One of the most compelling stories shared at Enlighten 2025 came from Goodwood, who faced a challenge familiar to many large organisations: how to deliver a consistent, relevant customer experience across a sprawling portfolio of brands.
With over 30 businesses under the Goodwood umbrella, marketing had become fragmented. Each team was emailing the same customers, often with overlapping or irrelevant content. The result was over-communication, disengagement, and rising unsubscribe rates.
Rather than driving sales, the overload of communications risked driving customers away.
Goodwood made a brave decision – they wanted to communicate LESS, while improving the performance of the campaigns.
The plan was to move away from each business unit doing its own thing, to a single, dynamic “Estate Email” each week, powered by a single customer view and reflecting individual customer interest. This would allow Goodwood to tailor content to each person based on their interests and behaviours, while reducing the overall email volume.
A clear set of objectives
The new approach needed to have absolute clarity about its objectives – and to be able to be measured. If not, then there would be a temptation to go to the old way of doing things.
So clear objectives were set around –
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Increasing click rate
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Driving up average clicks per individual
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Reducing unsubscribes
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Increasing sales
Combing creative with customer data
A new email template was created, that would be populated with the most relevant messages for each customer, replacing the mass of individual emails that were being sent.
To do this, Goodwood needed to understand the specific interests of each individual customer. Using Apteco FastStats, they pulled all the data together from across the business touchpoints, to establish these interests and preferences.
This gave Goodwood the insight to move from multiple untargeted emails going to everyone, to a one, highly personalised email a week.
For example, we can see here that Mrs Martin has only shown interest in the farm shop and the hotel, whilst Mr Smith has shown an interest in Festival of Speed and Motor Circuit but they both were receiving all emails whether of interest or not.
This approach also allows for cross-sell opportunities without harming overall engagement or deliverability. Instead of sending Mr Smith a dedicated email about Goodwood Farm, which is unlikely to get engagement as he has not previously expressed an interest in it, relevant content could be added to the Estate Email, without harming the Click Through Rate or Unsubscribes.
This new approach meant every section of the new email was dynamic. The result was far less over-mailing and a much more engaging relevant weekly touchpoint.
What were the results?
The results were impressive:
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70,000 fewer emails sent
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84,000 more clicks to the website
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£4.5 million in attributed revenue from the emails
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Unsubscribes reduced by 1.5%
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16 hours saved every month on email builds
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3% increase in engagement across the base
The results proved the success of sending only highly targeted, relevant emails. Many businesses feel uncomfortable with what they see as a reduction in marketing activity and often slip back into a ‘mail everyone’ mindset. But Goodwood’s results speak for themselves. As Natalie herself said, “We stood in front of senior leadership and said: we’ve sent fewer emails to fewer people. But we’ve driven more revenue.”
And when you can tell a story like that, it’s very hard for anyone to say no.
An all-round success story
In delivering the project, the CRM team brought stakeholders from across the business on the journey, aligning them around a shared vision of customer experience and brand consistency.
This wasn’t just a technology project. It was a strategic shift in how Goodwood thinks about its customers, its data, and its marketing.
And as an added bonus – the project won the 2024 award for Best Use of Apteco.
Want to know more? Read the full case study to see how Goodwood delivered award-winning results with Apteco and R-cubed: https://www.r-cubed.co.uk/case-studies/goodwoods-apteco-award-winning-work/
Or watch James Alty, Managing Director of Apteco, talk through the process of winning the Best Use of Apteco Award at Enlighten Brighton 2025 here.
