1.    What inspired you to start the dotties?

I thought it would be a great chance for us to celebrate our clients and partners and all the amazing work they are creating. It’s a perfect opportunity to showcase our successful clients and help our other clients who need some inspiration into what they could do to better their business – so basically a win win for everyone. Its also a fun night where we can all meet our clients face to face and enjoy an evening full of entertainment and a whole lot of dancing.

2.    The event is back again at the iconic Troxy this year. It’s an impressive space – what makes it perfect for the dotties?

The Troxy is great because it’s so versatile. We can really make it our own and stamp the dotdigital personality on the whole venue, so everyone who walks in there feels connected. The history of the venue is super-interesting too. It started out as one of the first luxury cinemas (back when people used to get dressed up to go to the cinema because it was such a treat!); it was then bought by the Royal Opera House who used it for rehearsals – the acoustics are pretty powerful. In the 80s it was a bingo hall before finally being bought by a couple for their wedding – who still own it and have turned it into an events venue for a whole range of events, TV shows and gigs.

3.    What’s the best thing about the night for you?

Seeing everyone – clients, partners and my colleagues – having a great time, enjoying the food and fizz, laughing with each other and dancing the night away. The dotties is not something to be missed, and it’s free for entrants. So, what are you waiting for?

Flashy email design, gripping email copy and intelligent personalization – these are the things most of us strive to deliver as email marketers. We want to get the look and feel of our brand spot on. Plus, we want to deliver memorable experiences that’ll help us shine  So sometimes we overlook the bare necessities, like ‘Can my customer see what I’m seeing?’. Email mobile optimization is one of those fuzzy areas of email design: some brands will nail it as a priority, while others haven’t even got it on their radar. Here’s why it matters:

For retail and ecommerce marketers, mobile’s taken over the market share. Mcommerce sales worldwide reached an estimated $1.357 trillion in 2017, or 58.9% of ecommerce spending overall. By 2021, mcommerce will account for 72.9% of the ecommerce market.” And for B2B businesses, it’s a similar story: 76% of Gen X buyers and 84% of millennials said their mobile device was critical to their work.

Email is STILL the top channel for marketers looking to maximize on ROI, delivering £32 for every £1 you spend. But in order for it to fire in all cylinders, it’s got to be optimized for your customers’ viewing preferences.

The customer experience should be seamless, whatever the device

Designing for mobile users shouldn’t be viewed as a separate component to your regular email design. Creating a smooth, effortless experience for your customers across all their touchpoints is the ultimate goal for any marketer – especially when 50% of consumers now regularly use more than four touch points during the buying process.

So the question is:

‘How mobile should I go with my email design?’

Every brand is different, and what works for your peers might not be the best fit for you. Deciding on the level of influence mobile has on your email design is the best way to ensure you’re optimizing content for your customers – without leaving any out in the cold.

Get to grips with just how many of your contacts open, click and convert on mobile devices. If you have a best-of-breed ESP, like Dotdigital, you can access a detailed breakdown of email client shares for every campaign you send. Find out the percentage of iPhone opens, for example, or build a more accurate picture of how many tablet engagers you’ve got on the books. A quick pointer: getting to grips with this information can also improve your send time optimization; a dip in mobile opens at certain times will highlight the times when it’s inopportune to push out marketing messages.

Once you’ve got the measure of mobile engagement, you can decide just how mobile you’re going to get. We’ve rounded up the important differences between mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive email design to help you make up your mind.

Mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendly email design (sometimes called mobile-first or mobile-aware) is fixed width and optimized for reading on a handheld device. This design relies on a single-column layout with large text and CTA buttons; the font size isn’t responsive but is large enough to be read on smaller screens. Extra spacing around campaign elements allows for maximum ‘tappability’.

Mobile-friendly email designs are simple to create and guarantee customers will be about to view your creatives on any device. However, their primarily single-column layout offers limited design options, especially for meatier campaigns like newsletters.

Responsive

Responsive email design uses CSS media queries to create fluid tables and images, allowing your campaign to adapt for different screen sizes and orientations. You can prioritize different layouts, font sizes, colors and even content based on the device customers are using. Previously, Gmail didn’t support media queries – but that’s no longer the case.

Using a responsive email design gives you much more control over your campaigns. The drawback is that the design process is more complex and will require some coding. Some best-of-breed ESPs will have responsive design baked into their platform as standard; brands using Dotdigital can select which email content blocks they want to display on what device. Plus, all of our templates are designed to be mobile responsive – even the free ones.

What about a hybrid email design?

Hybrid email, sometimes called ‘spongy’ email, uses a combination of percentage-based widths, maximum widths, and clever and complex workaround coding for Outlook clients to ensure emails are adjusted based on a device’s width. The hybrid design offers marketers universal ‘friendliness’, but requires more development knowledge – and can get messy if left to inexperience. Always test any new design across multiple devices and email clients to ensure you’re delivering a consistent customer experience

If you’re interested in building email campaigns with a hybrid design, we’re here to help you. Dotdigital’s talented Digital Creatives have the full mix of design and coding skills and can help your team execute beautiful, consistent mobile-optimized campaigns and pages. Get in touch with your Account Manager or check out our Creative Services page.

What next?

Dotdigital has a guide that goes into more detail on mobile email design. You’ll get real-world examples for top brands, more insight, and a handy list of 10 best practices to help you stand out in any inbox.

Grab our free best practice guide on email design.

Of course, we’re talking about the GDPR.

Do you feel like countless articles, webinars, and networking events later you still don’t have a good grip on the subject? Have you done the math and fretted over what that 4% fine for non-compliance could mean to your business and your budget?

In a recent Direct Marketing Association survey, 59% of its respondents agreed that over half of the marketing email communications they received were irrelevant. That’s not the best news.

At Dotdigital, we want you to continue to love your job, chat to your customers, and feel safe that you’re engaging with them in the right way. We believe, if used correctly, the GDPR will drive positive change and encourage a better marketer-customer dialogue.

So, we’ve made some changes to the Dotdigital platform to give you new functionality.

And if you need a bit of extra help, we’re offering professional services that could help make the road to compliance that little bit easier.

Here’s an overview of what’s new for you:

1.    Content Insight

One way we empower our clients to better the dialogue with their contact base is with Consent Insight. Consent Insight goes beyond GDPR requirements and allows you to develop a multi-faceted view of a contact’s consent as well as segment and target by them, for relevant marketing communications that will make customers open, read and click.

With Consent Insight, every dotdigital customer can store, at no extra cost, the consent text that every individual contact agreed to. To allow for a greater demonstration of consent, we’ll store the consent text, the date and time the contact consented, the URL that they consented on, their IP address and full user agent.

We’ll be using Insight data to store consent information. This means that the consent data will show when you view a contact. You can also segment by consent data and include it in campaigns with advanced personalization.

Find out more here.

2.    Double opt-in program templates

Whilst not mandatory, we do recommend double opt-in. This shows that you verify the identity of the receiver of your emails and is further proof that they want to receive communications from you. Plus, sending to a double opted-in list increases unique opens by 72.2%. Double opt-in is switched on by default for all new dotdigital clients.

To help our users with re-permissioning, we’ve created designated program templates. Combined, they create a skeleton process for obtaining and storing consent.

3.    New functionality for contact records

Like something from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all contacts have the right to be forgotten.

Besides the right to be forgotten, all your contacts will also have the right to submit a Subject Access Request (SAR). This will require you to share what information you have stored against their name.

The GDPR also states that you should respond to such requests without undue delay. We hope you don’t get too many deletion requests, but if you do, at least the platform changes keep it simple, saving you time:

“I’ve received a contact deletion request”

To delete a contact, simply go to your contacts and click into the individual contact you wish to delete. Select the ‘contact actions’ dropdown in the top-right corner and you’ll see the option to delete the contact there.

“What if I’ve accidentally deleted the wrong contact?”

Any contacts you delete will be moved to the recycle bin for 30 days. So, if you made a mistake, you have 30 days to recover the data. After 30 days, their details will be permanently deleted.

4.      Easy exporting

“I’ve received a Subject Access Request, what do I do?”

A contact may ask to know what data you hold against their name. To better facilitate SARs, we’ve made it easier to export individual contact data. Go into their Contact Summary and on the right top hand side of the screen you’ll see the ‘Contact actions’ dropdown. Select ‘Export contact’ and a download will start, containing only necessary data and excluding any behavioral insights you may hold.

5.    SSL/TLS for all custom-domains

Article 32 of the GDPR states that data processors (like dotdigital) should implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to mitigate risk by, amongst other things, encrypting personal data. If you use Dotdigital-branded domains, data in transit to and from these domains are as secure as before.

We’ve introduced SSL/TLS for all custom-domains, so you can enjoy the brand recognition of your own domain whilst having confidence that all data is being encrypted whilst being sent to and received from the Dotdigital platform.

This way all your email links, unsubscribe pages, landing pages, surveys, preference centers (and so on) are covered under this update too.

6.    Data availability and recovery

Ok, so this isn’t exactly a new feature. But you might not know it’s there – so it’s worth detailing.

Article 32 also discusses maintaining the availability of data, and the ability to recover from a technical incident.

In addition to having redundancy built-in to every level of the Dotdigital platform, we regularly back up data to a secondary facility, meaning that in the unlikely event of a major incident affecting the primary facility, we would be able to recover services to the secondary facility – restoring availability.

These secondary facilities are located so that they will not be affected by an incident impacting the primary, whilst still being in the same region for reasons of data sovereignty (so European client data will not leave the EEA)

7.    Consent maintenance programs

Establishing initial consent is easy. But making sure that consent remains valid is harder to achieve without constant monitoring.

Our consent maintenance programs take the legwork out of consent monitoring, providing peace of mind and freeing up your time.

And we’ve got two of them.

Consent maintenance program

This supercharged starter package offers an automation-based solution to ensure you’re only marketing to fully permissioned contacts. Our program monitors engagement and gives you options for dealing with contacts whose consent is degrading over time.

Consent maintenance program plus

This package provides everything in the consent maintenance program, PLUS the creation of up to 3 reconsenting campaigns. GDPR – but make it fashion!

To find out more, and get a quote for your specific requirements, speak to your account manager or give us a call.

We’ve created a handy guidebook, so you can share these changes with your whole team. Download it; print it out; stick it on your wall; get it tattooed on the inside of your eyeballs, we don’t care – as long as you have everything you need.

Disclaimer (the boring, but very important bit)

For the data provided by our customers within the Dotdigital platform, is a data processor (as defined by the GDPR) and the client is the data controller. This means that as a company we are responsible for handling client data (i.e. your account and user data) in line with the GDPR. Clients however, are ultimately responsible for ensuring they are GDPR compliant with respect to their clients or customer data (i.e. contact data you will be uploading in your address books in the Dotdigital platform). Whilst we are committed to building a platform that encourages good-practice in line with GDPR, we cannot provide legal advice and cannot be held responsible for client compliancy. This document is intended as a guide and should not be considered legal advice.

1. Powerful and empowering women in business

It’s safe to say that the 2018 Summit played host to some serious industry titans and we were thrilled to see the agenda opened and closed by two powerful and empowering women. Natalie Nahai, author and web psychologist, showed us how she advises Fortune 500 companies like Google, eBay and Unilever how to use online persuasion to win over and retain business. We learned about homophily, cognitive load and how to engage with customers in a more meaningful way.

Your keynote speaker this year was Baroness Karren Brady, one of the most influential, high-profile and respected female business leaders in the UK and rated among the 50 most inspirational people in the world. Karren gifted us her own top 10 ingredients for success along with a witty, provocative and inspiring insight into her career journey.

2. GDPR reassurance

It was easy to predict that GDPR would feature heavily on the agenda this year, but the key takeaways were far from dry, doomy and gloomy. In his primary session, Dotdigital’s Strategy & Insight Director, Skip Fidura, showed us to treat GDPR as an opportunity to strengthen our data and build more compelling, trusted relationships with customers through automation. And Rachel Aldighieri, Managing Director at the DMA, got us thinking about how marketers can work effectively and creatively within these new parameters.

3. 1,142 delegates

After welcoming over 600 marketers last year at Dotdigital’s inaugural Summit, we set out to make 2018 a year of international empowerment. Watching over 1,000 digital marketers discover, grow and network throughout the day was one of our personalhighlights. In fact, Dotdigital’s CMO, Phil Draper, let it get to his head a little. Here he is pretending to be his favorite artist, Ed Sheeran:

4. Twitter trending

While the hottest news on 19^th April was undoubtedly the 26° sunshine (welcome to the UK!), it was awesome to see #dotmailersummit take the no.2 spot on Twitter as an equally hot topic. We loved checking in throughout the day to see so many empowered marketers tweet their key learnings from our speakers. Plus, it’s always good to know when the lunch goes down a treat.

5. 849 app downloads

The dotmailer Summit 2018 welcomed 30 international speakers to deliver on 27 session topics across three speaking tracks – so we wanted to make sure delegates could get organized. Marketers were able to follow, schedule and query every session using our free dotmailer Summit app. With ¾ of attendees making use of the app on the day, you can bet it’ll be back for 2019.

6. Launching an evolved Dotdigital

2018 Summit delegates were able to get a first look at the brand-new innovations happening within the Dotdigital platform.

With 27% of revenue generated by automation over batch-and-blast campaigns, marketers need to be able to flex their mailing muscles. Dotdigital users now have access to 30 new free automation programs to help them deliver on rising customer expectations. In order to help our customers hit every contact on the right channel, we’ve incorporated Facebook Messenger into the platform, and our new COMAPI acquisition brings sophisticated SMS capabilities on-board. Add free Facebook Audience and Google Adword Re-targeting, chuck BigQuery into the mix and you’ve got a souped-up omnichannel automation platform with all the components in the box. Oh, and we’ve added a native product recommendations tool. Innovating Dotdigita, empowering you!

7. Hitting the Mark 2018

Summit attendees were the first to gain access to insight from Dotdigital’s biggest and beefiest benchmarking report, Hitting the Mark. Attendees were able to snap up the latest statistics on segmentation, as well as learn how many brands are still leaving money on the table by failing to send an abandoned cart email. Plus, we revealed this year’s number one marketer. Want to find out for yourself? Download the full report.

8. Wayne Hemmingway

One of the most inspirational talks from the day came from Red or Dead and Hemingway Designs co-founder, Wayne Hemingway, who showed the audience that “Design is about improving the things that matter in life.” The compelling businessman – who’s provided sustainable designs for tube uniforms, student accommodation and entire housing estates – entertained and inspired with his personal storytelling. To achieve perfection in design, Hemmingway urged marketers: “Spot something that’s wrong and make it right.”

9. Customer insight

At Dotdigital, we know our customers are true superstars, so it was awesome to see Charlotte Hilton from Sika take the stage to show audiences how they’ve harness automation to build trust in B2B marketing. Alongside Charlotte, attendees were able to hear success stories from Tom Wheatley of Shortlist Media and Sarah Elphick of Forest Holidays – to name but a few! See the agenda for a full list of Dotdigital superstars who lent their expertise on the day.

10. Our partners in tech

From our superb Gold partners, Magento and Shopify Plus, who helped realize the Summit 2018, to the inspiring session on trust and social proof from Neil Bayton at Trustpilot, attendees were able to access expertise from a seriously eclectic mix of tech experts. See the full list of partners for 2018.

Don’t believe the hype? Check out some videos from the day.

See you next year!

According to a report from Litmus Email Analytics, the average time spent reading an email is now 11.1 seconds, up 7% from 2011. The percentage of emails read for more than 18 seconds has also grown to 44.4% compared to 38.4% in 2011.

Consumers’ attention spans are expanding, indicating a promising rise in email relevancy.

We debated the possible reasons for this marked increase. Certain shifts in the industry certainly point towards a combination of trends that have boosted reading time:

• Some clients have seen a shift in opens on iPhone and Android devices. Those engaged will arguably spend longer reading their messages on mobile devices than they would on desktops, particularly now that brands are realizing the importance of responsive design.
• Better message previews on mobiles mean that customers have a better idea of the content each message contains, allowing them to better judge the time they’ll spend on the email. Those they may not have time for, they’ll save for later.
• We’re in the age of the empowered customer. With more customers happy to disengage with a brand who’s not providing them with the experience they’re after, and with tabs in ISPs like Gmail offering better user control over their inbox, consumers are probably feeling more positive about their emails and are spending longer reading the content they want.
• Content sits atop the throne in email marketing strategy. Companies that may not have felt the need to provide value adding content before – like travel comparison sites and transportation brands – are increasingly under pressure to produce content-led emails that nurture long-lasting relationships with brands. These emails will obviously take longer to read.

It’s clear that brands are moving in the right direction when it comes to providing engagement-driving experiences for customers. Email will always be your digital key to unlocking the best ROI from your digital marketing, and with attention spans expanding and consumers taking more time to connect with your content, there’s never been a better time to evaluate that side of your marketing strategy.

Take a look at our most recent cheatsheet, 5 winning emails that don’t include the word ‘sale’, to get the top insight on creating content-focused email campaigns.

Whether it’s a monthly update, a welcome email or an upcoming sale notification, these tips will put your business ahead of the curve.

Keep it personal

Emails are a direct form of marketing communication, so you’ll want to keep your messages light and personal. And it all starts with the greeting. Sending out countless detached, irrelevant emails isn’t going to get you or your business very far; customers like to feel as though you’ve carefully crafted an email specifically for them.

Something as simple as adding the customer’s name in the greeting is a good start. Consumers would much rather open an email to read something like, “Good morning, Karen!” instead of a general mass greeting. With the right email marketing provider, a simple automated personalization tool can make this task easy.

Another way to keep your emails personal, yet professional, is to add dynamic content. Dynamic content is content that changes based on the preference or the demographics of your customers, which allows your business to target individual subscribers. Adding dynamic content to your emails could be as easy as switching the image that is displayed for your male subscribers versus your female subscribers.

Make it clear as to who you are

Once you’ve selected a personal greeting, let your customers know who you are. The more information you provide, the less likely your email will be tossed into the spam pile.

Every person wants to know the following three things when they receive an email:

• Who is writing to me?
• Why are they writing to me?
• What to do they want me to do?

You want to make sure the “who” part is answered almost immediately upon opening, as this is the basis for legitimizing the rest of the email.

Grab their attention

Think about the subject line before shooting off an email with something generic. It should be engaging and interesting enough for the receiver to open the email. Remember, your email is competing against several other “unread” messages sitting in their inbox, so why should they open yours? The subject line is the first thing readers see – think of it as a first impression.

Keep it short and sweet

Keeping your emails concise is crucial. While you may be tempted to cram in as much information as possible, do refrain. Follow these three rules: make your email:

• Exclusive – let your readers know they’ve received this email because they’re special. For example, let them know they are the “first to know” about your newest products or offer them an “exclusive discount.”
• Urgent – try and make the proposition a limited-time offer.
• Simple – don’t crowd the email with too many visuals or information. Stick to one or two calls-to-action and one or two key messages.

Remember: People want to know who you are, why you are contacting them, and what you want them to do, all within a few sentences or paragraphs.

Double and triple check everything you send out

Sending an email with broken links or out-of-date information sends the wrong message. Be sure to check your links and proofread your copy before it’s sent out.

In addition, redundant coding and an excessive use of links, text, and images are practices that should be avoided. If you’re unsure about your emails’ link or image-to-text ratio, try running your email through a spam checker before sending it out.

A top email marketing platform includes spam check and preview tools so your email not only appears at its best, but also reaches its intended audience. These checks also ensure everyone in your team (or appropriate stakeholders) can review before you hit send.

When done right, the direct and personalized nature of email marketing means you’re likely to see a boost in online sales. By following these tips, you’re setting yourself up for a successful marketing campaign.

Email automation is a great “push” channel to get in touch with all of your customers in time for the weekend, and Dotdigital gets everything done in record time. Use our EasyEditor to drag and drop your way to a campaign that gets freakishly good results; identify the data segments you want to target and fire away!

B2C – Got any scarily good deals?

Use the holiday as a chance to promote items that people might need over the weekend for their various shenanigans. This lighting brand have designed an eye-catching Halloween campaign, using our columns building blocks, to promote a last chance sale on spooky essentials:

You can also use Dotdigital’s WebInsight to track customers’ behavior in the run up to Halloween, and then send them an abandoned cart or browse email to remind them to purchase in time for holiday delivery.

B2B – Get creative!

Not selling cut-price vampire fangs or highly flammable wigs in bulk? No problem – you can still have fun this Halloween. Be imaginative with your brand! We love this email created by a floor planning design software company; they’ve used their holiday campaign to showcase the platform’s capabilities and promote a free trial:

And if you feel like there’s no way that you could possibly connect your brand to warts and witches, that’s just as marketable. Stand out by providing a refreshing alternative to Halloween themed campaigns!

There’s just time to leave you with this other-worldly infographic from The Shelf. We love the insights they give into Halloween e-commerce, and we’ve pulled out a couple of essential tips for email marketing this holiday:

72% of smartphone shoppers research an item before purchasing it.

Mobile optimization is crucial for attaining that last-minute weekend return. All of our templates are fully-optimized and ready to go.

36¢ of every dollar spent in a brick and mortar store is influenced by digital.

The web WILL have a direct effect on your in-store conversion this weekend, so make sure you’re driving engagement with all of your digital touchpoints through your email marketing.

$8.4 billion is going to be spent on Halloween this year.

That’s a healthy sized portion of pumpkin pie to get your hands on.

All that’s left to say is Happy Halloween – don’t let the web bugs bite!

Courtesy of: The Shelf