Fast forward to today: the channels are different, but the strategy really isn’t. “It’s exactly what we were doing with direct marketing back in the day,” Kate says. “Just more efficient, and technology-driven.”
How confident are you that the right message reaches the right person at exactly the right moment?
Kate’s career has taken her from Australia to Amsterdam, from the wine trade to diamond jewelers. Along the way, she picked up a fluency in French, a love of great restaurants, and a sharp instinct for what customers actually want along the way.
At De Beers, she helped launch live chat and drove a quarter of a million pounds in sales within months, partly because she understood that a man who’s nervous to walk into a diamond store will happily ask questions from his phone.
Marks & Spencer
and Harrods
At Marks & Spencer, she helped build one of the UK’s first digital wine club subscriptions. That took over 800 hours and a trip to India to work with Amazon to get done, but it gave Marks & Spencer a digital wine club at a time when the subscription-based model was still in its infancy.
At Harrods, she ran the full digital operation across food, fashion, and everything in between. Every stop added something, and every role taught her something new. But the through line was always the same: a love for digital that never dimmed.
"I fell in love with digital," Kate says simply. "And I love it still."
With Loomi powering customer experiences, Kate now runs seven websites with a lean but scrappy team of four. That team builds triggered customer journeys in real time, and deploys SMS, email, weblayers, and zero-party data quizzes from a single platform.
The company’s skincare range includes retinol, which has to be introduced gradually (for both legal and dermatological reasons). So Kate’s team used Loomi to create a triggered journey that moves customers from level one to level five, one bottle at a time, with every response mapped and every touchpoint automated.
It’s exactly the kind of complex, human-centred logic she was once building on spreadsheets, except now it runs itself.
How long does it take your team to launch a new customer journey?
The early days of Kate’s career were built on waiting and guesswork. But now?
The marketer is firmly
in the driver’s seat.
“You don’t need to involve IT or really clever data people,” she states. “You’ve got the power to act instantly.” And yet, underneath all of it, the strategy is remarkably familiar. High spend, frequent buyers, lapsed customers, birthdays — the segments that worked then still work now.
"From Royal Mail to real time. The mission has always been the same: reach the right person, with the right message, at exactly the right moment. Turns out some things never change."
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"You don't need to involve IT or really clever data people," she states. "You've got the power to act instantly."
Kate Hodgkinson
How often do you need IT or data teams just to make a campaign happen?
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Story 05 / 08
Digital Experience Manager, Hobbycraft
