SkateHut targets segmented audiences with personalized email messaging

SkateHut got its start as a small family business in 2007, and is now one of the United Kingdom’s leading skate retailers.

The company sells an extensive range of extreme sports goods — including skateboards, scooters, bikes, and everything in between — all under one roof.

Challenge

As 2019 drew to a close, SkateHut’s marketing team was in search of a more progressive platform to take their email marketing efforts to the next level. There were two main issues that the retailer needed to address.

For starters, because SkateHut sells a wide variety of products, it also has a broad audience base. The retailer needed a solution that would allow it to easily segment its customers into smaller groups and deliver personalized, relevant marketing messages. Although SkateHut’s existing provider had this functionality, the team found the platform challenging to navigate, requiring technical knowledge for even simple functions.

Secondly, SkateHut wanted a solution that would enable them to more effectively target new and existing customers. Their established process for sending emails was time-consuming, which was less than ideal in a fast-paced ecommerce environment. This lag was especially problematic during the winter holiday season, SkateHut’s busiest time of the year. The team found themselves needing support from their provider for straightforward tasks, which then delayed them from getting important messages to their customers in a timely fashion.

SkateHut knew that their team — and business — would benefit from a solution that empowered them to do more.

Solution

SkateHut made the decision to partner with Dotdigital in February 2020 — and right away, the team was impressed by the seamless implementation process.

“It was so great to see that Dotdigital did everything they could to make sure we didn’t miss any business opportunities during the onboarding process,” says Nichola Lund-Yates, Marketing Manager at SkateHut. “For me, that was a big sign that we made the right move.”

SkateHut employed a range of Dotdigital solutions to solve its challenges. Using the segmentation builder, it was able to divide its customers into smaller groups with shared characteristics. The team also used Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) modeling to create highly specific audience segments based on how much customers spent and how frequently they shopped. By understanding its customers on a more granular level, SkateHut was able to tailor its messaging to ensure it was delivering relevant content to the right groups.

“We knew that a targeted email to 100 people can be more successful than a generic one to thousands of people — and we discovered that it could easily be pulled together with Dotdigital,” adds Nichola.
SkateHut also used Dotdigital’s marketing automation tool to run triggered email campaigns — enabling the team to keep their subscribers engaged with timely messages. By eliminating manual, repetitive tasks, the solution also freed up the team’s time so they could focus on their strategic goals.

Results

Today, SkateHut is creating campaigns that are more powerful, personalized, and relevant to its customers. Since its partnership began more than a year ago, they’ve seen their open rates grow from an average of 13% to 22%.

“As part of our onboarding process, we were able to narrow down our database and trim out old contacts who we were needlessly sending emails to,” Nichola says. “Dotdigital ensured we were targeting relevant people from the start, which helped drive engagement.”
SkateHut has also seen a 35% increase in revenue from March 2020 to March 2021, compared to the same time period the year prior. An overall rise in online shopping has played a significant part in this increase, but the team doesn’t doubt that their marketing efforts also contributed to the jump.

Over the past year, SkateHut has also seen a 100% increase in email-attributed website traffic. This shows that customers are engaging with SkateHut and recognizing its personalized marketing messages as content that offers added value.

In the months to come, SkateHut plans to continue expanding its customer segments with targeted, Dotdigital-powered campaigns. The retailer has set its sights on expanding its product lines, and expects its customer base to grow as a result. Taking a more personalized approach to email marketing will be integral to SkateHut’s continued success — and the team looks forward to using Dotdigital to achieve just that.

In addition, SkateHut is moving its website over to ecommerce platform Magento, and the team is thrilled to have a marketing automation provider that seamlessly integrates with their new site. Nichola notes that “Having our platforms work together is massive for SkateHut and as a marketing team, we’re excited to see how that will enable us to better engage our customers.”