dcf.cymru stimulus sheet · Business · Year 11
The bakery, Carys Rees, the customers and every figure on this sheet are invented. The promotion methods are real ones that small Welsh businesses use every day. The results table is also in pobty-campaign-results.csv.
Pobty’r Cwm (“The Valley Bakery”) is a small independent bakery in the Cynon Valley, owned by Carys Rees. It sells bread and cakes in its shop, and it sells Welsh cake gift boxes online, posted anywhere in the UK. Many online customers are people buying a taste of home for family who have moved away from Wales.
On gift boxes, Carys’s gross profit margin is 60%: out of every £1 of sales, 60p is left after paying for the ingredients and the box. Customers pay £6.50 postage on top, which goes straight to the courier, so postage is not included in the revenue figures. The cost of the promotion has to come out of that 60p.
Carys runs a loyalty scheme. Members get a stamp card in the shop and an online account, and 1,500 of them have agreed to receive marketing emails. Every online order and every loyalty card is recorded on the bakery’s till and website system, so Carys can see whether a customer is new and whether they buy again.
For 4 weeks, from 3 to 30 November 2025, Carys spent a budget of £1,200 promoting the gift box through four channels.
| Channel | How it worked |
|---|---|
| Social media adverts | Paid adverts with a short video of Welsh cakes on the griddle, shown to adults aged 25 to 64 across the UK who follow food and gift pages. Carys paid for every 1,000 people shown the advert. |
| Search engine advertising | A text advert shown at the top of the results when someone searched for phrases such as “Welsh cakes delivered” or “Welsh gift box”. Carys paid 75p every time someone clicked it. |
| Email to loyalty members | Two emails to the 1,500 members who agreed to marketing emails. The only cost was the email service, £60 for the month. |
| Printed leaflets | 5,000 leaflets printed and delivered to homes in the Cynon Valley, with a discount code, CWM10, for 10% off in the shop or online. |
| Channel | Spend (£) | People reached | Clicks | Orders | Revenue from orders (£) | New customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social media adverts | 480 | 40,000 shown the advert | 800 | 40 | 880 | 34 |
| Search engine advertising | 360 | 12,000 shown the advert | 480 | 36 | 900 | 24 |
| Email to loyalty members | 60 | 1,500 emails delivered | 225 | 45 | 810 | 0 |
| Printed leaflets | 300 | 5,000 leaflets delivered | no clicks: code used in shop or online | 20 | 400 | 12 |
| Total | 1,200 | 141 | 2,990 | 70 |
Orders are counted when a customer who clicked the advert or email buys within 7 days, or when the CWM10 code is used. New customers are people who had never bought from the bakery before.
“Social media got us the most clicks and the most new customers. Next time I’m putting the whole £1,200 into social media adverts.”
Do not read this section until Step 5 of the worksheet tells you to.
On 25 January 2026, Carys checked her loyalty card and online account records to see which of the 70 new customers had bought something again since their first order.
| Channel that found them | New customers | Bought again by 25 January |
|---|---|---|
| Social media adverts | 34 | 5 |
| Search engine advertising | 24 | 9 |
| Printed leaflets | 12 | 6 |
She also found that 31 of the 45 email orders came from loyalty members who had bought a gift box the Christmas before, when she sent no emails at all.