Partnering with Dotdigital - Stone & Wood Byron Bay-based brewing company amplifies online customer engagement
Read Case Study by Dotdgital, who we partnered with to deliver Stone & Wood's eCommerce website. The team at Dotdigital have enabled Stone & Wood to market the brand and website to their audience of drinkers via their platform and expertise.
Established in 2008, Byron Bay-based Stone & Wood was started by three mates – Brad, Ross, and Jamie. It was a dream with a simple idea of a ‘Village Brewery’ – a brewery producing quality beer while giving back to the wider community. Founded in a modest shed within Byron Bay’s industrial estate, Stone & Wood began its journey with a vision to create a conscious local business. Over the last 10 years, Stone & Wood has come to be known as a lifestyle brand, gradually becoming synonymous with Byron Bay and the local Byron vibe.
Challenge
A few years back, the Stone & Wood team realized they had outgrown their existing one-size fits all approach to email marketing. It became important for them to be able to segment different types of customers and be more targeted with relevant content through the right channels. In response to both the growth of their customer base and the shifting marketplace, Stone & Wood decided to beef up their customer engagement, especially through email. As a result, they started looking around for a marketing automation solution provider to help them increase customer loyalty and engagement. According to, Steve Blick, Direct to Drinker & Ecommerce Leader at Stone & Wood, “We started doing some research. We looked at Emarsys and Klaviyo and dotdigital, and for us, dotdigital ended up being the best option.”
Solution
Stone & Wood partnered with dotdigital in September 2019 to integrate different automated programs. “The journey over the past 18 months with dotdigital has been great. The key element that differentiates dotdigital is the way they treat their customers,” said Steve. “Their hands-on customer service, continuous support, and working as a partner made them our best choice.”
“Last year was a challenging one for obvious reasons. We never could have seen COVID coming, but we were super lucky to be prepared beforehand. dotdigital allowed us to make the most of online shopping by helping the team target audiences through personalized content, great offers, and explore some great ways to connect with our customers,” added Steve.
The welcome series, post-purchase follow-up, and ‘Beer Club’ campaign are the three top successful campaigns currently running on the dotdigital platform.
“The dotdigital platform has helped us bring the different strategies that we envisioned to life, allowing us to effectively engage with our drinkers and help grow the customer database. By utilizing the platform to run personalization, automation, and tailor-made marketing campaigns, we have been able to engage with our audience not only at transactional but at a non-transactional mode as well. This has resulted in increased audience engagement which is unbelievable,” commented Steve.
The post-purchase follow-up campaign has been a real triumph by giving customers the opportunity to make repeat purchases online. Post-purchase, customers are targeted with personalized and tailored content that consists of tasting notes and the story behind their preferred choice of beer to educate them further.
Another successful campaign has been the ‘Beer Club’ newsletter campaign. The Stone & Wood Beer Club is a monthly membership, giving members guaranteed access to limited releases, exclusive content, and exclusive merchandise, along with discounted access to events and tastings.
Results
Since partnering with dotdigital 18 months ago, Stone & Wood’s customer database has grown by 350%. While the welcome series has a 50% open rate and a click-through open rate (CTO) of 12:32%, the ‘Beer Club’ newsletter campaign witnessed an 80% open rate with a 37.15% click-through open rate (CTO). Moreover, email marketing accounted for 21.17% of the total revenue generated over the past 12 months.
To learn more about how Dotdigital can work with your eCommerce Strategy get in touch with us here.