Find the perfect customer-campaign fit

Optimize your automation performance with pin-point precision

Put excellence into the expected

Customer experience optimization

How do you define success for your team? What metrics do you look at?  At the core of how we measure our work, we look at customer and prospective-customer engagement. To do this, we keep a close eye on customer engagements using our CRM (Microsoft Dynamics), where we leverage lead-scoring to help identify warm leads and qualify them from a marketing perspective, flagging them as ready to be handed to sales. In service to customer engagement, we also look closely at channel-level metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, and click-to-open rates help give us signals about how our email marketing is being received by our audience. Conversion rates help us optimize the website for better engagement. Ad click-throughs and conversions help us drive engagement and learn about how marketing messages resonate. But all of these metrics point to engagement in some form. What does the MarTech stack at Dotdigital look like? Unsurprisingly, the heart of our stack is Dotdigital – which we love. It integrates beautifully with Microsoft Dynamics 365, our CRM. We use additional distribution channels like Hootsuite, GoToWebinar, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Linkedin Ads. Our marketing site is built primarily on WordPress, we deliver website personalizations with Webeo, setup popups with Wisepops, and use Dotdigital’s Chat as our sales live-chat tool. And what tools, in particular, do you use for reporting and analysis? Our data and insights team are wizards at Power BI which helps surface data kept in our CRM. We rely on that heavily to keep an eye on the sales funnel. On the marketing side, we use Google Analytics, Hotjar, Moz for traffic, conversion, and search engine optimization across the website. Dotdigital’s reporting tools help immensely with our email marketing and contact-database growth measurement. We regularly look at the big advertising platforms’ default reporting, too. Where we want to blend or manipulate marketing data, we use Google Data Studio. What challenges do you face when it comes to reporting? How does this affect you and the team? The biggest challenge, as other marketers know, is getting a ‘view-to-rule-them-all’. Having data stored in lots of platforms means it’s hard to get a single-view to understand or demonstrate how it’s all working together. Which means sometimes insights can be slow to surface and require a deep-dive to pull it all together. What are the key benefits of using Google Data Studio? Data Studio makes it very easy to integrate and blend a wide variety of data and gives users like me the ability to very quickly visualize that data. Interactivity is built into nearly every chart, table, and visualization automatically, making it simple to drill down and filter data in a way that surfaces compelling, actionable data stories. It also makes it very easy to share reports and dashboards. I like it because it’s web-based, very visual, and the learning curve isn’t too steep. The biggest benefit is that it’s free. We recently released a new integration that allows you to connect your Dotdigital campaign reports to Google Sheets. You’ve started using it already, how did you find it? As a Dotdigital power-user, I’m often very excited about new releases and integrations. But this was was particularly exciting, because I knew that connecting campaign reports to Google Sheets meant I could then pull that data into Data Studio! And to make things even better setting up the integration was so, so easy.  It was a matter of like 3 or 4 clicks and done.

How does this make your day job easier? We’re very interested in our email marketing performance over time. In the past, the executives would pull the campaign data manually into a spreadsheet and map that out so we could compare like-for-like campaigns and keep an eye on how CTO, CTR, and CTOR improve as we make optimizations. As marketers know, not all email campaigns are the same or even meant to be compared, so we’ve always wanted to be able to filter and manipulate data in a way to let us see trends across similar campaigns. Now we can do that without having to export campaign reports or making sure our campaigns are tagged perfectly. That data refreshes frequently and is waiting for us in a spreadsheet, ready to be used. And how does this translate to what you do in Google Data Studio?  Because the export is automatic, we can jump straight into the insights. Google Data Studio loves Google Sheets, naturally, so pulling that data into Data Studio is a breeze. Plus, you only have to do it once and your dashboards in Data Studio automatically with the campaign data that is being pulled into the linked Google Sheet. At that point, it’s a matter of setting up charts and tables to visualize the data. This has given me the ability to filter and present campaign data in a highly customized way, empowering me to surface need-to-know insights to the Marketing Director or any of my colleagues. What’s your favorite thing about working in Google Data Studio? Is there a particular feature that you think everyone should hear about? Data Studio makes filter controls so, so easy. The simplest being the date filter, but you can easily assign any filterable data field to the data filter. With a bit of regex, we extract the email type from the campaign names and turn this into a ‘Campaign Type’ data field. I can then add a filter dropdown so the team can look at campaign performance by type of campaign (content, webinar invite, promotion, feature release) with one click. And every chart in the report will then show the relevant data accordingly. Another very close second favorite is the ability to schedule email delivery of a Data Studio report. This means you can automate your monthly campaign reports to land in your boss’s inbox every month.

Syncing your Campaign Reports to Google Sheets means that your dashboards in Google Data Studio are automatically updated. Saving you time. What can you do with all that time saved? Optimization, optimization, optimization. The less time we spend doing the dirty work of mining for insights on past campaigns, the more time we can spend on optimizing our future campaigns. When time is saved, we want to invest that time back into building automations, lifecycle programs, and campaign optimizations that will save even more time in the future. It’s said a lot, but it’s very important to make time to save time. What are the benefits of being able to clearly convey the performance of marketing efforts with the wider business? Ultimately, across this business, and any business, it’s important that we’re all marching in the same direction. Visual insights and reporting—and making those insights easily accessible—helps not just our team but other teams make better decisions in their own work. It ensures that we’re all working from the same insights, and minimizes the likelihood of duplicative work.  This is particularly important in this era of remote working when cross-team collaboration requires more energy and planning.

Whilst data in itself can be interesting, sometimes it needs a helping hand to give it context and bring it to life. After all, for marketers, it always comes back to telling great stories right? How has the Google Sheets integration(and in turn Google Data studio) helped you do this? This is entirely true. And the amount of data that’s available to digital marketers can be overwhelming.  And I’m sure many can relate to the feeling when we’re sent a Slack message from a boss or a colleague like “Can you send me our website traffic stats?” or “What do our email stats look like?” When really they’re asking “Are we getting value from our marketing investment?” or “Which of our activations is making the most impact?” or “Where are opportunities for us to make more impact?”. And to answer these questions some of these many metrics help, but they need to be seen in a blended way, with context and, very often, narrative. Customizable reporting with Data Studio and the easy integrations with key marketing tech, like Dotdigital, make it easier to tell those stories in a visual and interactive way.

What advice do you have for other marketers that want to improve their storytelling with data?

While it’s overwhelming at first, start by taking inventory of all the data metrics you do have access to. Then run through each of them and ask yourself  “What is the practical action I would take based on this metric?” and “How often would I look at this metric to make a decision?” If it’s difficult to define what that practical action you could make is, set it aside. Then group the rest based on the second question. Going through that exercise leaves you with a narrower set of metrics– eliminating the data overload. This helps you as the storyteller and also your audience. It also gives you the rough outline of how to structure your data storytelling. Data you need frequently can be presented in simple, quickly digestible ways.  Deeper data that needs to be reviewed less frequently can be framed with a narrative in a more comprehensive way.

You can find out more about syncing your campaign data to Google Sheets in our Help Center.

Online event engagement is a great example of this. Event management platform Eventbrite reported that in 2020 nearly 75 million people registered for more than one million virtual events, logging an impressive combined 100 million hours in attendance. By November 2020, we were spending 34x more time attending online events than in January of the same year.

Similar trends can be observed across email engagement and purchase behavior too. We analyzed Dotdigital customer data in June last year and found that some industries (healthcare, utility providers, technology hardware, and apparel & fashion in particular) are seeing triple-digit increases across their email opens and clicks.

To top it all off, this is translating into increased online purchase activity too. With online sales growing by 46% over a single year. All sounds great, right? These statistics don’t tell the full story of course. We’re all consuming more content digitally, but (in most cases at least) our wallets and minds are the same ‘size’!

So this means that more brands are vying for that same share of mind and share of wallet. We’re spending more time looking at content from the brands we love (according to Yotpo 31% of consumers now claim to be loyal to 6-10 brands versus 26% in 2019), but this doesn’t always translate into a readiness to buy.

New channels and tools can offer an excellent return on investment, but only if you’re targeting the right people (the ones that are really ‘into’ you and your product, then and there). Another interesting thought by Wang and Head (2005) in the “Innovative Marketing Journal” raises that the consumer market is non-contractual, and customers may not value lifetime relationships as we think they do. All of these trends combined can be expensive to marketers.

Marketers can however afford to be choosier with who they remarket to, and through what means. There’s a need to better qualify what we class as ‘engagement’ and better identify propensity to act or buy.

Drumroll, please…

By all accounts now is no time to be resting on our laurels, the latest Dotdigital release is hot off the press and brings all our customers new ways to uncover meaningful, profitable opportunities as they arise.

Uncover emerging opportunities.

With eRFM. Understanding when it’s time to act requires insight into the purchase cycles of your customers, and an ability to act on the high-intent signals that they give you. Retargeting for loyalty is possible, but you need a workflow that will help you identify previously missed opportunities as they arise. And this is where eRFM and the new Opportunities dashboard come into play.

eRFM is a holistic behavioral model that presents you with customer personas which are graded based on levels of purchase intent and intent signals. At the core of the model is the notion of a customer decision window. What a customer viewed on your website yesterday is far more relevant (to you and them), than what they browsed six months ago.

The Opportunities Dashboard is where your customers are displayed in a highly visual and actionable way, grouped together based on their purchase profile and how likely to buy they are. The dashboard lets you find tomorrow’s customers today, and drive a more profitable customer segmentation strategy.

Deliver next-gen shopping experiences.

With PWA for Magento. The number of Magento stores going ‘headless’ is on the rise, and for good reason. PWA storefronts as they’re known, deliver on a host of shopping experience improvements. From increased mobile usage to improved site speeds (read: improved conversion rates), PWA implementations help merchants deliver better online experiences all-round and in turn impact marketing ROI for the better too.

With our latest product release, Magento merchants running a headless storefront can now benefit from the same #1 integration, regardless of their chosen implementation.

Seamlessly manage shared experiences.

With Eventbrite. Eventbrite is one of the most used events management and ticketing services around and has helped a number of industries (particularly those hardest hit in 2020) continue to deliver engaging experiences to their audiences.

So we couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to add not one, but two Eventbrite integrations to our Integration Hub. With it, marketers can seamlessly manage events marketing and after-event experiences. The ability to capture attendees as they check-in or -out makes it an incredibly powerful way to engage in-the-moment. This allows marketers to follow up post-event with an email containing highlights and next steps, or even an SMS containing a voucher for that coffee you promised as a Thank You for their time.

Dotdigital gives you all the tools you need to act when it matters most. To find out more about our latest product release, you can get the full low-down here.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be.

We’ve released single sign-on (SSO) for Dotdigital. So now you can do away with those Slack memos you sent yourself (no, really), the numerous Dropbox Paper documents you’ve stored your passwords in (come on, admit it), and all that countless effort it takes to get into your most valuable business systems, one of which no doubt is your marketing platform.

Why SSO?

Besides relieving a lot of frustration on the users’ part, single sign-on brings a broader set of benefits to businesses. For one, it fosters collaboration. Marketing platforms play a greater role in cross-departmental collaboration than ever. Chat is a great acquisition tool for marketers, but typically requires sales users to log-in. Customer and persona reporting are instrumental to driving effective marketing programs, and can provide valuable insight for online visual merchandisers and ecommerce managers too.

Or perhaps you want to send transactional SMS and your dev team urgently needs access to your API credentials. Some such teammates won’t need access every day, and so expecting them to remember another log-in when you want them to use your hard-fought insights, or make something happen for you, can seem like a tall ask and hinders collaboration.

But those are just my takes. SSO presents a host of different benefits to businesses. Understanding these from a perspective other than your own is going to help you drive the internal conversation and make it happen. I spoke to some of our own experts on the matter to find out more…

SSO for privacy and cybersecurity

With the ever-increasing legislation around privacy and cybersecurity, SSO has become a hot topic at the board table. Many organizations, including dotdigital, align with internationally recognized standards such as ISO 27001, to deploy security best practices. For stretched internal IT teams that means having to deploy security measures and policies to help protect against emerging threats.

Steve Shaw, Chief Technology Officer at dotdigital explains: “Policies and procedures have to be tight and followed to keep bad actors at bay. Having strong password policies, policies around password rotation, two-factor authentication, and account lockout across all your technology are no longer nice to have but a must to protect Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Implementing this across a sprawling technical estate, that increases daily with the advent of SaaS & cloud, can be a huge challenge.”

This is why single sign-on is so important concludes Steve, “It enables your SaaS applications to tie into your organization’s Identity Management Platform (IdP), helps to control the password strength, two-factor authentication requirements, and account lock-outs, all from a single location.

“Imagine if one of your employee’s email accounts has been compromised. How many SaaS applications would the attacker now have access to? With SSO you can block access to that employee’s account by disabling it on your own IdP.

“With the introduction of SSO for Dotdigital, your organization can benefit by reducing IT and Security team administration overheads and ‘time to act’ by connecting Dotdigital to your IdP using the OpenID protocol, which enables IdPs such as Azure Active Directory, Okta and Google’s IdP platform.”

SSO: security vs. usability

Further to this, Dotdigital Head of Information Security, Yousif Rajah, provides this useful analogy: “Whenever we talk about bolstering the security of something, there is often a difficult trade-off between security and usability.  In the physical world, you’d ideally like to walk up to your house and simply push open the door.  But for most of us, the level of risk dictates that we need to add a level of security to protect the things we care about; which normally takes the form of one or two locks. How about 10 locks? Great Security; awful usability.

“In the online world, single sign-on (SSO) is one of those rare controls where those trade-offs don’t have to be so binary.  End users can have a much more seamless experience, while IT, Security, and Governance teams can maintain the level of control and visibility they require. It really is a win-win.”

Win-Win(-Win) with SSO

With SSO, your company controls the rules around access – not the platform you are logging in to; resulting in:

• Productivity gains: you use the same password across all of your SSO-enabled platforms; enabling you and key collaborators to access the tools you need with efficiency.
• Reduced overheads: you’ll have fewer prompts to enter a username and password when logging in to SSO-enabled Apps; fewer tickets for your IT team to tend to.
• Best practice: businesses can turn to their central IdP to swiftly manage account access for all their SSO-enabled applications; reducing the risk of bad actors accessing sensitive customer data.

Get in touch to find out more about single sign-on.

Whilst there are a lot of things about this year we’d rather forget, there are some things that are worth highlighting.

Year of digital converts

2020 is the year that the ‘late majority’ became fully-fledged digital converts. With many countries asking their citizens to stay at home or minimize their travel, consumers who previously shopped in store or preferred to access services in person, found they had little choice but to give the internet a go. All age groups have seen an increase in the frequency with which they shop online, too. This increase is strongest with the under 35s, of which 62% now shop online once a week or more, versus 48% last year. 

With our places of interest shifting online, so have our expectations and habits. Google reports that ‘live chat’ and ‘online classes’, amongst many other service related terms, have seen an increased search interest across the world. So, many businesses and organisations delivering events and services have found themselves testing fresh creative formats.

From a MarTech standpoint, it’s been a very interesting year too. Many marketing terms that you’d have seen in a game of buzzword bingo last year are now displaying adulting behavior, and have made their way into our day-to-day conversations and actions. Of course, I’m talking about terms like actionable analytics, CX (customer experience), machine learning, retention marketing, scalability, and so many more.

Still sound fluffy? Let me try to unpick my top three and explain how our customers have used some of the latest and greatest features in Dotdigital to accelerate their way up the (here’s another for you!) digital maturity curve.

Actionable analytics

Since its initial launch in 2019, Commerce Intelligence and RFM persona modelling in Dotdigital has surfaced a wealth of online purchases and persona insights. Grouping different customers into meaningful personas means you can send messages and offers that will help them graduate to the next level of loyalty.

Earlier this year, we made it easier to create segments directly from these dashboards, as and when you spot a cohort of customers you want to retarget with a particular campaign, for example. Bringing these personas into segment builder lets you overlay other attributes and create incredibly refined target groups. What’s more, persona groups are mutually exclusive, so you don’t have to worry if some of last month’s customers that needed nurturing are now high potentials and ready for a different message.

In addition to this, we’ve introduced a dedicated dashboard where you can track what’s happening with your abandoned carts. Learning from your shoppers behavior and fine-tuning your tactics accordingly can have a huge impact on your bottom line. We analyzed 9.2 million carts and found that cart abandonment campaigns recovered $245 million in otherwise lost revenue this year alone; you can read the full report here.

Artificial Intelligence

AI, machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics. This topic corners an entire space in the ‘buzzword’ lexicon on its own! But not for long… Econsultancy concurs that some of the greatest challenges businesses have with AI implementation for marketing include: having access to the right data; not knowing what AI can do for your business in real terms; and (this one’s based on market feedback we’ve received) a worry that there is no control over AI output or no visibility of what that output even is.

If you’re already using our predictive recommendations (now accessible via a shiny UI that helps you match the right product recommendation type to the appropriate stage of the customer lifecycle), you’ll know that you can use ‘best next’ and overlay it with rules in segment builder. ‘Best next’ uses what is called collaborative filtering to, based on order behavior of similar shoppers, predict which products that individual is likely to purchase next. This is great, but sometimes you want additional control to exclude products from particular brands or categories in support of your latest campaign, for example. Many customers using predictive recommendations were asking us “How can I understand it?” and “What’s the AI doing?”, to help with this we launched affinity scores in October this year. You can find out more in this Q&A with Principle Product Manager Ian Pollard and resident Data Scientist Sam Crawley.

CX

As mentioned above, Google reports that ‘live chat’ and ‘online classes’, amongst many other service related terms, have seen an increased search interest across the world. In an increasingly digital and remote world, consumers are seeking and expecting more personal experiences with the brands they love.

Live chat is traditionally a great way to handle after-sales and support queries, but we believe there is more in store for marketers and consumers alike, too. This year we’ve upgraded Dotdigital Chat in more ways than one, so brands can be as helpful pre-sale as they would be after one. This includes things like:

• Multi-team support
• Agent insights including browse behavior history
• Forms in chat for easier acquisition
• Translation support and enhanced email and browser notifictions

Another great way to deliver experiences that stand out from the inbox this year is with interactive email, powered by AMP. It’s a major update to a much-loved channel that’s close to our hearts. Our Head of Product Management, Michael Duxbury, explains more in his blog post.

Is that it?

From all-new program reporting to SMS enhancements, a better way with transactional emails and upgrades to our Dynamics 365 CRM integration, there’s a ton more that we’ve delivered that I couldn’t possibly cover in one blog post alone. To ensure you always receive updates about our platform, make sure your preferences are up to date by signing up to product updates here.

And don’t worry if you don’t feel you’re quite up to speed with any of the above just yet. Our incredible customer success and support teams are on-hand to deliver the five-star experience we hope you have come to expect of us. So, do reach out if you want any more information on any of the above.

Next year is jam-packed with more platform enhancements and features that even the most seasoned of marketers should get excited about. For a sneak peak, remember you can always check out our roadmap here.

The daily changes that are being implemented globally mean that we are likely to continue to see (1) a drop in social interactions, (2) increased working from home, and (3) a further shift from offline to online.

This however doesn’t mean that your customers don’t want to hear from you. As we become ever more reliant on digital communications and interactions, it is of increasing importance that brands make these interactions count, and that their messaging is on point and relevant.

We’re sure you’re juggling a ton of change implementations across your businesses, so we thought we’d round up some ideas to help make it easier to navigate some decisions around your marketing:

Out of sight, out of mind?

Businesses have widely reported negative impact already. OpenTable, a popular restaurant booking platform, have already reported a 20% reduction in seated diners across the world. At a city level, 45% fewer diners are eating out in Seattle, compared with 40% in San Francisco, 30% in New York, and 25% in London, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

As many of us are advised to minimize physical social contact, messages where you remind your customers to book that spa day, or send them a voucher code that is redeemable in-restaurant, will seem misplaced. Consider creative ways in which your brand can add value within the comfort of peoples’ own homes. For example, if you don’t offer home delivery already, maybe now is the time to try it out.

Especially if your business promotes physical events, or sells services that are delivered in a physical place of business, consider what automated messaging you have in place. In fact, we recommend that all our customers, regardless of business type, review their automation programs and make any appropriate tweaks, to avoid unfortunate messaging. This includes coupons and voucher codes, making sure they are redeemable against online services, for example.

For customers who may not be sure what to do with services they have already booked with you, why not give them an easy way to reach you? This could be through live chat or even SMS. A text straight to their phone will make it easier for them to cancel or modify their upcoming appointments. Receiving cancellations is disappointing, but no-shows will be more costly to your business.

Depending on your business type, and whether modification of services is possible, don’t be afraid to ask loyal customers for their support. Some charitable and state-subsidized enterprises aren’t just offering refunds, but in some cases giving customers the option to convert their purchase into a donation.

Continuity: They’re still your customers, but different

You’ve spent months painstakingly analyzing your customers, understanding what they like, what they don’t, when they convert, and when they won’t. Many people will be asked to work from home, which (despite our best efforts) will undoubtedly mean that some routines will go out the window, or change at least.

With fewer people commuting, we recommend you keep an eye on when and on what device your customers are consuming your content. You may record a change in when people are completing orders. Keep an eye on your reporting and dashboards, and compare recent results to those long-standing behavioral ‘truths’ as you may find opportunities to fine-tune your marketing mix as we adapt to a new (but temporary) normal.

We also recommend a review of your delivery and returns policies. As many of your customers will be getting using to working home more, make it easier for them to have items delivered to their front door. If you currently charge for shipping, consider making it a free service with orders over a certain threshold (if cart size isn’t your strong point, explore product recommendations to surface items they’ll happily add to cart).

Don’t be afraid of going back to ecommerce 101

You may encounter a new kind of customer entering your digital doors, one who is less familiar with shopping online, so sense-check your sign-posting and make it as easy to complete an order. A few ideas to help them overcome traditional barriers to shopping online:

• Do your welcome programs reiterate the secure payment gateway you have in place? And affirm how easy it is to complete an order online with you?
• For clothing retailers, are your product pages detailed, could you provide more information on size and fit? Alternatively, you may want to put live chat on your site or on product category pages, so you can assist shoppers in their remote decision-making.
• Surface product and service review on-site and in your messaging, so they feel confident they can expect a good experience from you, wherever they buy.
• Like so much around us is in flux, so may your customers’ preferences. Make sure it’s easy for them to find your preference center, and indicate what they want to hear about when.
• Oh, and did we mention gifs? If all else fails, this is sure to provide a much-appreciated break.

We’re well versed in marketing automation across all industries. Get hands-on advice on cross-channel marketing automation for B2C ecommerce here, and for B2B ecommerce here.

And for all we’re a digital marketing platform, you can still simply speak to us. To discuss your account or any of the above suggestions, just get in touch with your account manager or customer success representative.

If you’re not familiar with Dotdigital, get a glimpse via this quick demo here.

Change is an important part of any successful business, so we thought it would be a good idea to give you some insight into our key roadmap items and how customer feedback influences what we build.

Behind the scenes

In our company’s infancy, we were simply an Email Service Provider – or ‘ESP’ as it is now commonly abbreviated. Although, once you start learning about ramp-ups and deliverability, email doesn’t seem so simple anymore – luckily, we have a dedicated team to help with that!

20 years on, whilst the market has crowded, and its players have converged – we’re still standing strong. Of course, this doesn’t happen unless you have a task force and customer base that are receptive to change.

The change

I’m sure you’ve clocked our rebrand to Dotdigital and I hope you’ve also noticed our change in direction (in terms of what our tech can do). Today, marketers can use Dotdigital to send omnichannel marketing messages to the right audience, at the right time, and on the right channel.

We wouldn’t have come this far had it not been for you. Whether you’re fresh to dotdigital or a long-standing customer that we’ve served for 10+ years, we work extremely hard to understand how you use our platform and what we can do better to help you improve.

The feedback

If you’ve visited our roadmap before, you might have spotted a green tab at the side for feedback and ideas.

We invite anyone, including our thousands of users, to tell us how we can make Dotdigital better. Some great developments have been put in motion thanks to some of the feedback we’ve received – one of which is RFM segmentation (coming soon!).

The future

Besides our public roadmap, we use dotlives, webinars, customer interviews, and other opportunities to gather valuable feedback. You may have even received a beta program invite from one of our product managers; betas are a way for us to get feedback prior to launch whilst giving our customers the opportunity to shape the products they’ll be using in the future.