How Bella Freud 21X'd email consent rate with Dataships

GDPR turned a 73% email opt-in into a 3.4% ceiling

When GDPR took effect, UK ecommerce brands saw consent collection crater overnight. Chris Fuller, Head of Ecommerce at Bella Freud, experienced this firsthand at a previous company, where email opt-in rates dropped from 73% to 3–4% the day the regulation kicked in.

At Bella Freud, the same dynamic was playing out. The Shopify default checkout consent was converting just 3.4% of paying customers into marketable email contacts. For a luxury brand with high acquisition costs and long consideration cycles, that meant the vast majority of hard-won customers were invisible the moment they left checkout.

“We’re selling stories as much as we’re selling physical products, and the ability to reach out to our current customer base and tell those stories has been absolutely invaluable to us.”

Fuller knew the math: email subscribers have higher lifetime value, higher repeat purchase rates, and cost nothing incremental to reach. The brand was already running a 10% discount popup to capture leads pre-purchase, but checkout consent for paying customers was the bigger lever — and it was barely functioning.

A zero-dev integration that proved itself in an A/B test

Bella Freud implemented Dataships in spring 2025 and ran a controlled A/B test on its UK checkout. Half of customers saw the Shopify default consent experience (control), and half saw the Dataships-optimized consent interface (variant).

Setup required zero development resources. Fuller described the implementation as a single integration with no dev time — a sharp contrast to his previous experience building a custom consent system in-house at a B2B company.

The A/B test made the business case immediately clear. The control group converted at 3.4% MCR. The Dataships variant converted at 80.1% — a +70.4 percentage point improvement in compliant marketing reach.

Fuller took the results directly to the CFO.

“It’s not a cost. It’s a growth opportunity. And if we don’t take that, that’s the real cost to the business.”

Sustained 74% consent rate unlocks $81K in incremental lifetime value

Since going live post-test, Bella Freud has maintained a 73.8% compliant email marketing consent rate, up from 3.4% on Shopify’s default. That sustained performance has translated directly into downstream revenue.

• Subscriber growth: 823 incremental email subscribers captured by Dataships — contacts that would have been non-marketable under the default checkout.
• Lifetime value: $80,777 in incremental LTV unlocked across the Dataships subscriber base, with email subscribers generating $147 in CLV compared to significantly lower values for non-subscribers.
• Repeat purchase revenue: The Dataships cohort drove $89,884 in repeat purchase revenue versus $71,869 for the control group — a 25% lift. Repeat orders increased 41% (319 vs. 227).
• Revenue unlocked: $40,420 in incremental revenue attributed to Dataships-captured subscribers.

Fuller also highlighted the impact of Dataships’ Consent Memory feature, which launched after the initial integration. The feature prevents existing subscribers from inadvertently opting out during repeat purchases — a problem Fuller had flagged independently before Dataships shipped the solution.

“The great thing about it is it’s plug and play. You guys are experts in consent. I can just go, that’s one thing that’s taken care of. I can then focus on growing the business in other ways.”

What’s next

Bella Freud is currently reinvesting in the US market after a tariff-driven pause in 2025, and rolling out Dataships on its US store is part of the growth roadmap. SMS and WhatsApp consent collection through Dataships are also on Fuller’s radar as the brand expands its retention channels.