In other exciting news, we are thrilled to announce the acquisition of our long-term partner, Fresh Relevance. With this move, we are able to provide you with the best CXDP experience, empowering you to consistently deliver customer experiences that go beyond expectations. Read more about it here.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

Save time and do more with WinstonAI

WinstonAI, Dotdigital’s marketing intelligence engine, has continued to grow and evolve. From send time optimization and product recommendations, to generative AI assistance, WinstonAI is on hand to make your work life easier. And with this release we’re adding even more features to our generative AI capabilities, helping you streamline your campaign creation process.

Grammar and spell check

What is it?

Built into the campaign builder, WinstonAI will scan your campaign content and provide a spelling and grammar check across email, SMS, surveys, and pages and forms. This will let you know of any errors found and offer suggestions, leaving you in control to adopt as you see fit.

WinstonAI is powered by GPT and our partnership with Microsoft ensures that all data is always secure.

Why is it important?

WinstonAI grammar and spell check allows you to save time, so you can focus on the more creative and important elements of your campaign.

• Reduce time spent proofing campaigns
• Streamline sign-off processes
• Communicate with confidence
• Reduce typos and grammar errors
• Keep standards high and maintain brand reputation
• Spend more time focusing on creative and strategic elements of your campaign

How to get started

Our grammar and spell checker, powered by WinstonAI is now available within the campaign builder. To note, if you don’t want to utilize WinstonAI, there is a toggle option to disable WinstonAI suggestions, so you always have complete control.

SMS in one-click

What is it?

This new WinstonAI feature enables you to easily convert email campaigns into SMS messages with just one click. WinstonAI will do all of the hard work for you and suggest an SMS campaign with copy that is aligned with the message of your email campaign.

Why is it important?

A cross-channel approach is key, and SMS adds a lot of value to your marketing mix. With incredible engagement rates, 60% of SMS are read within 1-5 minutes, and the ability to cut through the noise of a busy inbox, SMS campaigns should be a part of your marketing strategy.

This new feature means you can focus on the message first, and the channel second. Creating SMS has never been this easy, allowing you to increase your reach in no time at all

• Save time and drive far more engagement with just one click
• Deliver cross-channel experiences in seconds
• Focus on creating your message first, and channel second

How to get started

When you’ve finished writing your email in our campaign builder, simply click on the WinstonAI icon and select “convert to SMS”. You’ll then find the suggested SMS campaign in the SMS editor and all that’s left to do is hit send. If you’re not sending SMS yet, start by setting up a free trial in your account.

Shorten SMS

What is it?

Ever written the perfect SMS campaign only to realise that you’ve gone over the character limit? WinstonAI can now analyze your text and provide a shortened version that is suitable for mobile messaging while retaining the essentials of your original content.

Why is it important?

Adhering to the 160-character count limit for SMS texts is crucial to avoid sending multiple consecutive messages and impacting your billing. The WinstonAI shorten SMS feature simplifies the task of condensing lengthy messages, without losing their core meaning. You will also receive the character count of the shortened message.

How to get started

You’ll find the WinstonAI Shorten SMS tool in the SMS campaign editor. Simply click on the WinstonAI icon and select “shorten message” to receive your alternative text.

Elevate your strategy with enhanced SMS

SMS is a great tool to have in your cross-channel strategy. It lands in the palm of your customers’ hand and gets the message across in rapid time. This release we’re launching a host of improvements to your SMS experience. This includes making SMS campaign creation easier, offering improved SMS number capture, and delivering detailed new reporting.

Advanced revenue attribution for SMS

What is it?

Get more insight into campaign performance with our new advanced revenue attribution for SMS. By tracking both direct and assisted campaign revenue, you can now easily identify how different touchpoints are performing throughout the customer journey. This is already available for email and now we’ve added the capability to SMS to ensure you can effectively report on campaign performance across both channels.

Why is it important?

Customer journeys are anything but linear and each touchpoint deserves recognition. ROI is a crucial metric for any business so reliable, detailed reporting is key. A comprehensive understanding of the marketing journey and every individual campaign’s impact is invaluable for managing budgets, future campaign planning, and campaign optimization.

How to get started

Find out more about our revenue attribution models in the help center. To benefit from assisted revenue attribution you must be on a CXDP or Amplify package.

Commerce SMS capture

What is it?

Consumers are shopping on mobile devices more than ever before, so we’re making it easier for our ecommerce partners to maximize every conversion opportunity. Merchants using Magento, Shopware, Shopify, or WooCommerce can now capture SMS numbers as part of the check-out process. Shopify merchants are also able to offer an SMS-only checkout to their customers.

Why is it important?

Embrace the mobile shopping trend by integrating SMS capture at checkout and letting consumers decide how they want to be contacted, keeping your brand connected to the pulse of the customer.

• Acquire more marketing contacts that are opted-in to receiving SMS.
• SMS checkout allows customers to complete their purchases faster.
• Send tailored mobile offers and discounts via SMS.
• Send order updates directly via text messages keeping shoppers informed throughout the whole purchase process, leading to higher satisfaction.

How to get started

You must be a merchant using either Shopify, Magento, Shopware, or WooCommerce and SMS. Head to the help center and search for your ecommerce platform to find out more.

Think bigger with extensive integrations

Our integrations allow you to bring your whole customer journey together and share data every step of the way to better inform your marketing strategy. We know how important fast, accurate data flows are, so we made our API even better.

New integrations area in Dotdigital

What is it?

In our new integrations area you will find a comprehensive directory of all of Dotdigital’s tech integrations, including Dotdigital-built, verified partner and app extensions such as Facebook and Google ads. The integrations area is categorized and has search and filtering functionality, plus each integration will have a profile with a description along with instructions on how to install.

Why is it important?

A core part of our offering as a CXDP is our ability to connect with your entire marketing stack. You can now easily find the integrations you need to create a seamless customer experience that delivers conversions and improves ROI.

• One centralized database for improved visibility and connectivity.
• Have the confidence that the integration you’re reviewing is either Dotdigital built or verified, making choosing new tech easier.
• Discover the steps needed to self-install, or how to get in touch with our partners.

How to get started

You can visit the new integrations area from your Dotdigital account. Not a customer? You can also check out our integrations in the partner directory here.

API V3 and improved rate limits

What is it?

Our all-new API offers a top-of-class CXDP experience. Whether you’re wanting to push data into Dotdigital or send it back to other systems, this new API is changing the game. We’ve also enabled higher rate limits for our existing APIs.

Built with the latest RESTful technology, with service versioning embedded from the start, our family of APIs allow you to:

• Integrate quickly with any other system
• Make up to 6,000 calls per minute so data will always be up to date
• Read data in 30ms – that’s five times faster than you can blink

Why is it important?

These new services are the first of a new batch that will be focused on ensuring our customers and partners can integrate even more seamlessly with Dotdigital. This enables you to freely exchange data which in turn drives incredible customer journeys using our communications and automation capabilities.

• Our CXDP allows high-speed data access without burdensome rate limits.
• Sync insight data as you can now retrieve all modified records since your last call.
• Contacts can be identified using any identifier for improved visibility.
• Consolidate many API calls into one by optionally including other contact related data when getting your contact details.

How to get started

Visit the Dotdigital Developer hub for all information relating to our APIs.

The new Dotdigital is now available to all customers

We’ve spent the last few years re-building Dotdigital from the ground up to be able to offer you the functionality of a powerful data platform, paired with our customer experience and marketing automation tools. In short, Dotdigital is now a CXDP.

What is it?

We’ve kept all the things you already love about Dotdigital, and amplified them. Built on our core values of sustainability, privacy, and security, we are continuing to grow the platform to support your business in even more areas.

Dotdigital’s data platform functionality combines email and SMS data to create a unified, single source of truth for your contacts. Unified contacts allows you to bring your data into one place, enabling you to build a deeper connection with your audience.

Why is it important?

Unified contacts, gives you more insights than ever before – all in one place. You now have more ways to identify customers, so you can match up associated data with identifiers including (email, mobile number, and unique contact ID).

A joined-up customer data platform allows you to create an engaging, cohesive customer journey. In today’s market, going beyond the expected is key for brands who want to stand out, be memorable, and offer an exceptional experience.

• Engage with your customers on their preferred channels for optimal engagement and an improved customer experience.
• Deliver a seamless cross-channel experience with multiple touchpoints across the customer journey.
• Gain a 360° view of your contacts to better understand them enabling you to market directly to their interests.
• Deliver campaigns that engage at scale with hyper-personalization techniques and tools that appeal to your audience.

How to get started

We’ve done all the work, unified contacts is now a part of your Dotdigital account from today.

Other key updates

New look and feel: homepage and better UI

You’ll notice a new, refreshed homepage now featuring key performance metrics and personalized recommendations to help you identify key opportunities and effectively manage your to-do list. We’ve also upgraded our navigation and redesigned the SMS editor, making the platform easier and more intuitive to use.

A Dotdigital PWA

We’ve developed our own progressive web app (PWA) for the Dotdigital platform. This app makes it easier for you to access the Dotdigital platform. Simply pin the new app to your task bar at the bottom of your screen for instant, easy access. Head to the help center to find out more.

Shopware multi-store support

Shopware merchants can now connect multiple storefronts to one Dotdigital account in order to communicate with customers more effectively. Having a multi-store setup connected to one back end store can save time and admin work, this is especially valuable for ecommerce merchants that serve multiple countries.

App blocks for partners

The new partner app blocks enable to partners to build their own blocks for customers to use in the EasyEditor. This gives you more control and flexibility over what layouts you use in your campaigns. Plus, automatically matching campaign style functionality saves you time by removing the need to manually adjust the style via the code.

SMS regulations for Singapore

In order to send SMS in Singapore, marketing providers need to be able to block incorrectly formatted sender IDs, as these are considered a risk for illegitimate messages. Our latest update supports this change – get in touch with your Customer Success representative to enable the change in your account.

At Dotdigital we know it’s hard to keep up with the sending rules and regulations of different countries. We keep on top of it for you so that you can continue to send SMS in 220+ countries across the globe confidently.

Improved login experience

We’re increasing the login inactivity window from 2 hours to 3 days. So you can go away for a long lunch or even a long weekend, without being logged out of the platform.

Join the webinar

Why is storytelling important?

Brand storytelling is important in marketing because it helps you connect with your target audience on a deeper and more emotional level. Our brains are wired to remember stories over simple facts. Stories help us retain information and create close, personal bonds. The benefits of integrating this into your marketing are obvious. 

Data can come to life through storytelling. By telling personal and emotional stories, you can capture and retain your audience’s attention. This makes your brand more relatable and memorable, setting you apart from your competitors. Successful brand storytelling can not only increase awareness and brand loyalty but also boost sales and business growth. 

Understand what customers need

Long before talk of customer-centricity started ringing out across the marketing world, the customer was essential to company success. After all, businesses would be nothing without customers to connect with. Despite this, there are still some brands out there that don’t put the customer at the center of everything they do. Instead, they focus on their ideas and assumptions about their target market without ever really getting to know them. Warning: these businesses won’t last long. 

For brands looking to grow, disregarding the customers’ needs can be irrevocably damaging. Especially in today’s market, customers are more than happy to jump ship and realign their loyalties to a brand that is willing to meet their needs and fulfill their expectations. That’s why you need to ensure you’re always learning about your customers. Understanding their goals and needs will help you engage them with your brand.

Discovering customer needs through data

Crafting a compelling brand story begins with discovering what your customers truly desire. That’s why it’s essential to collect customer data and use it in the right way. There are several effective methods to uncover these insights:

Polls, surveys and interviews

Direct conversations with customers will provide you with the richest data. You can explore the decision-making process: – What drove them to convert? – Why did they choose your brand over competitors? – Was there a specific element of the experience or your website that stood out? – How did they discover you? – What are their interests? What are they passionate about? 

By collecting this information, you will get to know your audience like never before. You can discover what is important to them and build this into your brand story. For example, if they’re passionate about supporting international development, you can introduce a new initiative supporting business programs in the developing world. Ultimately, displaying this commitment and aligning your brand values to match your audiences’ will lead to stronger, loyal relationships and rapid growth.

Monitor interactions

Interactions and customer interactivity with your brand will only grow in importance. Following Apple’s iOS 15 software, it will be interactions, not opens that help you understand customer intent. By tracking customer interactions, you can learn a great deal about the average customer’s journey toward conversion. The emails they interact with, the links they click, and the pages they visit all tell you something about what they’re trying to achieve with your brand. 

You can identify where customers’ interests lie, focusing your product or service development on what will drive engagement and growth. You can also identify moments that generate engagement or where customers drop out of the funnel. This will give you greater insight into what your audience is trying to achieve and how they want to do it.

Feedback and reviews

Customers should feel at the center of your brand story. This includes feeling like their opinion and feedback are valued. You should not only be encouraging feedback and reviews but also monitoring them to identify trends. Are customers raving about your fantastic customer service? Are they disappointed about the lack of shipping options?

By using feedback and reviews to identify these trends, you can improve your customer offering and demonstrate your commitment to a customer-centric approach. Including customers in the day-to-day running of your business gives them to chance to get fully invested in your brand. 

Customers love a brand that listens to them and values their input. By reinforcing and demonstrating this in your brand messaging, you’re helping to create more trust and strong bonds with your brand. Section on reviews also being great marketing material when positive. Use these at various touchpoints across the customer journey. From social media to checkout. Social proof is invaluable.

Customer loyalty is the ultimate goal

As a marketer, your ultimate objective is to enhance customer loyalty and retention. To achieve this, you can create a brand story that is based on customer data. Showing that you understand the needs of your customers fosters satisfaction and exceeds their expectations. This customer-centric approach positions your brand for long-term success and growth.

Discover how Dotdigital help you create unforgettable brand narratives that resonate with your audience by reading our best practice guide.

What is a single customer view?

A single customer view (SCV)  is essential to gaining a complete and organized overview of the information your company has on your clients. By consolidating all customer data into a centralized location, businesses can easily access a comprehensive overview of their customers, their preferences, interests, and purchasing behaviors. This allows brands to create personalized campaigns and engage with their customers on a deeper level.

What is Distil.ai

Distil.ai is a customer data platform that allows marketers (that’s you!) to pull all your data from all your tools and all your channels together into a single customer view. 

That’s right, Distil.ai unlocks that single customer view that remains elusive for too many businesses —unified, holistic data. Everything that you know about your customers across all your channels and devices, across all your internal systems – all in one place, ready to be activated. 

Now that all your data is in one place and right at your fingertips, Distil.ai lets you make it available to any of your customer touchpoints. Then, you can push it into a powerful customer engagement platform like Dotdigital, transforming your data into smart marketing campaigns your customers will love.

How does Distil.ai work?

Here’s how Distil.ai works: So, you’ve got your customer insights locked, loaded, and in the right format for your tool or channel. It’s time to create the kinds of bespoke customer experiences that delight your audiences and drive revenue and ROI. But… how?

How do you get from all that first-party data (the live information you hold about your customers) to solid-gold marketing genius? For starters, you create that single customer view we talked about using a customer data platform like Distil.ai.

Your new and existing contacts expect (often demand) only the most relevant content to be delivered to them. Analyzing and segmenting your data in the right way keeps people engaged with your brand, saving you countless unsubscribed.

The benefits of single customer view

The single customer view (SCV) offers many benefits for companies aiming to leverage customer data effectively. Here are some key advantages of SCV:

View engaged subscribers

SCV allows you to gain a comprehensive view of each customer’s interactions and engagement with your brand. This helps you identify your active subscribers and who’s at risk of subscribing to better understand their behavior. You can then nurture your engaged subscribers along the buying cycle while curating tailored content designed to win back lapsing contacts. 

Personalize your channels

Personalizing channels for your customers is crucial, and SCV plays a key role in achieving this. By discovering your contact’s preferred channels, you can engage with them more effectively, whether it’s through email, SMS, social media, your website, or any other platform. 

Engagement levels can differ across channels, but with SCV, you can identify the most effective channels for acquiring new customers and those that your regulars prefer. This allows you to concentrate your efforts and deliver the right message to the right person, on the right channel.

Offer targeted product recommendations

Having a single customer view is key to creating personalized product recommendations that match each customer’s needs and interests. With a single customer view, businesses can spot patterns and connections. 

You’ll also have the ability to establish a deeper connection with your customers and foster long-term loyalty by consistently delivering products and offers that resonate with their tastes and preferences.

Create customer segments

With an SCV, companies can segment their customer base based on various factors such as age, gender, geo-location, purchase history, browsing behavior, and more. By examining the data, businesses can uncover insights and trends that help them understand which customers belong to each segment. 

Using a single customer view to create segments enables targeted marketing campaigns. By analyzing individual preferences, spending habits, and frequency of visits, businesses can reduce dwell time, deliver personalized and relevant messages, and maximize sales and ROI.

Leverage the single customer view

By adopting the SCV approach and utilizing platforms like Distil.ai you can greatly improve your customer engagement, boost your revenue, and cultivate lasting customer loyalty in today’s ever-changing and competitive data environment.

What is a martech stack?

A martech stack is simply the name given to the collection of marketing technology or software used by a business to support and enhance its marketing efforts. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you likely already have one.

Forrester found that martech stacks now account for over 20% of the total marketing budget, and 56% of businesses planned to increase their allocated budget to spend on martech. Plus, a huge 82% of marketers said they plan to change their martech stack in 2022. There is a lot of growth in this area because marketing technology is constantly evolving, and martech frees up marketers’ time, and we all know that time is money.

The importance of a martech stack

The importance of a martech stack cannot be overstated in today’s digital age. With the proliferation of marketing channels and the vast amount of customer data available, a martech stack is essential for businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in the market.

By leveraging customer data from various sources, such as CRM systems, social media platforms, and email marketing campaigns, a well-designed martech stack can help automate and streamline marketing processes, improve customer targeting and engagement, and increase marketing ROI. By integrating various marketing tools and technologies, businesses can achieve a holistic view of their marketing efforts and gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.

A martech stack also enables businesses to stay agile and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. As customer expectations and preferences evolve, businesses must be able to respond in real-time to deliver personalized experiences and relevant content. A martech stack can help businesses achieve this by providing the necessary tools and technologies to analyze and act on customer data.

How to build a martech stack

Curating your marketing stack isn’t as intimidating as it sounds. There are no rules and no expectations. It’s as simple as looking at what you need, both as a business and as a team, and going from there. Do you have an SEO specialist on your team, or do you need an all-in-one solution to automate your processes? Once you’ve got an idea of the areas you need support for or simply want to enhance, you need to look at your budget.

38% of marketers cited budget as a barrier to building a martech stack. However, a martech stack optimized for a marketing team’s needs is going to be worth the investment. Once you’ve figured out your priorities and your budget, you can start researching which options will work for you. There is no set number of technologies you should have in your stack.

What does a martech stack look like?

Still unsure of exactly what a martech stack is? Let’s provide some examples. For SEO, we use Semrush for social media scheduling and reporting. Then, for marketing automation, we use Dotdigital (duh), and for CRM, we use Microsoft Dynamics. 

That’s just a fraction of our complete martech stack; we simply use technology that works for us, and you should do the same. No business and marketing team will be the same, so it’s highly unlikely any martech stack should be the same.

We have previously had other technologies in our stack too, ones that we’ve since changed to a new offering or simply no longer need, and we’ll likely add new ones in the future too. A martech stack is simply a name for the collective technologies and software your marketing team uses, it’s not a strict parameter, and it can be fluid.

So, how can tech integrations improve your marketing?

Dotdigital is an example of how technology can improve your marketing. Our platform unifies data, which in turn raises insights ready to empower hyper-personalized marketing messages, automated depending on customer behavior. Pretty impressive, right?

The martech industry is vast, with 9,932 martech solutions available. This means you’re highly likely to find what you’re looking for, no matter your industry or need. Dotdigital works with lots of different technologies to strengthen your marketing throughout the customer journey.

Some examples include:

• Customer service platforms like Zendesk to keep records of all interactions in one place
• CRM platforms to support sales team integrations and remove silos
• Ecommerce integrations to improve understanding of customer behavior
• Enhanced personalization through platforms like Movable Ink

If you have any questions about what’s possible, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Put into practice

For an example of how one of Dotdigital’s integrations can help, let’s look at Reviews.io. You can set up an automation program that sends customers an email asking them to review your brand on Reviews.io once they’ve completed a purchase. 

You can also have an automation set up to send a follow-up email based on the review they leave. Three stars or under? Nurture campaign. Four or five stars? Thanks for your review. Have you checked out this similar product? You get the idea.

The journey is seamless back and forth. You’re prompting customers from your communication platform, letting them provide a review on the review platform, and then following up on your communications platform. This is a great example of two technologies that offer different services working together to bridge the gap—exactly what a good martech stack is all about.

But wait, there’s more. You can also use the social proof editor within Reviews.io to create a graphic and have that automatically appear in your Dotdigital image library. That extra hit of social proof ready and waiting in your image library to add to your welcome campaigns can make all the difference to your conversion rates. 

And the best part? No one on the team had to spend time looking for good reviews, creating an image, and manually uploading it to Dotdigital. The result is stronger marketing campaigns, as well as more time on your hands.

Working together

As soon as you’ve identified the technology you need, make sure it works together. As we’ve just explored, your martech stack is there to support you and make your day-to-day run smoother. You don’t want to be bogged down in manual tasks to share data from one platform to the next.

When your technology works together, it’s going to be more effective overall. Knowledge is power right? If system B knows what a customer has done on system A, it can better market to them based on this and let systems C, D, E, and F know too. 

Of course, it won’t be this linear in reality, as your customers’ journeys aren’t linear. Your stack will be a collection of tech platforms that work in different areas as and when they’re required, in no particular order.

The point remains that your tech platforms communicating with each other is key. Data-driven marketing is imperative for success. The technology is there to strengthen your customers’ journey, so being aware of what happens throughout that is crucial. Think of your stack more like a web, with each piece of technology or software able to connect with each other. 

You need to ensure that multiple systems are integrated to transform a wealth of customer data into reliable, contextual, and timely insights and make that information easily accessible to other platforms that can take action on those insights.

Choosing technology partners based on their integration capabilities with your existing technology is imperative to building a marketing stack you can rely on. This will in turn improve your customer journey, and as we all know, a positive customer experience leads to higher rates of customer loyalty.

How can Dotdigital improve your martech stack?

With 46% of marketers citing the complexity of integrating the technologies as their top barrier to creating a martech stack, we understand it can feel daunting. We know that your time is valuable, so we offer both out-of-the-box integrations so you can get started straight away and a bespoke solution if your stack requires a bit more tailoring. (Our developers always love a new challenge).

Our marketing automation software is the best in the biz thanks to data unification, cross-channel functionality, and leading marketing automation. And while our platform does a lot, it can’t do everything.

Dotdigital is designed to work with the best of the best in other areas too, such as ecommerce, social media, review platforms, and so on, so that you can create a truly joined-up stack. Our integration hub is a great place to start exploring, as it explains how you can integrate Dotdigital with other marketing software.

Embrace technology

Marketing is a broad discipline, and there’s a lot to keep track of. As consumers have largely moved online, the tactics and tools used to engage with customers have become more and more technology-based. 

Back in the day, print advertising and direct mail were huge channels, these days, social media ads and email marketing are more common. Even billboards, which used to be printed out and pasted on by someone climbing up a ladder with a bucket and brush, are now digital screens that can be updated at the touch of a button.

The point is, technology is undeniably a huge part of marketing, and it’s only going to continue to grow. It can be hard to know where to start, what’s going to be worth your investment, and how to make it all work together. 

However, if you start by looking at what you need, researching what’s available, and curating a stack tailored to your business, it’s going to benefit both your marketing output itself and your team’s productivity.

Customer engagement models like RFM enable marketers to segment audiences in more sophisticated ways. Using insights such as the recency, frequency, and monetary value of past purchases (RFM) enables you to identify customers who have the highest potential. But how do you know whether these shoppers are truly engaged? 

What is eRFM?

To determine whether a customer is truly engaged with your marketing efforts, you need to measure their engagement and interaction with your brand. That’s where eRFM comes in.  

Businesses use eRFM as a segmentation framework to categorize customers based on their previous behaviors and actions. To effectively use eRFM to segment customers, businesses need to collect and analyze customer data across the four metrics: engagement, recency, frequency, and monetary value.

eRFM: the future of segmentation

eRFM is the next level of RFM. As well as measuring the recency, frequency, and monetary value of past purchases, our customer modeling tool also looks at engagements like email opens and online activity. This means that you can segment customers based on their recent interactions with your brand, as well as their past purchase behavior.  

Each RFM persona receives an engagement score, so you can identify customers who are primed for conversion, and those who need to be re-engaged. By using eRFM, you can tailor your marketing campaigns, provide personalized experiences and boost customer retention.

Daily data syncing means that your segments will always remain up-to-date. As customer behaviors change, so will your segments. Identifying key moments in the customer journey is now easier than ever, you’ll never miss an opportunity to convert customers again.

Creating eRFM segments

RFM modeling creates seven personas that can be made into audience segments:

1. Non-customers: potential customers who have subscribed to your newsletter but haven’t made a purchase.  
2. Inactive: customers who have not made a purchase in a long time.  
3. Need nurturing: customers who are about to fall into the ‘inactive’ segment. 
4. High value: customers who have spent a lot with you, but have not shopped recently. 
5. Recent: shoppers who have been actively purchasing from you. 
6. Loyal: customers who shop with you frequently.  
7. Champions: shoppers who frequently spend a lot of money with your brand.  

With the addition of engagement insights, these personas are broken down further into four categories: 

1. Lightly engaged  
2. Engaged 
3. Highly engaged 
4. Most engaged  

This gives you a total of 28 audience groups to choose from when building your segments.  

How to use eRFM segments

With 28 segments to build, the possibilities are endless. Each customer can receive highly personalized and relevant messages depending on the journey stage they’re on. 

Here are just a couple of ways you can add eRFM segments into your day-to-day marketing automation strategy.  

1. Greet new website visitors

Making a good first impression on new customers is essential for growth. A strong pipeline of potential customers can guarantee your business’s future revenue. With more consumers shopping online than ever before, you must identify those yet to make a purchase so you can target them accordingly.  

Traditional RFM modeling doesn’t account for prospective customers expressing interest in your brand. eRFM allows you to target new subscribers who are browsing your website for the first time. You can identify these non-customers and enroll them in welcome or nurture programs to highlight your brand’s USPs.  

2. Discover critical first purchase intent

We know that shoppers today browse multiple bands before they’re ready to make a purchase. Increased competition online means you’re fighting more and more for their attention.

Using eRFM modeling, online behaviors are tracked, so you can easily identify shoppers who look ready to convert for the first time. Applying this to segment builder means you can deliver relevant and timely content that will help tip them over the edge. This is the perfect time to send readers information about your shipping or returns policy. 

3. Re-engage inactive customers

Inactive customers can be a huge source of opportunity. They’ve previously purchased from you but for whatever reason, you just haven’t seen them in a while. Our eRFM model makes it easy for you to identify inactive customers who are showing signs of re-engaging with your brand.  

You can target this segment with a timely win-back campaign that reminds them of your brand’s values or offers them a discount code on their next purchase. This may be the incentive they need to come back into the fold. 

4. Identify customers with active carts

Customers add items to their baskets for many reasons, but one thing is for sure: they’re considering purchasing these products. Maximize these clear signs of intent by acting quickly to close the sale.  

When your eRFM model surfaces customers with an active cart, you should be retargeting these shoppers with personalized product recommendations or exclusive offers. Product recommendations are proven to increase average order value, so are crucial for customers at this stage in their journey.  

5. Drive repeat purchases from existing customers

Retaining existing customers is 5x cheaper than acquiring new ones. To really tap into brand-new revenue opportunities, eRFM can surface customers showing signs of making a second purchase.  

You can use this clear intent to purchase to highlight unique aspects of your customer experience, such as your loyalty program. Collecting points per purchase or unlocking special rewards can drive shoppers to return time and time again.  

6. Maintain loyal customer engagement

Your most loyal customers are typically very low maintenance. You’ve already done the hard work showing them why you should be their go-to brand. They trust you and because of that, they’re happy to be advocates for your brand. But what do you do when their engagement starts to wane? 

By creating a segment based on this eRFM persona, you can enroll these shoppers in a customer care automation program to keep engagement levels high. This is the perfect segment to target with requests to complete focus group surveys.

As well as maintaining engagement, you can create a stronger relationship because these customers will feel directly connected to your brand. 

Adding eRFM to your segmentation strategy

eRFM segments are based on customer behaviors. For those marketers out there struggling to implement an effective segmentation strategy because of poor customer data, eRFM is the solution you didn’t know you were waiting for.  

eRFM pulls in data hiding in plain sight. There’s no need for extensive data cleansing or laborious preference collection. We use insights from your ecommerce platform to help you discover opportunities waiting to be turned into revenue-generating moments.

As a result, it would be safe to assume that marketing budgets are reflecting this opportunity. Unfortunately, not. Marketing budgets have shrunk as businesses tighten their purse strings. The average share of a company’s revenue that’s spent on marketing declined to just over 6% in 2021. 

What is customer retention?

Customer retention is an important part of any successful business strategy. It involves building and maintaining positive relationships with your existing customers to keep them coming back. 

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers for your company. The goal of customer acquisition is to convert your customers into paying customers who will generate revenue for your company.

Customer acquisition or customer retention?

The rise of marketing opportunities online may make it feel like acquiring new customers and growing your marketing database is the answer to business growth. If there are more customers online looking to discover new brands, then you have a better chance of converting them, right? Not necessarily.  

While the acquisition is still a big priority for a lot of brands, competition is rife. You’re not the only brand to see the revenue opportunities offered by the new increased activity online. Brands like Google, Facebook, and TikTok want to keep users on their channels and clicking on revenue-generating paid ads rather than surfacing new brands organically.  

That means big brands with bigger budgets are the ones succeeding in converting customers. 

It’s also important to note that customer acquisition can be more costly and time-consuming than customer retention – so it’s good to focus on both strategies simultaneously.

The benefits of customer retention

Investing in customer retention is a smart move for any company looking to achieve long-term growth and success. Improving your customer retention has many benefits: 

Reduces rising customer acquisition costs

Research carried out by Profitwell found that customer acquisition costs (CAC) had increased by 60% in the half-decade from 2014 to 2019.  

During the recent pandemic, when online demand for goods first surged, ecommerce giants like Amazon and supermarkets ramped up their tactics, investing massively in paid search and delivery fulfillment. With 74% of online searches starting on Amazon nowadays, it’s been made nearly impossible for brands to compete with these industry leaders for new customer acquisitions.  

Lowers churn rate

When customers leave because they’re unhappy with their experience, it costs businesses money each time they lose one — not only because they have less revenue coming in but also because they have to spend money on marketing campaigns aimed at acquiring new leads (which usually don’t work as well as retaining existing ones).

How to improve customer retention

To retain customers, marketers need to shift their focus from acquisition to retention. The most effective way to do this is by using customer data. Customer data can be used for personalization, improving customer experience, and making data-driven decisions.

Harness your customer data to segment

Your data literally holds all the answers. Want to set your marketing team’s KPIs clearly? Check out your data. Want to know what products or services to develop? Your data will tell you. Want to know which customers are of the highest value? The answer is in your data.  

You can calculate your customer lifetime value (CLV) to help you increase sales and profit as well as boost customer loyalty. It can help identify segments that will generate the most revenue over time, enabling you to justify spending on your marketing campaigns. 

Thankfully, improved data capture, understanding of the importance of first-party data, and better access to predictive analytics tools mean that CLV can be forecast with greater accuracy.  

A great example of this is Dotdigital’s RFM customer modeling tool. By pulling in customer data from across your marketing stack, it intuitively groups customers based on the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their interactions with you. You can then build segments to target high-value and loyal customers or even customers who need nurturing.  

The end goal is to never let a customer go after you have invested in their initial acquisition.  

Whether through CLV, RFM, lead scoring, or NPS, you need to harness your customer data to target the right customer with the right message at the most optimal stage of their journey.  

Personalize your marketing for memorable experiences

Personalization is about more than addressing your email subscribers by their first names. Truly personalized messages and content take user behavior as they interact across your digital touchpoints into account, as do user preferences such as specific product recommendations, choices, and interests. 

This ensures that customers are seeing deals, promotions, and content that is relevant to them, on the channels, and at the frequency, they want to see it.  

Recent research found that customers are 80% more likely to make repeat purchases when brands create personalized experiences. These experiences can be anything from relevant product recommendations, to location-based updates. Overall, personalized communication on your website or in your email marketing campaigns can increase brand loyalty —particularly among millennials—by around 28%.  

Personalized experiences help you nurture your customer relationship by being useful, informative, and relevant to their specific stage in the journey. This will keep customers returning to your brand time and time again, leading to higher retention rates.

The long-term value of customer retention

Marketers must understand the long-term value of customer retention. Nurturing your existing customers is just as vital to your business’ success as acquiring new ones. Not only is it cost-effective, but the likelihood of converting an existing customer is 60–70%, whereas you only have a 5-20% chance of converting new prospects. 

The results will not be immediate, unlike measuring the growth of your marketing list. You need to ask yourself how you can improve the customer experience to keep customers coming back and turning into brand advocates. 

Calculating and tracking CLV and customer behavior will help you identify high-value segments and where you need to direct your marketing resources. In turn, this will ensure you’re getting a higher ROI for your marketing campaigns. Additionally, ongoing data analysis can help you identify trends and set clear KPIs for your marketing team.

Customers want and value personalized experiences. Using your customer data and intent signals, you can segment and target existing customers with experiences tailored to their needs and desires. With a strong core customer base of loyal customers, you will ultimately see customer acquisition rates improve, as they turn into brand advocates and spread the word about your business.  

We know that the customer experience is essential. So much so, that recent years have seen the number of companies with a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) or Chief Customer Officer (CCO) grow from less than 65% to 90%. The value of a good customer experience (CX) is widely acknowledged and fully accepted.  

But theories on how to achieve it are varied, conflicting, and ever-changing. Every year, we’re told about new tools that will help us create the experiences that will drive conversions, ROI, and retention.  

• SCV 
• DMP 
• CDP 
• AI 
• CRM 
• PWA 
• CMS 

The list is as long as it is endless. But one thing all of these buzzwords and tools have in common is data. 

What is customer data?

Whether you’re communicating with customers, businesses, donors, fundraisers, or your own internal members of staff, every organization has a wealth of data at its fingertips.  

Customer data is more than a simple email marketing contact. A contact’s email address is just one of many invaluable gems of data that businesses collect to better understand their audience. Customer data ranges from behavioral to demographic and personal information about them.  

Connecting your data

Today’s cross-channel customer can interact with your business anywhere, at any time, and on any device. You can send out surveys to collect data, build preference centers, and track browsing behavior. The ways you can collect data are vast and varied. As are the systems that house it.  

The data you collect can be housed in your email service provider, CRM, ecommerce store, CMS, and more. To gain quick and practical insights from your data, you need a tool that can pull them all together. 

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

Today’s marketers are faced with a particular problem that affects every business, everywhere. Disparate data. To resolve this issue, we’re seeing more and more companies emerge referring to themselves as a CDP – but what is a CDP? 

A CDP – customer data platform – is a piece of software that brings together disparate and disconnected customer data into a single unified source. This allows for information to be easily shared and accessible to other systems which empower marketers to target customers with personalized and relevant marketing messages.  

As the internet enabled brands to flourish online, companies have collected more data from more sources than ever before. With all this big data, demand for a tool that can process multiple data sets and deliver actionable insights has grown. Similarly, the need to share data across teams and departments has increased.  

Compliance with data privacy regulations requires legal teams to easily access a customer’s personally identifiable information (PII). The need to deliver relevant marketing messages means that marketing teams need to be able to pull insights about customer behavior and preferences. Customer service agents need to access personal information in order to provide a personalized experience.  

CDPs have emerged as the answer to solve all our problems. But is this really the case? Are CDPs really the only customer data tool we’ll need in the future?  

Segmentation, automation, cross-channel

What are we really after when we talk about customer data tools?  

We’re after a single source of truth. Once place where everyone can get the answers to the burning questions stopping them from achieving their goal, objectives, and KPIs. 

When we strip that back, we’re looking for a platform that can consolidate multiple data sources, creating insights that will help us build experiences that convert and retain customers. As package software, it needs to play well with others, unify customer profiles, manage PII, and have open access to grow with your business and your marketing stack.

As marketers, we have three core areas of concern that must be considered when sourcing a new customer data tool. 

1. Segmentation

Segmentation is essential for marketers looking to deliver personalized experiences. Creating groups of customers based on common characteristics – i.e., segments – is an invaluable but underused marketing tactic.  

Customer data tools need to be able to highlight, categorize, and group customers based on their common traits. How often do they shop with you? When did they last engage with your email marketing? Are they a high-value customer with a large contract with your business or do they need nurturing?  

The quicker and more accurate these insights can be drawn, the timelier your marketing communications will be. Has a high potential customer abandoned completing a price request form? You will be able to retarget them with a personalized and relevant message that will drive conversions.  

When considering which customer data tool to buy, these customer and segment insights should be at the top of your consideration list.

2. Automation

Automation, much like segmentation, is essential for marketers in every sector and every vertical. Marketing automation uses triggers to deliver messages in a timely and relevant fashion. These triggers can be any touchpoint across the customer journey; they could be date-driven (birthdays, anniversaries), behavior-based (abandoned carts, abandoned browse, page views), demographic (location, job title), and so much more.  

A customer data tool will be able to process these actions, identify customer intent, and enable marketers to send timely automated messages. You’ll never miss a conversion and retention-building opportunity again.

3. Cross-channel capabilities

As well as segmenting your audience and automation your messages, you need to be able to extend your reach. Today, customers are unpredictable. They can change devices and channels at any point along the customer journey. Cross-channel marketing enables you to manage multiple channels under one roof. No matter where the customer is, whether that’s geographically or in their individual customer journey, having cross-channel capabilities means you will always be able to connect with your customers. 

You need a customer data tool that can follow customers across their channel of choice, deliver messages – be it automated or single sends – and return actionable insight into customer behavior on each channel you offer.  

Choosing a customer data tool

The types of tools, systems, and software you can use to connect your data are varied but one thing is certain: it needs to work for your audience.  

As marketers, your job is to create customer experiences that engage, convert, and retain customers for the long haul. To do this, you need a data-driven marketing tool that can do it all; connect with customers on any channel, deliver insights you need to create a personal and relevant message, and help you target the right customer every time.  

It’s harder to know people’s interest in your brand and their intent to convert. For ecommerce, you can’t see them browsing the products on the shelf and see their reactions to the goods. If you’re in the not-for-profit space, or B2B, which relies on building relationships, online doesn’t allow you to have a face-to-face discussion and see the emotions at play.

A visit to a website takes a lot less commitment and intent than visiting a physical location such as a store or an office, so you need to work harder to get that precious conversion. To do that, you need to engage your customers and know what they might be looking for. Let’s explore how to increase your customer engagement and how to gauge customer interest. 

Contact scoring

So, what if you could know who each customer is, and how interested they are in your brand and products. Imagine if you could tell how many emails and social posts they’ve engaged with, how long they’ve spent on your site, what they’ve bought from you, how much they spent, and whether they read your blog. Then use all this information collectively to work out how you should connect with them next.

It’s called contact scoring. Contact scoring gives you a way to score and rank your contacts based on two key metrics (scored between 0-100):

• ‘Engagement’ – scored on contacts’ interaction and behaviors (such as campaign opens, link clicks, and visits to your website)
• ‘Suitability’ – scored on contacts’ profiles (such as their job title, industry sector, and location)

These metrics combine to produce a third metric – an overall contact score. As a result, you and your company can manage and prioritize your most promising prospects.

Utilizing contact scoring

The purpose of this tactic is to enable you to deliver the right messages, to the right customers, at the right time and the right scale. For example, you might want to send a loyalty offer to those with a higher score, whereas you’d probably want to enter lower-scoring customers into a re-engagement program.

Once you’ve set up contact scoring, you can create rules to work with segments and automations that are triggered when certain scores are met. This will be different for every business, so the platform is designed to be super flexible – your imagination is the limit.

eRFM

If you’re in the ecommerce space, eRFM is another great tool available to you. eRFM is our ecommerce behavioral model is designed to help you better understand the potential of your contacts. It’s a combination of our RFM model (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) that looks at a contact’s purchasing behavior, with our engagement model that looks at the engagement of a contact – for example, their email opens and clicks, web sessions, and abandoned carts.

When we combine these models, we can better understand and detect purchase intent across various customer types – from inactive contacts to champions.

You can use eRFM groups within your segment building to make highly accurate segments based on the customer’s likelihood to purchase. You can then use these in your marketing automation programs to target these customers with the right message, at the right time.

What content should you consider for your customer engagement strategy?

To be able to score your customers’ engagements effectively, as well as your website and product pages, you need content to track against. This is especially useful for new customers that haven’t made a purchase yet, or if your product or service is something people tend to think about for a while before committing. Here are five types of content to consider for your strategy and why:

1. Blog posts. Blog articles are liked by most audiences because they’re usually topical, digestible, and regular. Many publishers and brands will post blogs at least a couple of times a week, typically to distribute via social channels to drive engagement. This type of content is a great way to measure someone’s level of interest in your company – if they’re frequently reading your posts and clicking through to your site, then you’ll want to allocate a good proportion of points to these actions.
2. Emails. Marketing emails are a great way to measure your customers’ interest in your brand. You can see when they’ve clicked through and converted, or haven’t, as the case may be. Each time they do or don’t engage with your emails, the more points you’ll reward or deduct.
3. Webpages. You want customers to get to your site. But you want them to spend time there, navigating through it, and not just bouncing after viewing one page. The more pages a customer views on your site (and the longer they spend on it), the more points you should give them.
4. Landing pages with forms. Customers who’ve landed on your page and completed a form are making contact. They’ve taken the time to complete the fields, which means they’re interested in your brand. You should therefore consider giving this type of engagement a sizable weighting in your overall score, and follow up while they’re still warm.
5. Social media. Prospects and customers who follow you on social media are likely to be engaged with your brand. By recording this information, you can use it to target them on a platform that suits them, with content they’ve shown interest in.

Conclusion

Ultimately, given the distance when selling online, brands need to work harder to gauge the interest of browsers and customers. Luckily, technology allows you to track this reliably, perhaps even more accurately than in person, as someone behind a screen feels no societal pressure to be polite.

Ensure you’re tracking your customers and potential customers, and have segmentation and automation set up to react to changes and target them at the right time. When you’re acting on customer engagement and activity, you’ll be offering super reactive, relevant customer service, at scale.

With a unified view, you can begin to deliver personalized lifecycle marketing that connects with customers in the moment and drives conversions and results.

Why is it important to collect the right customer data?

Customer data empowers marketers to deliver targeted and relevant data-driven marketing. It’s an undeniable source of power for marketers. But, as consumers become increasingly aware of how and why brands are collecting data on them, it’s falling on the marketer to work harder to earn customer trust.

As changes to privacy laws, cookies, and privacy settings sweep across the digital world, brands need to better understand the different types of data and how to use them. In this new world of consumer consciousness, it’s not right for businesses to collect and hold customer data without putting it to good use.

Responsible marketing – making sure your marketing has a positive impact on consumers and their community – places a special emphasis on how brands handle customer data. If brands lose customer trust because they’re not using their data appropriately, winning them back will be an uphill battle.

As a result, you need to know what types of customer data are out there, how to collect it, and how to use it to improve the customer experience.

What is zero-party data?

Forrester defines zero-party data as “data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand”.  That is, information customers have explicitly shared with you via data capture forms or preference centers.

How to use zero-party data

With updates to iOS software and updates to privacy laws, zero-party data is more important than ever. Customers want their marketing to be unique and personalized. Zero-party data enables them to be proactive about these experiences. They’re in power. How much information they share with you determines the level of personalization they want to receive.

Collecting preferences allows you to ensure you’re reaching customers on the right channel, with the right products and messaging.

• Multi-channel marketing
• In-copy personalization e.g., first name
• Dynamic content

What is first-party data?

First-party data is information you have collected directly for customers and can include behaviors and actions across your website, data in your CRM, or social data. As with zero-party data, this information comes straight from the user. It can be generated from interactions.

How to use first-party data

As you collect first-party data directly from your audience, it’s accurate and relevant to the users’ experience. You can use this type of data to personalize experiences through product recommendations and abandoned cart emails. It empowers you to send timely and relevant messaging that’s going to drive customers towards conversion.

• Trigger marketing automation campaigns: abandoned cart or browse emails
• Product recommendations
• Retargeting ads

What is second-party data?

Second-party data is secondhand information that you didn’t collect yourself. Typically, you would expect to receive this kind of customer data from a trusted source – a partner or seller you have agreed to exchange data with.

How to use second-part data

Second-party data is essentially first-party data that has been shared with you. As a result, you can similarly use this data. When you obtain this information through a data-sharing agreement with a partner, you can auto-enroll new contacts into new automation programs.

• Lead nurture programs
• Event follow-up programs
• Retargeting ads

What is third-party data?

Third-party data is any data collected and sold to companies by a third party. It’s not directly collected from your customers so its usefulness and value can be brought into question.

How to use third-party data

Third-party data is generally collected at a large scale. This makes it useful for brands looking to gain insights into audiences’ behaviors and interests. When used alongside your own first-party data you can uncover and target contacts who fit your customer personas.

But when choosing to use third-party data, it’s important to consider the issues it can raise. Most importantly – you don’t know how reliable the quality of the data is. After the revelations of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, customers are extremely wary of receiving unsolicited marketing. If customers believe a brand is targeting them without their explicit consent, their trust will be impossible to win back.

The growing importance of customer data

For a customer to become loyal to your brand, you need to earn their trust. How you handle and care for their personal data will go a long way towards earning that trust.

Consumers today expect a value exchange. They’re happy to hand over personal information about themselves if they can expect a valuable experience in return. Personalization, timeliness, and relevancy are just a couple of ways you can use data to deliver exceptional experiences.

With new privacy laws and impending updates to iOS software are changing the digital landscape, brands have to pay more attention to what data they’re collecting on customers and how they’re using it.