Neal’s Yard Remedies is a UK-based health and beauty brand founded in 1981 and headquartered in Covent Garden, London. Known for its organic and ethically sourced skincare, wellness products, and herbal remedies, the company has since grown into a globally recognised brand. With stores across five continents and an expanding e-commerce presence, Neal’s Yard combines traditional apothecary principles with modern natural health innovations.

The problem:

While Neal’s Yard Remedies has a strong and growing online presence, particularly in the UK, the company realised it wasn’t taking full advantage of its online shopping experience, specifically when it came to cart abandonment. The business was sending follow-up emails to shoppers who left items in their shopping carts without finishing a purchase. However, these communications were basic and generated through a default Shopify plug-in, offering very limited personalisation, measurement capabilities, or control.

Jessica Fox, CRM manager at Neal’s Yard Remedies, explains: “We recognised that we were not maximising the sales potential of our cart abandonment emails and went in search of a purpose-built platform. This would give us the control over the design, content and scheduling of emails, as well as the ongoing performance monitoring that we needed to succeed.”

Understanding that effective cart abandonment emails could significantly improve the company’s conversion rates and boost revenue, the team began the search for a more advanced solution that could deliver results through better customisation, workflow automation, and strategic design, which is where Dotdigital came in.

The solution:

Neal’s Yard Remedies turned to Dotdigital for help in developing a more refined, data-driven cart abandonment strategy. Having previously worked with Dotdigital on an automated email campaign for product replenishment – which successfully re-engaged customers when they were likely to need a refill – the brand was confident that the partnership could be deepened to improve performance across other key touchpoints.

Jessica adds: “We handed over all the technical implementation to Dotdigital’s Professional Services team and our customer success managers, who carried out a customer journey mapping exercise before building the entire automation for us. All we had to do was provide creative and copy for the emails.”

The new process is simple and effective. Users who leave the website with products in their cart now receive a personalised email within 20 minutes, featuring images of the abandoned items and a direct link back to the cart. If they don’t complete the purchase, a follow-up message is triggered after three days, encouraging them to return.

To optimise results further, Neal’s Yard and Dotdigital launched A/B testing to compare various email strategies. This involved sending some customers a 10% discount code while others received only product information. These tests confirmed that promotions could have a measurable impact on conversions, though the new system delivered a large boost even without offering discounts.

The challenges:

Handing over a crucial part of the customer engagement journey to an external team can bring challenges, especially for a small CRM department used to working independently. However, Dotdigital’s collaborative approach made that process incredibly smooth. By allowing Dotdigital to manage all the technical execution, Neal’s Yard freed up internal resources while still maintaining creative input. This teamwork allowed for fast deployment and precise integration with Neal’s Yard’s branding and messaging standards.

Before partnering with Dotdigital, Neal’s Yard relied on a basic Shopify module to send cart abandonment emails, but it offered little flexibility for personalisation, testing, or performance tracking. The CRM team needed a more advanced solution that aligned with the brand’s positioning. Integrating a new platform can often be complex, especially with established data systems. However, Dotdigital’s seamless, one-click integration with Shopify made the transition effortless. All customer and product data synced instantly, enabling  the team to create branded, high-converting email campaigns without technical delays. This empowered them to focus on strategy and design rather than backend setup.

The result:

The upgraded cart abandonment strategy has had a huge impact. Neal’s Yard Remedies saw a 419% increase in revenue from this email flow after partnering with Dotdigital, compared to their earlier approach. In fact, cart abandonment emails now deliver the company’s best email conversion rates across all campaign types.

This success isn’t confined to just one campaign. Jessica says: “We have grown automation campaigns massively with Dotdigital. We had one automation live, we now have seven, and these account for around 25% of our email revenue every month. These were our most high revenue-driving and high-converting campaigns, and they tick on in the background which is great for us when we have a small team.”

Encouraged by these results, the brand also began experimenting with SMS marketing. So far, they’ve launched 11 SMS campaigns, re-purposing email content for quick yet effective mobile outreach. This new channel alone has driven an impressive £68,000 in revenue, highlighting the strength of integrated, cross-channel marketing.

Looking to the future, Neal’s Yard Remedies is working with Dotdigital’s personalisation engine, Fresh Relevance, to bring their engagement strategies to the next level. 

India Bosley, trading manager at Neal’s Yard, says: “Through the personalisation platform, we’re able to look at different experiences for different customer types. We’ve been able to break down how a customer sees the site and sees it differently, so each of those people would see a difference experience to the previous person. We’re able to rely less on promotions and more on full-price products.”

With Dotdigital’s personalisation tool, the brand will roll out tools like product recommendations, personalised offers, pop-ups, and loyalty-driven banners. Whether a customer is browsing the website or reading an email promotion, they’ll see content tailored specifically to them – reinforcing brand trust and boosting the chances of repeat purchases.

The team is also preparing to replicate this model for its growing U.S. operations. With the power of real-time personalisation, better data insights, and creative automation tools, Neal’s Yard Remedies is positioned not just to grow, but to lead the way in ethical digital marketing within the beauty and wellness industry.