How dotdigital can help during times of social distancing

As cities around the world go into lockdown, and the daily working lives of many grind to halt, it’s safe to say that the future is unclear. Many of the businesses using Dotdigital are having to make some impossible decisions about stores, staffing, and services. And, with people working remotely around the world, clear and effective communication has never been more important.

At Dotdigital, we are more than aware of these demands. We too made an early decision to ensure all staff in our 13 offices around the world were able to work safely from their homes. As a result, we asked ourselves what more we could be doing to help our community, friends, and family during this time.

Free chat to keep connected with customers

You may have noticed that we launched live chat at the end of last year. Depending on your plan with us, you may have already had access to one or three chat agent seats to try it out. We are now extending this so that all our customers have 10 free agents at their disposal*.

We understand that many of you may be planning or have already shut the doors to your physical stores. Customers will increasingly be practicing social distance, putting more demand than ever on your website and online customer service teams. By adding live chat to your site we hope this will enable you to reassure your customers about your business continuity. It would be great to think that by doing this, you’ll be able to reassign existing staff to manage and monitor these customer queries.

Tips and tricks

1. Get started quickly. Our intelligent chat tools allow you to automate messages and create teams. This can help you organize customer queries based on topics such as delivery and returns, or sales inquiries.
2. Make sure your working hours are clear and well-publicized. Customer queries come any time of day, but your staff need a break too, so make sure your website visitors are aware when their query will be answered.

* NOTE: The chat agents we are supplying will be free during this period of disruption to businesses and Dotdigital will give a months’ notice to let clients know when the agents will be removed in the future.  

Free child account for internal comms and sends for all existing customers

Upon activation of this offer, you will receive an additional employee engagement child account to use for your internal communications and 10,000 free email sends to ensure you’re able to communicate clearly and effectively with your staff, customers, and stakeholders.

During this time, internal communications is as important as clear and open communication with your customers. Your staff needs to be well informed with every passing development. HR teams around the world will be working overtime to ensure that staff are kept updated with policy changes and employee morale and wellbeing remains high. We wanted to make this as easy for you as possible.

For many of you, your customers will be in the same situation as yourself – working remotely. Access to stores, venues, and services is becoming increasingly difficult. Keeping relationships with your customers strong is going to be vital. We want to give you the tools to keep them engaged until they’re ready to come back.

Tips and tricks

1. Our first and easiest tip: personalize. Everywhere, people are worried and unsure about the future. Information is more important than ever. But, at a time when changes are being applied en masse, a simple first name personalization is going to make the world of difference to your reader. Whether you’re talking to staff or customers, personalization is quick and easy, all you need to do is drag and drop it in as you build your email.
2. Schedule important updates. When you know a big change is coming, make sure you’ve done as much in advance as possible. This will allow you to schedule your send to arrive at the optimum time for your readers. Dotdigital also has the power to amend links after the send, so updating after the email lands is easy. This is especially important for policy updates, as staff will make sure this information is easy to find and accessible to them at all times.
3. Check-in with staff, partners, and customers’ health and wellbeing by creating surveys for regular updates. All new child accounts will come with full access to our landing pages and forms tool, so you can start sending straight away.

As well as 10,000 free sends, our product team has also created two brand new templates specifically for updates at this difficult time. This will enable you to get important comms out faster.

Send instant updates with SMS

All child accounts in this offer come with access to our powerful SMS channel, so you can get messages out quickly and efficiently.

These uncertain times have made access to mobile devices more important than ever. People are staying connected with the help of these devices, but they’re also using them to get the urgent information they need. Make sure you’re maximizing the mentality to get your comms heard.

Tips and tricks

1. With a 98% read rate, SMS is the perfect channel for crisis management. We used it ourselves when the decision was made for all our members of staff to work remotely. During times of emergency, you need to use a channel that will reach employees, customers, and stakeholders wherever they are.
2. Keep staff and customers updated with the latest information about your business or services with well-times and relevant text messages. SMS are quick and easy to set up so they are perfect for timely communications. You can even use them to prompt readers to check your latest email updates.

Our pay-later SMS structure means you can get your messages out immediately and only pay for what you use.

Get started

To activate this offer, all you need to do is complete this simple form, and we’ll be in touch to finalize the set-up accordingly.

For additional help and information about Dotdigital, check out our training hub.

Get onboard

I’m also delighted to announce that we have a number of additional offers for businesses interesting in becoming a part of Dotdigital’s Dotfamily.

Every new account will have access to a free employee engagement child account and 10 live chat licenses outlined above. But, there are also a number of limited-time regional offerings.

The UK and EMEA

For those operating within the UK and EMEA during these troubling times, we are introducing unprecedented flexibility with onboarding and set-up costs. We want to make migration as easy and streamlined as possible, so please talk to your sales rep about what they can do for you.

For all the incredible charities out there, we want to show our gratitude with overall reduced fees. For the work you’re doing, keeping communication flowing is essential, and we’d like to help in any way we can. With reduced fees, you can be up and running in no time, and join the likes of the British Heart Foundation, Help for Heroes, and Asthma UK.

The Americas

To help businesses across the Americas, we’re completely waiving onboarding fees, typically worth $3,500 USD. Changing your marketing tech can be stressful at the best of times, so we want to do all we can to make things as easy as possible for you.

APAC

We’re offering free onboarding worth $4,000 AUD or $4,000 SGD across the whole APAC region. With no cost to getting started, we want to get you sending and talking to your customers as quickly as possible.

We understand that with all the uncertainty during these times changing marketing automation platforms might not be at the top of your priority list, but these offers will only be available until June 30^th, 2020. Please get in touch today if you’d like to get on board.

Stay in touch

If you have any questions or feel there is something else we can help your business with at this time, please get in touch with your Account Manager or a member of our helpful Customer Success team.

If you’re not a customer but are interested in finding out more about how Dotdigital can help, please contact a member of our Business Development team.

We’re all in it together

As this continues, we want you to know that the dotdigital team is here to help you as much as we can.  Regardless of whether you’re a customer, prospect, or just stumbled across our blog by mistake, we’re all in this situation together and we’ll see it through by helping each other.

If you want more information about managing your communications and marketing during this tough time, please check out our latest blogs.

Managing communications in times of crisis

Effectively communicating your business continuity

Even continuity brings change. Here’s what you can do to remain relevant.

And for more information about Dotdigital and the step we’re taking in response to the ongoing pandemic, take a look at our own continuity plan.

Business continuity – COVID-19