What is hack week?

Employees work in teams to work on innovative solutions for previously identified problems. These solutions could involve an emerging technology, a novel way to apply existing technology, or just simply making things better. It’s been exciting to see previous years’ hacks that have made their way into the Dotdigital product and the quality of the ideas this year were no exception.

Thirteen teams had three days to bring ideas to life and create a video showcasing what they had created. A panel of judges then identified winners in four categories, plus a fifth ‘bragging rights’ award for the best team name, voted on after the presentations.

This year, hack week was lead by Simon Letch, our Software Development Manager and the judges included a member of HR, a member of Customer Success, along with members of the Product and Technology team. The entries were strong, making the decisions very hard. Let’s get to the winners.

Most Innovative

The unacceptables – Next Generation Dotdigital took the award for most innovative. Their goal was to enable simple and consistent integration of our scripts in the latest and greatest of front end Javascript frameworks.

Most Wanted

The team Moebius theory and their project: RPP (Rapid program pollination) was given the Most Wanted Award! They worked on creating a feature for the program builder that adds an “execute immediately” option for programs which will execute enrollments based on the current enrollment rules.

Chief Product & Technology Officer Award (awarded by our very own Steve Shaw)

The Explosive Architects – C4 was the winner of our CPTO award! Using Structurizr, this team is championing creating living C4 models of our architecture and proposed goal state architecture to ensure any changes we plan are moving towards that goal state.

Best Hack

Team Plan for Success introduced Omnibox which is a calendar view of scheduled Email and SMS campaign activity.

Bonus Award: Best Team Name

And last, but not least, the Sheriffs of Noteingham took the bonus award and bragging rights for Best Team Name!

Join us and hack too

If experimenting with new technology and solving customer engagement problems in new and innovative ways seems like something you’d excel at, have a look at our open positions over at careers.dotdigital.com. We are always on the lookout for outstanding additions to our team!

By now, most will have a plan in place that is well on its way to ensuring holiday success. Here are three ways you can double check your strategies to make sure they are not trading long-term gains for short-term wins.

1. Will your list expect to hear from you?

The holiday sending period is known for increased volumes. Audiences are naturally larger and there are more things to communicate.

As a customer, I want to know what’s going on with the brands I love and I’m more likely to have some purchase goals to take advantage of seasonal deals. Targeted emails from marketers who are smart with their data analysis show me exactly what I want and are highly valuable. Unwanted messages clutter my inbox, hiding the ones I’m really looking for – this makes for a frustrating experience and I’m more likely to complain or move messages to the spam folder.

As you’re preparing to communicate the wonderful things you have to offer to your recipients, take a hard look at the risk of sending to those that aren’t expecting to hear from you and proceed with caution.

2. Are you giving your recipients choices?

There are always going to be people who, for one reason or another, don’t want to hear about a specific holiday or sporting event.

For people experiencing grief or hard times, they may not be looking forward to Thanksgiving as much this year. For the World Cup specifically, it’s no secret that there‘s some controversy about the host country chosen by FIFA. When it comes to social issues, you need to ask if or how you as a brand have chosen to respond, and whether it will alienate your recipients and jeopardize ROI.

Along with giving recipients the ability to opt-out of holiday emails, give them the ability to choose not to hear about the World Cup as well. This makes sure you’re maximizing your efforts to give your recipients what they want.

3. Have you incorporated all channels?

Take a look at what you have planned for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – is it cohesive with your World Cup strategy?

Having a strategy that elegantly combines both will ensure your recipients needs are the focus and ultimately get you the best success. Remember that there are other ways to communicate with your recipients. Make sure to use SMS or other channels where email doesn’t make sense.

Using an approach that strategically incorporates all methods so that everything is working together will make for the best success.

This is a fun time of year, and all of us are doing what we can to make sure we are prepared and helping our businesses be successful. It’s important to be reviewing the plans we have in place to make sure we are set up for wins. Look critically at your strategies, and then go enjoy something festive – I’ll be having some pumpkin pie.

We know that many security filters automatically visit every link in an email to assess the validity and risk of the URLs. This is one of the ways MBPs protect their users. This non-human interaction (NHI) has been a topic of conversation in the industry for a long time. Security providers believe this automated link checking is a necessary precaution to prevent end users from downloading something harmful (like malware) or falling victim to phishing attacks. What’s more, link checking carried out by security providers is ramping up. In a recent industry report, as much as 20-80% of link clicks for B2B senders can be NHI (with B2C fairing much better with less than 10%). We’re seeing a distinct change with B2B domains protected by Microsoft Office 365 and Barracuda, where they’ve begun checking links more frequently than ever before. Many businesses are accelerating their migrations to cloud mailboxes during COVID-19. This surge of businesses turning to cloud services helps explain the increase in NHI.

The situation becomes even more complicated as security providers are looking to hide the link checking they’re doing. They do this because they don’t want ‘malicious senders’ to be able to detect their checks. Malicious senders are known to either change the URL redirection after the checks have been performed or present harmless content to known security filter IPs, but the harmful content to recipients. Security providers continually adjusting like this creates a moving target for those of us providing services to legitimate senders when it comes to differentiating between NHI and real recipient clicks.

How does this affect customers?

1. Increased traffic to websites

The increase in NHI can send a sudden (and unexpected) amount of visitors through to a sender’s website. This surge in visitors can cause some websites to become overwhelmed, suffer performance issues, or even go offline as a result.

The good news is there are some solutions senders can implement…

• Throttling sends: Sending a large campaign immediately may result in 1,000s of website visitors (which includes NHI clicks) over the course of just a few minutes. It’s possible to use our throttling feature to control the spread and send rate of a campaign (sends can be steadily completed in small chunks over 1 to 24 hours). Packaging up sends into smaller chunks and controlling the subsequent website visitors will reduce the risk of website performance issues. We’ve recently made our throttling feature more sophisticated which is explained in this article.
• Website robustness: Sender websites have to be fit for purpose. Investing in a solid website infrastructure that can cope with larger numbers of visitors is becoming increasingly important. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is often an effective strategy for managing high traffic and allows speedy delivery of website content to visitors. Whichever strategy is used, it’s important security providers can successfully access links to websites. Attempting to block or interfere with these checks will have profound negative impacts for senders.

2. An increase in click and open metrics

Of course, security filters are doing what they’re designed to do: protect end-users. But, as a consequence, open and click rates are artificially inflated in reporting data.

How can we solve this problem?

• Re-think engagement measures: Senders are re-thinking how they measure the success of campaigns and moving away from traditional open and click metrics to other more sophisticated engagement measures. There are many other useful metrics to measure email performance. Here at dotdigital, we often talk about holistic indicators. It’s about using all of the available data points to paint a picture. Senders need to redefine the click metric and where that belongs in that picture of holistic indicators. Holistic indicators are often described as using all the metrics available regarding the emails being sent together to get an accurate idea of how emails are performing.
• Exclude NHI from campaign reporting: Dotdigital has functionality (currently in beta) that searches click data for signals of NHI and stops them from reaching your reports. We’re still developing the feature, but it’s already showing signs of being very effective, which is why we’re offering it to a small set of customers now. If you’re interested in knowing more, see this help center article.
• Focus on building a positive reputation: We know sender reputation plays a huge part in the amount of NHI experienced. Senders with highly engaged recipients will receive less NHI. Building and maintaining a positive sending reputation is vital in reducing the overall impact of NHI. Using our sender reputation feature is a great way of keeping a pulse on it. If you’re looking for guidance in taking your reputation to the next level, we have a highly skilled team of deliverability consultants who can provide the best advice on achieving a great sending reputation. If you’re keen to learn more, ask your account manager/customer success manager.

We’re all working hard to solve these conundrums. There isn’t a single solution to these problems. Instead, there will be several mitigating actions senders can take themselves. In addition, an cross-channel marketing engagement platform like ourselves should provide useful advice and technological advances. In summary, senders should be ready for more NHI and website traffic than ever before, especially with the busy holiday season just around the corner.