CTOR at 8%, the improvement across the board has been significant.

• Free trial to paid subscriber conversion on Car Design News has grown from 2% to 35%
• WhatsApp campaigns averaged an 89% open rate in March 2026
• Livestream automation programs are consistently hitting 47-53% open rates and 22-28% CTR
• 70+ automations now running across four brands
• 95% of data selections moving to dynamic segments

WhatsApp:

• Average open rate of 89% across campaigns in March 2026