How THG Ingenuity turns events into a connected engine for growth with Zoho Backstage
- INDUSTRY Ecommerce
- EVENT TYPE In-person and Virtual
The company
THG Ingenuity is a leading ecommerce solutions provider that helps brands scale through three core offerings—THG Commerce, THG Fulfil, and THG Studios. With over 20 years of award-winning experience, the company combines global reach, technological innovation, and a customer-centric approach to drive profitable, long-term growth for brands it works with.
Trusted by brands such as Myprotein, Cult Beauty, Holland & Barrett, LookFantastic, and The Range, THG Ingenuity operates at the intersection of commerce, content, and fulfillment.
Running that kind of business means staying in close contact with prospects and partners at every stage of the relationship. Events have always been central to that effort, and as the company's ambitions grew, so did the complexity of staging them.
The challenge
Natalie Jones, Head of Systems and Processes at THG Ingenuity, describes the company's event program as “wide-ranging and relentless.” The marketing team runs tech showcases and fulfillment events for senior prospects, hosts networking sessions and warehouse tours, holds in-person gatherings in the company’s own studio space and auditorium, and delivers webinars for audiences across the UK and overseas—often all at the same time.
Each of those event formats demands their own logistics. But the harder problem, Jones explains, was not managing events in isolation; it was making sure each event actually moved prospects forward. Without those connections in place, there was no reliable way to tell whether a warehouse tour had influenced a conversation three months later, or whether a prospect who attended a webinar had already been nurtured via email, a gap that the team set out to close.
Without a connected system, every event risked becoming a standalone moment; one that was impressive on the day, but disconnected from the broader marketing and sales effort. The company quickly realized it needed an event management platform that could bring it all together.
"THG Ingenuity is running a lot of live events using Zoho Backstage. These include many tech and fulfillment events where the marketing team will invite senior prospects who have shown interest in our product capabilities."
The solution
THG Ingenuity chose Zoho Backstage as the platform to unify its event operations. And they got both, the depth of integration and the feature set.
Backstage gave the team everything it needed to build and promote events at scale. Each event gets its own branded microsite, allowing the marketing team to direct email campaigns to a dedicated landing page without relying on the broader company website. Registrations, ticketing, check-ins, and badge scanning all run from within the same platform. Speaker profiles, session management, and sign-up flows are handled there, too, giving the team a single place to operate rather than a patchwork of tools.
For virtual and hybrid events, Zoho OnAir within Backstage allows the company to extend its reach to audiences that cannot attend in person, without changing how the event is built or managed. More than 30 events—spanning in-person gatherings, webinars, and hybrid formats—have now been delivered through the platform across the UK and globally.
"We have now hosted more than 30 Backstage events in the UK and overseas, ranging from in-person events to webinars and OnAir."
What makes the biggest operational difference, though, is how Backstage connects to the rest of THG Ingenuity’s systems. Events are set up in Backstage and linked directly to Zoho CRM, ensuring every registration and attendee interaction is captured as a touchpoint on the contact record.
At the same time, Zoho Marketing Automation captures leads generated from each event and places them into targeted email journeys sequenced by the event they attended, the industry they work in, or other relevant criteria.
"We set up events in Backstage and connect this to the CRM for touchpoint tracking and marketing automation for email campaigns and marketing journeys."
The result is that the system—not a team member—carries the conversation forward after each event concludes. Leads are automatically segmented and nurtured, while the CRM builds a progressively richer picture of each contact's engagement history.
The Backstage features THG Ingenuity uses:
- Branded event microsites
- Registration and ticketing
- Attendee check-ins
- Badge scanning
- Speaker profiles and management
- Webinars via Zoho OnAir
- In-person and hybrid event formats
- Integration with Zoho CRM for touchpoint tracking
- Integration with Zoho Marketing Automation for email journeys
Benefits & ROI
By bringing its event program into a connected system, THG Ingenuity has seen the impact of events extend well beyond the day itself. The changes have been practical, measurable, and consistent across formats.
Unified event management
The team has now hosted over 30 events across the UK and globally from a single platform, covering everything from in-person tech showcases to overseas webinars. Running different formats through the same system has reduced the operational complexity that previously came with managing events at this scale.
Stronger lead management
Leads generated from events are automatically synced with Zoho Marketing Automation and enrolled into targeted journeys based on the event attended and the prospect’s industry. Follow-ups are now consistent and timely, without requiring manual coordination between the events and sales teams each time an event wraps up.
"Leads generated from our marketing events are synced with Zoho Marketing Automation, and they enter into targeted email journeys based on criteria such as the event they attended or the industry."
End-to-end visibility
The contact record in Zoho CRM now provides a complete picture of how each prospect has engaged—which events they attended, which sessions they participated in, and which email journeys they followed. The clearest shift, as Jones describes it, is in how event data is used. Previously, attendance numbers and registration counts were the primary measure of success—tallied after each event, then largely set aside. Now, that same data flows into the CRM and informs decisions across marketing and sales long after the event itself.
"We push all the event data to Zoho CRM to measure the engagement of those attendees and for touchpoint tracking."
This end-to-end visibility makes conversations between sales and marketing more productive, and it gives the team confidence that no prospect falls through the cracks between an event and a follow-up.
Higher marketing impact
With better tracking, consistent segmentation, and automated follow-up journeys in place, THG Ingenuity can now treat events as a reliable source of pipeline rather than standalone activities that are difficult to connect to outcomes. Each event adds another layer to a shared understanding of prospects and what moves them, and the system ensures that layer is never lost.
Future plans
For THG Ingenuity, the integration between Backstage, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Marketing Automation is already delivering results, but the team sees it as a foundation for something larger. As the event program continues to grow in volume and geography, the priority is to deepen the connection between event engagement and the broader marketing ecosystem, so each interaction is better informed by what came before.