Cornishware sees a surge in orders after embracing email marketing

For nearly a century, Cornishware has been brightening the kitchens of Britain’s cooks, bakers, and tea makers with stunning striped pottery. First produced in 1924, the ceramicware uses a technique that involves scraping blue slip away from the surface to reveal white bands of clay beneath. Today, Cornishware continues to attract a loyal following from deep in the West Country. The brand even nabbed a spot on the 50 most iconic British designs in the Design Museum in London.

Challenge

Cornishware had been putting spend into social media, but the brand’s knowledge of its audience suggested email was the ideal channel. One of Cornishware’s most frequent buyers were women of an older demographic — more likely to read an email than scroll on Instagram or TikTok.

They saw that while social posts and ads were powerful tools for raising awareness, a more cross-channel approach would be important for driving sales. What the organization lacked was data and the power to automate and customize campaigns to its targets.

With every reason to believe that email marketing would deliver a better return on investment, the kitchenware brand made the decision to upgrade their marketing suite to Dotdigital. Tom&Co., their Magento ecommerce agency, helped them through the process. After a smooth onboarding, Dotdigital data soon showed that email is king for Cornishware’s return on investment.

Solution

For a small brand that sells internationally, running email campaigns manually has the potential to overwhelm resources. But Dotdigital’s list management capabilities, dynamic personalization features, data management, and automations enabled complex email flows that could run in the background, allowing the Cornishware staff more time to attend to strategic work.

Location-specific address books allow Cornishware to segment their audiences and send localized versions of campaigns at the right times within different time zones to their UK and EU customers. And Dotdigital’s dynamic content functionality makes it possible to do things like re-engage customers who have abandoned their carts and could use a reminder of the item they left behind.

The Tom&Co. team asserts that this level of responsiveness and detail is what wins when it comes to customer emails. “You want customers to know that you care about them, and that’s what personalization does. Dotdigital is the perfect platform for enabling that. It allows you to create content that’s tailored to customers and boost brand loyalty.”

The reporting tool has helped Cornishware unlock deeper insights on their audience segments. Since Dotdigital integrates with Magento, it indicates what time a customer placed an order and the items they browsed. Cornishware then used that information to send stronger, tailored campaigns.

Results

Email marketing is one of the most successful marketing tools used by the team at Cornishware. “As soon as we send out an email campaign, everything is gone within minutes!”

By using Dotdigital to optimize campaigns around popular holidays and get the word out on promotions, Cornishware has seen a surge in open and click-through rates. Unique clicks rose by 30% and engagement has increased by 145% in the past six months.

The simplicity of Dotdigital has also enabled the team to send more emails. From October 2021 to March 2022, they sent a total of 1.3 million emails — a 48% increase from the previous six months due to efficiencies gained from implementing Dotdigital. Cornishware has generated awareness around new product launches and seen massive spikes in sales revenue after each campaign, so much so that they had to scale back the frequency of them so the production team could keep up with the demand.

Looking ahead

For customers looking to get their hands on the brand’s timeless designs, there is good news: Cornishware has a slew of new product launches coming up in the next few months. The team is eager to harness the power of Dotdigital to promote their new wares and forge even stronger connections with their audience.

“Dotdigital is a very comprehensive platform, with capabilities that run the gamut from creating your own template to automating campaigns. If you’re a small business like us, it’s the perfect platform to connect with your customers.”