Mills Milk

Mills Milk delivers milk, groceries and household essentials to doorsteps across Scotland, alongside a trade side supplying business customers. Most of a customer's value arrives long after their first order, because people order week after week. That shapes every marketing decision we make with them.

Mills had strong local demand and wanted to grow faster: a bigger digital presence, steady new customer demand, and marketing that could keep pace as operations expanded across Scotland and into new retail partners.

In a delivery business the useful question is how long a new customer takes to pay for themselves, and what keeps them ordering after that. Answering it needed three things: acquisition at a known and stable cost, retention that actually runs, and reporting that connects the two.

• Google Ads. Captures people actively searching for doorstep milk and grocery delivery.
• Meta ads. Promotes subscription offers to new audiences, with consumer and trade campaigns kept separate so neither distorts the other's results.
• Seasonal campaigns. Planned against the trading calendar, including basket discount offers that drove strong uptake with very little admin.
• Email retention. Built in Klaviyo, including win-back automations triggered the moment a customer cancels.
• WhatsApp campaigns. Used for offers where the message warrants the channel.
• Live reporting. Performance across ads and ecommerce is available daily in Holisticly, not assembled once a month.

It costs about £11 to acquire a new customer, and a new customer spends about £11 in their first week. The first week pays for the acquisition. Over an average month of 4.3 weeks, that customer spends around £47, a little over four times what it cost to win them, and every order after the first week contributes margin. That one calculation turns strategic questions into arithmetic: whether to spend more, whether retention is worth the investment, and what happens if acquisition costs rise in winter.

A WhatsApp discount campaign reached around an 80% open rate, far beyond what the same message achieves by email. It also taught us something. Some customers questioned whether the message was genuine, because the sender profile wasn't clearly branded. We fixed the branding, and we now treat sender presentation as a core decision on these channels.

We audited how Mills appears when people ask AI tools about doorstep delivery. It scored 31, which gave us a baseline. Since then we have been restructuring the site into question-led sections that AI tools can quote. It is too early to claim a result.

Between 2020 and 2025, revenue grew from £5m to £25m. Monthly website users rose from 7,300 to 19,800 (+171%) and monthly subscription orders from 151 to 314 (+108%). Mills has its own commercial drivers, an operations team and a product people want, so we don't claim all of that growth as ours. What we can evidence is acquisition cost against customer value, and how individual campaigns performed.

Google Ads and PPCMeta ads and paid socialEmail, SMS and WhatsAppSEO and AI search visibilitySubscription ecommerce marketing