In this fall’s Dotdigital release we’re introducing three new ‘interactive email’ templates that can be purchased as a service via our Creative Studio (our unique in-house design and build team).

This form of email marketing allows contacts to control your content right from inside their email client – from swiping on images to giving you data.

A proper product showcase

No more boring grids of images! Get contacts engaging with your product emails by using image carousels and accordions. Want to show off your new season’s products in a new way? This is how to do it.

A new way to discover products and services

If you have multiple categories of products, services, or events, then our ‘discover’ template might be just the ticket to drive up engagement. Subscribers can select a category (“home insurance”, for example) and your top services in that category will appear. Without ever leaving the email!

Capture preferences (no web browser required)

We can’t stress the importance of having marketing preferences that are tailored to your business enough. But up until now, the only way of capturing them was from a form somewhere on the web (embedded in your website or on a landing page, for example). Now you can not only show a contact their preferences in an email but allow the contact to update them too (no web browser required!)

And you’re not just limited to marketing preferences, as you can also capture additional information from their name to their insurance cover expiry date – whatever makes sense for your business. Perfect to form part of your progressive profiling program.

Powered by AMP for email

If you’re wondering how we do this (or why we’ve not mentioned it all before), then let me introduce you to AMP – or more specifically, AMP for email.

AMP (without the “for email”, and which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google-originated initiative that aims to make the web a faster, more user-centric place. In their words, “AMP is a simple and robust format to ensure your website is fast, user-first, and makes money.”

AMP for email has taken that web format and applied it to email. You can’t quite do everything in an email that you can do on the web (a lot of times, for security reasons). But you can make emails interactive for the first time since, well, ever.

Use interactive emails risk free

Because AMP is largely a Google project, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that AMP emails work in native Gmail and Gsuite apps, both on mobile devices and on the web.

But that’s really where mainstream email client support ends. Alarmed? Don’t be, because any contact who can’t see the interactive version of an email will simply see the normal HTML or plain text version instead.

This means any campaign to any audience can be interactive – there’s no awkward segmenting on domain or email client needed.

Google-powered quality control

Here’s something you won’t be used to: Interactive emails need to go through a Google approval process before they can be sent (if you try sending without getting the email approved, it simply won’t work.) But, we’re here to help: for every interactive email we send, we’ll get it approved on your behalf (and as we’ve done it before, we know what we’re doing).

The advantage to this is that when it comes to send time, you know your campaign – which might be fairly complex at this point – is going to work just fine. 2020’s been hard enough without added nightmares about malfunctioning image carousels.

Our interactive email top tips

I’ve just said any email can be a candidate for AMP – but there are some we think just really… work. Here are my top 5 interactive email ideas:

1. Preference capture in your welcome program. This is for sure my number one. In fact, it’s so awesome, we do it ourselves. If you do one thing, make it this.
2. Progressive profiling in your welcome program. Capture additional information about your contacts after they sign-up, but from within their first few emails.
3. New product launch. Your products deserve the best showcasing they can get: show off your new wares in a shiny image carousel.
4. Make your core product offering easy to navigate: Whatever products, services, or events you offer, break them down and make them filterable in an ongoing campaign. Maybe you sell furniture (get your contacts to pick a room, show them products for it), or you’re a hotel (pick a location, show the rooms) or you offer training courses (pick a subject, show the courses) – maybe you’re even a charity (pick a cause, request a donation). If you offer more than one product (in the loosest sense) to the world, this one can work for you.
5. Key reasons to buy. Show what makes you, you – whether that’s low prices and great customer service, or the best industry knowledge and quick delivery – in a scrollable panel, not just in a list. Works really well as part of an onboarding program.

Final tip: all these work a treat when combined. A welcome program that takes inspiration from all of the above, for example, is sure to drive interest and engagement in your brand.

Get the ball rolling

If this sounds like where your campaigns should be headed, give us a call. Interactive emails are a full-service offering, which means we’re here to make them as painless as possible.

Why Dotdigital Hacks

Hack Week, now in its seventh year, gives our wider product and technology teams the chance to work on things that are just a little bit different from the day-to-day. It can be hard to take a step back and innovate when you’ve got your head down finishing a sprint, so Hack Week forces a pause in what we do.

The winners of 2019

2019 saw the introduction of a judging panel that scored every team, and our winners were the teams that scored highest. The judges were an excuse to introduce a little more role diversity – we had judges from Product Management, Customer Success, Engineering, Pre-Sales, and Training. These are the hacks they awarded most points too.

Voiceitronic Editor Control

Ever wanted to create an email campaign with your voice? For the two million people living with sight loss in the UK alone, it could make all the difference to their Dotdigital experience. The team used the speech recognition library annyang to allow EasyEditor to be controlled by voice – everything from selecting building blocks, moving them to a campaign, reorganizing them and, ultimately, sending, was included.

Creating on-demand Magento environments

Ok, so this one doesn’t have the catchiest name – but it solved a very real problem: creating test environments in a particular version of Magento with a specific branch of our Magento integration can be time-consuming (and just a wee bit dull). But it’s important, as we need to test our connector against all the Magento versions before we ship changes (otherwise some of you, understandably, get upset). And so the team set to using Docker to create a Slack bot that allowed the engineers to ask Slack to create a test environment using very specific configuration requirements. What’s more, it even added some sample data to aid the testing. That’s a 40-minute job taken down to seven minutes, on average.

In too deep

It wouldn’t be a hack week without machine learning being used for something, and so this team used TensorFlow Models hosted in BigQuery to provide real-time product recommendations on websites. It’s amazing what can be done with the data held in Dotdigital! (Incidentally, if you haven’t got your order data and product calalogs in your account yet, then you really should – once it’s there you can do many, many useful things.)

Interactive mobile landing pages

Ever think that simply sending a customer a discount code isn’t exciting enough? This team wanted to make the process much more fun, with scratch-off panels and spinners that revealed discount codes. The aim here, of course, was to gamify customer engagement, with the team working off the premise that, “humans like interacting with things that give them a reward.” Pavlov’s Dog not included.

Ok Google, how to win Hack Week?

And finally – the judges’ overall winner. This team created an entirely new voice channel for Dotdigital via the Google Assistant. What was really nice to see (and one of the things the judges loved) was that it was very consumer-focused. Using the data that lots of our users will already have in their accounts, it allowed someone to check in on order statuses, make changes, and so on. It really was the perfect mix of engagement, data, and innovation.

dotquizulator

There’s actually one more hack from the team that won the ‘popular vote’ from live voting on the day. (We allowed staff from all around the world to vote via SMS using upcoming functionality that will be available later this year – so keep an eye out for that.) This team extended our pages and forms tool so that competitions could be built within a form, including questions that had ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers, and even a live tally of someone’s score. It’s very easy to imagine this in our product one day!

Hack throwback

Our Hack Week is a yearly ritual. If you’d like to see previous hacks, check out the blogs from years past.

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. You never know – maybe next year your hack will be featured here!

I’m going to make an assumption here, and it’s this: by now, you don’t need me to tell you about the GDPR, or why it’s important, or even how it will affect you. You know what it is, and you’re already planning for it – and have been for months, or even years. I know this because that’s what you’ve been telling us. We’re fortunate to have customers that are so proactive.

And if you know about the GDPR, you’ll know about Article 7 – even if not by name. Article 7 is the section that deals with that tricky beast: consent.

But perhaps consent isn’t that tricky: isn’t it really just knowing who’s subscribed and who hasn’t?

Under the GDPR, not quite – because simply knowing that a contact is subscribed isn’t going to be good enough. In the post-GDPR world, consent will need to be specific.

Consent’s no luxury

If you have a signup form that contains an opt-in checkbox with, “Yes, I’d love to receive future emails”, then that’s going to cease being the gold standard on May 25. You’re going to need to come up with something more specific – something that says what those emails are going to contain, and how often you’ll be sending them.

But coming up with clearer, more specific opt-in text is one thing. The GDPR also says that you need to be able to demonstrate you have that specific consent.

You may well already be storing preferences in data fields, or perhaps with address books. That’s great, and you should carry on doing that. But being able to demonstrate why a contact has those preferences? That’s something that’s probably new to you – and it’s why we’ve built ConsentInsight.

As of today, you can now store – for free – the exact consent text a contact agreed to. Alongside, you can store the IP address they were on at the time, information about the browser they were using, and when they did it. And if their consent changes, we’ll keep the history too.

Get, store, demonstrate

You can request and store consent wherever you can add a contact (with the exception of adding individual contacts in the app).

The simplest way will be by generating a signup form, which will now get you to set your consent text. If you prefer creating signup forms with our surveys and forms tool, then you can use the new ‘Consent’ building block.

If you’ve obtained consent by some other means, you can set it when importing contacts by including the information in the file you upload (you can map the values just like contact data fields).

Of course, you may also be thinking about retrospectively gaining and storing consent for your current subscribers (we like to call this ‘up-permissioning’). For this, take a look at our two GDPR-themed program templates; you just need to fill in the blanks.

Let us do it for you

If you’d like a helping hand using ConsentInsight, or perhaps running an up-permissioning campaign, we have teams on hand that can help. Just let your account manager know.

ConsentInsight is available in your account now. To learn more about Dotdigital and the GDPR, visit our trust center, or download our free eBook for essential information on the new regulation.

I’m frequently surprised when I hear customers refer to their marketing automation and their lead scoring as if the two should never meet. Surprised, as there are a number of ways in which they can really complement each other.

Likewise, if you’re only using one or the other, let me show how the two can work together.

Engage your low scorers

You’ve got your lead scoring all setup. You’re happy with your rules, and your group distribution. You take your red hot leads, hand them over to your sales team – who say thank you very much – and then you ignore the rest.

You know this isn’t right. And perhaps some action somewhere will make a warm lead hotter. But finding time to actively nurture cool leads never quite makes it to the top of your to-do list.

So automate the process. But just because it’s automated, doesn’t mean it can’t be personal. In fact, I’d recommend it is personal. If a contact has engaged with you in the past – perhaps even extensively – don’t send them generic campaigns. Getting personal will help massively in your efforts to get them re-engaged.

Reward your most engaged

Hoorah, you have hot leads! Sell to them, quick! But these people shouldn’t just be there to sell to. If they love you that much, help them tell others about you.

Turn them into advocates. Create an automation program to send them vouchers, discounts, and content to share – whatever will be valuable to them – so they can distribute their love for you.

Use demographics to raise engagement

Lead scoring is great at telling you how engaged someone is. But using suitability scoring – which uses an email marketing contact’s demographic information – can tell you something that may not be obvious: if they look right on paper, why aren’t they engaged?

Or put another way, if a contact’s suitability score is through the roof, but their engagement is low, then automatically tailor your marketing: ensure your content for these contacts is different, utilise alternative channels – even mix up the volume and frequency of your efforts.

You may just find their sweet spot, and your lead gets warmer.

Know who to target when you’re retargeting

Set up an amazing retargeting program? Lead scoring is one of the best ways of establishing who it should be sent to.

Contacts that were previously hot – and received appropriate campaigns – but that have now cooled, are your audience.

And when they start engaging once more, their score will rise and they’ll stop being re-engaged. All without lifting a finger.

Get creative…

Lead scoring, as a tool, is flexible. Perhaps more so than people think.

Go beyond the normal uses to find something that works for you and your business. If you’re a B2C eCommerce outfit, try using lead scoring to measure customer happiness. As an example, complaints could make the score go down, positive reviews could make it go up.

Low scores can trigger incentives to stay loyal; high ones can reward them for their custom.

The key is to look inward at your business, and make the tool work for you.

…and experiment

On the 5th August, these features will be live in your Dotdigital account so there’s nothing stopping you from experimenting. You have the tools, you have the skills – good luck! And if you don’t have a Dotdigital account – why not sign up for a free trial?

You know it’s important to target customers at the right point in their customer life cycle; and chances are you’ve already sorted out your welcome campaign for new subscribers; so what’s next?

Well, that depends on your business — what changes to your email program are going to drive the most return on investment? Here’s an easy one, which doesn’t take up much planning time: a simple re-engagement program where you trigger an email to subscribers who might not have opened your emails for a while – say, 30 days – using a new addition to our trigger suite, ‘Last Opened Date’.

Deliver quickly; iterate

You could spend a whole bunch of time planning a massive re-engagement program, but my mantra follows that of the agile methodology:

• Get something working quickly
• Fail / succeed early
• Learn and improve your marketing from there

This allows you to get an early return on investment, and not only develop good marketing, but also become a better marketer by learning what does and doesn’t work, and adapting to it.

Making a basic re-engagement program

From that point of view; here’s an example built using our program builder.

1. Create a start rule such as “Start 90 days after Last opened date”
2. Use a decision rule to filter out any contacts you don’t want to receive any mailings from the program
3. Send the first re-engagement message
4. The program should then wait a few days
5. Automatically send a followup re-engagement message to anyone who didn’t engage with the first one

And if you want to add further steps, as many of the following on repeat as you see fit:

6. Wait a few more days
7. Send a further message to anyone who hasn’t engaged with any of the messages so far

And as for the content? Well, I’ll leave that to the creative team. I will say, though, that for these messages the subject line is key — if they’re not opening your emails then a well crafted subject line is going to be key in re‑engaging them. This will typically play on:

• Guilt — This would include something along the lines of “We miss you!” or “Was it something we said?” and works particularly well if you have a personable B2C or charity brand;
• Fear of missing out (or as they say these days #FOMO) — You could be quite blunt and tell them “We’re going to stop emailing you” in the subject line, the fear of missing out on potential content and offers may re‑engage some contacts;
• Urgency — Perhaps combined with FOMO such as “Reconfirm you subscription by 30 April”;
• Or failing the above, a good old incentive — a special offer they just can’t refuse; perhaps combined again with urgency “Act now to get 60% off”

Where to from there?

We said we would start simple and move on from there, so what’s next? Well, that depends on you. You can move on to other areas of automation, or improve this one. Whatever you do, look at the data and learn whether or not what you’ve done is working. Suggested next moves for your next iteration:

• Segmentation —  Send more targeted re-engagement to different segments of your mailing list.
• Data integration — When all is said and done, “Last Open Date” isn’t the greatest indication of customer value; be sure to consider other engagement factors such as their purchase history in your automation program, and trigger from something that works for you.
• More personalised engagement — Rather than a blanket send time, try tailoring the send time to your contacts by using a dotMailer extension such as the one built by AudiencePoint. You can use intelligent timed sending to send emails when your contacts are ready to receive them.
• Preference centres — When your contacts do open your re-engagement campaigns, be sure to give them a decent choice of what to do next. Do your preference centres give your contacts the chance to subscribe to content that is relevant and timely to them?
• Multi-channel marketing — If your contacts aren’t engaging with you by email, it doesn’t mean they’re lost – let them know via social and other channels to look out for promotions in their inbox.
• Do something with your non–engagers — Now you could consider unsubscribing them completely, but a non-opener won’t necessarily stay that way. Long unengaged contacts can become re-engaged due to circumstances totally outside of your control such as the weather; in the UK we’ve seen when there’s heavy snow and people end up working from home, email open rates rocket. An unopened email in their inbox is still an impression of your brand messaging to the customer, and it may be cheaper to win them back than to find a new one.

What’s more, we’re highlighting which of our free templates are optimised in the template library (lookout for the desktop, tablet and mobile icons under each thumbnail).

The mobile myth

Even if a template isn’t optimised for a mobile, it will still work on those devices. But optimised templates are a bit special: they use media queries to display differently on smaller screens (images that are next to each other on a big screen collapse under each other on a mobile to ensure your recipients don’t have to scroll horizontally, for example).

The final dimension – not just a bad film

You may also notice that we’re no longer giving the image dimensions in our mobile-optimised templates. When images can show differently depending on the device they’re viewed on, the dimensions can change.

Sometimes, an image can be larger on a mobile than on a desktop. As a result, it’s always worth uploading the best quality image you have, and letting EasyEditor resize it for you. It can look at the code, establish the largest possible size the image may be shown at, and scale it accordingly. Which is pretty neat.

Use at will

Despite their cleverness, mobile-optimised templates can be used like any other: the text and images can be replaced to craft a campaign as normal. Just don’t forget to use the mobile preview to see how your work will show on smaller devices!