Dotdigital features – Dotdigital https://dotdigital.com Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:37:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.2 https://mkr1en1mksitesap.blob.core.windows.net/staging/2021/11/favicon-61950c71180a3.png Dotdigital features – Dotdigital https://dotdigital.com 32 32 What’s new: introducing MMS and generative AI updates https://dotdigital.com/blog/whats-new-introducing-mms-and-generative-ai-updates/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 14:44:42 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=64090 End your year on a high with Dotdigital’s latest release. Save even more time with brand new generative WinstonAI™ features, increase your cross-channel reach with the launch of MMS for North American audiences, and enhance your customer experience with advanced personalization for SMS. Let’s get into it.

Become your own editor with WinstonAI™

WinstonAI writing assistance

WinstonAI has been a hit with our customers since its launch. It is built into the Dotdigital platform to streamline the day-to-day tasks that come with cross-channel marketing and to lend a helping hand to busy marketers.

Our latest release builds on the existing features of WinstonAI to give you all of the tools you need to edit your copy – all from within the campaign builder.

New WinstonAI writing assistance

What is it?

WinstonAI now has new generative AI capability and can rewrite messages in a different tone, shorten or expand text, rephrase, and include emojis in text.

Why it’s important

Getting the tone and message right for your audience is crucial for campaign performance. WinstonAI is here to save you time and support you in this.

WinstonAI can change the tone of your message to friendly, professional, witty, heartfelt, empathetic, educational, funny, casual, urgent, or optimistic. If you want something to be rephrased you can ask WinstonAI to reword, improve readability, simplify, or summarize. You can also ask WinstonAI to expand or shorten your copy and to add relevant emojis.

What else is new?

WinstonAI new look

New iconography has been added throughout the Dotdigital platform to show you where WinstonAI powers insights and actions. Wherever you see the sparkle icon, WinstonAI is available.

Add more touchpoints with MMS for North America

MMS for North America

What is MMS?

MMS lets brands send visual messages to their customers via the same channel SMS uses. It boosts engagement and allows you to bring more color to what were previously simple SMS messages.

Why it’s important

Launching MMS capabilities for the United States and Canada gives any brand with customers in this region a new way to engage those customers, stand out from the crowd, and generate ROI. SMS is already super successful at engaging customers in this region, MMS takes this to the next level.

How it works

Dotdigital customers can now send multimedia content such as images and gifs to their customers in the US and Canada by using MMS. If you want to send MMS messages, speak to your Customer Success Manager who will be able to support you in getting set up. Once MMS has been activated in your account, you’ll see the SMS section in your lefthand navigation now reads SMS/MMS.


Engage with precision thanks to advanced personalization for SMS

Dotdigital's advanced SMS

What is advanced personalization for SMS?

Advanced personalization for SMS gives you all the benefits of Liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language, to create highly personalized and targeted SMS content. Now including access to Insight data, this update expands the existing SMS personalization with contact data fields, such as customer names, to personalization with more intricate data, such as order and booking details.

Why it’s important

Great customer experiences stem from personalization. Advanced personalization for SMS gives you the ability to deliver uniquely tailored experiences to your customers, leading to better engagement, stronger brand loyalty, and improved conversion rates.

One example is abandoned cart recovery; you can now include a unique shopping cart link in your SMS campaign, directing online shoppers straight back to their abandoned cart. This both removes barriers to conversion and improves the overall customer experience.

How it works

The new advanced personalization editor makes it possible to include insight data using liquid markup. It allows for the creation of detailed SMS content to create powerful messages that are highly personalized to the recipient.

Other key updates

Dotdigital and FreshRelevance login

A seamless login experience for Fresh Relevance

Dotdigital acquired Fresh Relevance in September. Now, our joint customers can seamlessly switch between the Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance platforms without having to log in each time.

Dotdigital forms WordPress plug-in

An updated WordPress plug-in gives Dotdigital customers more options to integrate with their Content Management System (CMS). Dotdigital users can now integrate a Dotdigital form on any WordPress page. WooCommerce merchants can use this to implement beautifully designed data capture forms and popovers on their stores.

Improved UX login

You can now choose to disable the 90-day password rotation requirements on your account to give you better control over password rotation practices. This can be switched on or off down to child account level.

Track links from specific campaigns more easily with improved UTM link tracking capability built into the campaign builder. This gives you more precision and flexibility in your reporting – something especially useful for specific seasonal campaigns.

We’ve made some changes to the product recommendation rule side-panel so it’s easier for you to find the category or specific product type to display in your content.
Now, products can be filtered by a variety of ways to make them easier to find.

Not only can you filter by product attributes, but you can also search and select from your own categories, which have been synchronized from your store. This allows you to include or exclude particular products with ease and precision.

Dotdigital app homepage updates

We’ve made amends to the Dotdigital homepage to provide a better experience. You can now preview, test, and send emails and SMS campaigns quickly and easily directly from the Dotdigital homepage.

“New in store” product recommendations

Our latest ‘new in store’ product recommendation option helps your customers see what’s new in your store instantly. Ideal for busy sale periods when stock levels across older products may be low.

Join our webinar

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What’s new: WinstonAI updates, SMS in seconds, and the new Dotdigital app https://dotdigital.com/blog/whats-new-winstonai-updates-sms-in-seconds-and-the-new-dotdigital-app/ Mon, 11 Sep 2023 11:01:36 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=60715 Our latest release makes creating cross-channel content easier than ever before. We’re also launching a whole host of other tools and improvements to enhance your customers’ experience, and yours too. We’re talking one-click campaign generation, in-built copy support, advanced revenue attribution for SMS, our new progressive web app (PWA), the full launch of the new Dotdigital with unified contact data, and more.

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 detecting a typo and suggesting a correction
WinstonAI detecting a typo and suggesting a correction

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

Reporting dashboard for an SMS send
Reporting dashboard for an SMS send

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

New integrations area
New integrations area

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

Unified contacts style customer profile with contact photo, name, and SMS number details
Unified contacts style customer profile with contact photo, name, and SMS number details

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 welcome screen on Dotdigital
New welcome screen on Dotdigital

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

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How to unify customer data for data-driven marketing https://dotdigital.com/blog/unify-customer-data-for-data-driven-marketing/ Tue, 11 Apr 2023 09:01:31 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=37404

Dotdigital Blog

How to unify customer data for data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing is no longer a theoretical and innovative approach, it should be a fundamental part of your marketing strategy. 

Data-driven marketing has been a buzzword for digital marketers for a while now; it has long been emphasized as the tactic behind marketing success. In fact, the majority of marketers in a recent survey cited data-driven marketing that focuses on an individual as “the single most exciting opportunity” emerging in the industry.

Data-driven marketing, two men working together on a tablet

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is an approach to marketing that focuses on strategies built on insights pulled from big data. This data is a collection of customer information, interactions, engagements, and purchases that can be used to form predictions about future behaviors.

Ultimately, the goal of data-driven marketing is to enhance and personalize the customer experience to drive growth, conversions, and customer retention.

Data-driven marketing is no longer a theoretical and innovative approach, it should be a fundamental part of your marketing strategy.

Brands around the world have accelerated their digital transformation as a result of the global pandemic that hit back in 2020 and has forced marketers to re-evaluate their digital engagement strategy. Similarly, there has been a significant shift in customer behavior as they opt more and more to interact with brands through digital experiences.

But, where many brands have experienced unusual and rapid growth in the number of customers discovering them online, there have also been unusual buying behaviors and increasingly high churn. In response, marketers are doubling down on their efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their data.

With technology and platforms like Dotdigital so fundamental to modern marketing, it’s essential brands focus on how to get the best value possible from the big data they have available. Can it unify all your sources of data? How quickly can you pull insights from your data?

Why is unified data important?

Today, most companies are ‘data-rich’. That is, they have vast amounts of data on their audience. The trouble lies in a company’s ability to tap into that data. 

What is data unification?

Data unification is the process of collecting raw data from multiple sources, systems, and formats and standardizing it so it can be treated as a single source of unified and accurate data. 

In a study by Econsultancy, only 23% of brands believed their organization was ‘very strong’ in terms of being able to pull actionable insights from big data. When you consider the numerous benefits of having a single source of data truth, it’s clear to see why so many businesses are stating that improving their data and insights is a top priority for 2022. 

Graph showing senior marketing tech priorities

Benefits include but are not limited to: 

  • More accurate analytics and enhanced business intelligence 
  • Higher data quality  
  • Reduced overall costs  
  • Higher ROI 
  • Faster time-to-market 
  • Optimized sales and marketing 
  • Faster and more accurate decision-making
  • More visibility of cross-selling and up-selling opportunities 
  • Improved employee productivity 
  • Smarter product management 
  • Improved operational risk management  
  • Reduced supplier onboarding costs 
  • Streamlined supply chain management 
  • Enhanced compliance with privacy legislation 
  • Superior customer experience (CX) 

Organizations need to ensure that they have the ability to unite multiple systems, transform them into clean, reliable, contextual, and timely data and make it easily accessible to teams across the business.  

 

Data unification is not a 'nice-to-have'. It’s essential for efficient data-driven marketing that drives profits, growth, and customer retention.  

What to consider when streamlining and unifying your martech stack

For true organization-wide success, you need to go further than unifying your internal systems. Being able to understand and interpret online and offline customer behavior will empower your marketing team, offering new ways to automate and optimize marketing spend and feed the sales funnel.  

Unfortunately, the constant evolution of marketing solutions and changing expectations of customers means that martech stacks often become a mishmash of systems.  

The biggest perceived barrier preventing marketers from creating the ultimate customer experience is ‘poor integration between tech systems’. But, when looking deeper into the problem, it is more likely that the true problem lies with marketers either using multiple technologies or vendors, without a unifying platform. 

Unifying your data sources can reduce costs by 25-35% and increase speed to market by 30%. Bringing together your marketing stack, pruning legacy systems, and modernizing applications will enhance customer experiences, drive customer retention, reduce costs, streamline marketing and sales workflows, minimize code maintenance and end data siloes. Now, let’s look at what you need to consider when unifying your stack.  

Single customer view  

90% of people now travel across devices and touchpoints to complete a single task, generating tons of data along the way. Legacy and outdated systems like CRMs can no longer process, sync, and interpret this data in real-time. A single view of the customer pulls all this information together. 

What is single customer view?

Single customer view (SCV) is a single location for every individual you interact with. It provides you with an overview of all the data you’ve collected throughout their relationship with your brand.  

Your SCV should sit at the heart of your business. Customer-centricity is essential for survival in this modern, digital-first world we live in. An SCV gives all departments and teams access to valuable information to improve performance. Executives can use it to make key business decisions supported by accurate and insightful data. Marketers can use it to deliver more personalized and profitable campaigns. Customer support agents can use SCV insights to resolve issues faster. The potential for growth and success is limitless. 

Overall, the improvements you can make to the customer experience will improve retention, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and directly impact your bottom line.  

2. Cross-account reporting 

As your business grows and develops, you need a martech stack that grows with you. Whether you have multiple storefronts, operate in different regions each with individual currencies, or manage separate brands under one umbrella group, you need to be able to pull information on your sales, campaigns, and marketing activity across all facets of your business. 

Getting a bird’s-eye view of your performance through cross-account reporting across all regions and business divisions gives decision-makers in your company a clear view of what’s happening. This helps all teams identify risks, weaknesses, and missed opportunities where performance can be optimized. Similarly, campaigns and activities that yield high rewards can be double-downed on, invested in, and used to drive business profitability.

3. Open integrations 

When streamlining your marketing systems, you need to know your data unification platform plays nicely with others. That means, it is open to integrating with the vast number of other systems out there.  

With so much data at your fingertips, you need to have confidence that you can tap into this and gather insights with speed. At the same time, you don’t want to find yourself limited by your platform’s ability to integrate with new tech as you grow. You need a platform that can do it all.  

Open APIs and self-serve functionality enable you to continue to grow your martech stack while keeping your systems streamlined.  

Data unification = data action + data collection

Data unification is not a ‘nice-to-have’. It’s essential for efficient data-driven marketing that drives profits, growth, and customer retention.  

We’re in a new era of customer expectations. Changes to data regulations and increasing privacy consciousness means customers are more engaged with brands’ data collection methods than ever before. At a time when trust in brands is at an all-time low, customers want to know the value they will get from sharing their data. How will marketers put it to use to improve their experience?  

It is your brand’s responsibility as data stewards to use data respectfully and create valuable customer experiences. Marketers must think about what actions they want to take and what data they need before they begin collecting data.  

Unifying your data into a single source makes this data and insight accessible, not just to the marketing team, but to the whole business. Decisions can be made across the business with your customers in mind. True customer-centricity is only possible if you connect all your data.  

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What’s new in Dotdigital: improved analytics and insights  https://dotdigital.com/blog/whats-new-in-dotdigital-improved-analytics-and-insights/ Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:59:42 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=46970 As we reach the end of 2022, it’s time for our fourth and final product release of the year. At Dotdigital we’re committed to delivering continuous innovation and empowering marketers with the tools necessary to overcome every obstacle. 

As we began planning this release, we knew it was vital that we understand the challenges you’ll be facing soon. That meant thinking about the economic uncertainty facing marketing teams around the world.  

So, with this release, we bring you advanced features to navigate the rocky road ahead. The threat of a global recession is looming over economies everywhere. As intelligent marketers you need to be able to: 

  • Demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts 
  • Report on successes and optimize where necessary 
  • Reach audiences at the right moment to drive conversion 
  • Generate new leads efficiently and effectively 
  • Adapt to the changing demands of your audience 

Our latest feature update aims to make all this possible and so much more.  

Let’s dive in.  

Multi-touch revenue attribution 

From today, you will be able to gain greater insights into the customer journey and demonstrate the genuine value delivered by your marketing efforts.  

How has Dotdigital’s revenue attribution changed?  

Dotdigital’s previous advanced revenue attribution feature was an inference-based, last-click model. This model attributed the completion of a sale to the final engagement point customers made when purchasing from you.  

How does multi-touch attribution work?  

Our new multi-touch revenue attribution model goes even further by taking into account all touchpoints in your customers’ journey and assigning credit to each. By assigning “assisted revenue” to each email campaign your customer interacted with before a purchase you will get a holistic understanding of the marketing lifecycle and can demonstrate the full value of your efforts. 

Assisted revenue tile in Dotdigital

Why is multi-touch revenue attribution important?  

Multi-touch revenue attribution gives you an overview of what campaigns have the highest level of influence on each sale you make.  

There is an argument that first- or last-touch is more important. First-touch attributes value to the product, page, offering, or campaign that first attracted your customer. Last-touch focuses on the moment when a customer commits to purchasing from your business. It’s simpler, certainly, but simple isn’t always the best. 

Only focusing on first- or last-touch revenue attribution could result in you planning your marketing spend based on skewed data. Multi-touch attribution gives credit where credit’s due. First- and last-touch attribution doesn’t explain how a customer can land on your website looking at Crockpots but ends up purchasing an Air Fryer. Multi-touch does, and it reveals the value behind every stage of your marketing campaign.  

The insights you’ll gain from using multi-touch attribution will enable you to make more effective and efficient decisions when it comes to the allocation of budgets, plus the planning of your future campaigns. And as a bonus, it allows you to tweak those campaigns already in action.  

How to get started with multi-touch attribution 

Our new multi-touch revenue attribution feature is available to all ecommerce marketers who have access to the ecommerce area of Dotdigital.  

Facebook lead ads  

In our latest update, you can now sync contacts from your Facebook lead ads directly into your Dotdigital account. This means you can now easily add them to nurture and re-engagement campaigns to efficiently grow your marketing lists and engage new audiences.  

How does Dotdigital’s new Facebook ad sync work?  

Dotdigitial’s new integration with Facebook lead ads sync contacts automatically from your Facebook account into your Dotdigital account. Live lead ads on Facebook are linked to an ‘instant form’ which collects customer information such as email, phone number, and custom preferences. Once they’ve clicked on your advert and filled in this form, data is seamlessly synced, so you have everything you need to deliver personalized marketing. 

Facebook lead ads integration in the Dotdigital integration hub

How will Facebook ads sync improve your marketing?  

With an economic downturn facing consumers all over the world, they’re becoming understandably picky about where and with whom they spend their money. Simultaneously, with budget cuts looming and attention focusing on profits and ROI, you need to rethink your acquisition strategies to make them more cost-efficient.  

Our new integration with Facebook lead ads makes it easier for you to pivot and discover new customers and bring them into your marketing audience. With it, you can:  

  • Identify potential new customers for your business 
  • Collect vital subscriber information for personalized communications  
  • Understand the behaviors and interests of your potential clients
  • Encourage the download of brochures or whitepapers 
  • Get prospects to enroll in your automation programs 

All-in-all, this update will save your team time and money by removing all manual workflows and providing you with the vital information you need to deliver conversion-driving campaigns.  

How to get started with Facebook lead ads 

Good news, our Facebook lead ads integration is ready to go. All you need to do to get started is go into your Dotdigital account and install the integration from the self-serve integration tab, in the “social” section. After this, you can connect your business’ Facebook account to Dotdigital by logging into your brand’s Facebook account and begin syncing data. 

Shopify Hydrogen 

The pressure is on for ecommerce brands to stand out from the crowd and meet customers where they are – on any device. Hydrogen, Shopify’s headless commerce framework, makes this possible. For this release, we’re giving existing Shopify merchants early access to our brand-new Hydrogen integration.  

How does Dotdigital work with headless commerce solutions?  

Headless commerce solutions separate your frontend store from the backend to deliver more agile and consistent experiences for customers. Traditional commerce solutions can connect with third-party integrations but can cause problems to the storefront due to poor architecture or code bloat. This problem is solved with headless commerce which allows data to flow seamlessly from both the front and backend into Dotdigital.  

How to achieve a seamless marketing-to-store handover?  

Dotdigital’s new toolkit for Shopify Hydrogen means you can now craft outstanding customer experiences that range from their first touchpoint to their final purchase and beyond. Simply set up the integration, enable the automatic data flow, and reap the benefit from Dotdigital’s suite of ecommerce features.  

What does early access to Dotdigital’s Hydrogen integration mean for Shopify merchants?  

By giving Shopify merchants access to a live demo Hydrogen storefront, we want to make the transition to headless commerce as smooth as possible for our customers.  

This means, rather than having to start from scratch, you’ll be able to see how we’ve set up programs such as an abandoned cart, web behavior tracking, and live chat in a Hydrogen-powered store. Through this, you’ll be able to set up your store and store-based automations quicker and easier than starting from square one.  

How to get started with the Hydrogen integration 

When we’re Hydrogen-ready be able to find us in the Shopify app store. Our partners and developers can get their hands on the toolkit through GitHub. For more information, check in with your Customer Success Manager or Sales representative.  

Push notifications 

Catching the attention of your customers is not an easy feat. At Dotdigital, we understand this, and that’s why our platform helps you tap into and automate every channel at your fingertips. In this release, we’ve made some important changes to push notifications to ensure they work for you, every time. 

How have we improved push notifications? 

Push notifications aren’t new, but they haven’t always been the most seamless of experiences for many customers. Think of that moment when your favorite fast-food delivery service sends you a discount to be used that very day. You click on the notification but nothing happens. There’s no link to what they told you about.  

So, what have we done about it? We’ve enabled deep linking for your notifications. That means customers who click on your notification will be taken directly to the appropriate page. That 15% discount can finally be claimed and conversions will increase. 

As well as improving deep linking, we’ve enabled the ability for notifications to link directly to a website or landing page if the deep linking function doesn’t give the experience you want. Reporting on all campaigns is essential, no matter the channel, so we’ve ensured you can get full analytics of your push campaigns. By monitoring your push notification interaction rates you can use your performance data to optimize your campaigns. 

How to get started with Push notifications? 

If you’re new to push or want to find out more about how to get started with Dotdigital’s push functionality, you can read all about it in our help center

Also coming in this release 

Consolidated analytics 

Account analytics for email and SMS provides you with a bird’s-eye view of your account in one place. This enables you to easily see performance stats across the board. All your KPIs are available at-a-glance, with the ability to deep dive into your results to optimize your marketing for standout results. Previously launched as cross-account analytics our new consolidated analytics is now available for all, to give you better insight into your overall performance. 

As part of this, the previous email-focused dashboard is being replaced with an analytics landing page which will include data for SMS as well as email. 

Account analytics in Dotdigital

Tagging and filtering 

When cross-account analytics first launched in May 2022, it gave businesses with multiple child accounts the ability to pull together insights from various accounts. In this update, we have launched the ability to tag and group your accounts with custom tags, giving you the ability to filter and compare campaign performance in a way that matters most to you.  

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Shine a spotlight on your success with Yotpo and Dotdigital https://dotdigital.com/blog/shine-a-spotlight-on-your-success-with-yotpo-and-dotdigital/ Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:27:29 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=46532 In September, Dotdigital and Yotpo expanded their partnership by releasing a second integration between Yotpo Reviews and Dotdigital, to accompany the existing integration between Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals with Dotdigital.

The new integration enables joint customers to take advantage of reviews in campaigns by creating highly personalized and targeted messaging that boosts engagement. This is done by handing a loudspeaker to brand loyalists and champions, to help them share their love of brands and products with other potential customers. 

“We’ve been long-time partners with Dotdigital, focused on our shared mission to help merchants create unique and personalized customer experiences.

After seeing a lot of success over the years with the Yotpo-built Loyalty & Referrals integration, it was only a matter of time until we added Reviews & Ratings. We are excited that Dotdigital took the initiative and brought it to life.

The new synergies allow our shared merchants to seamlessly create a truly connected tech stack that boosts results. And the timing couldn’t be more important.”

Itai Bengal, Director of Product Partnerships, Yotpo

“This latest integration with Yotpo shows our commitment to working closely with our partners to  offer our customers the very best product.

It takes the original Loyalty & Referrals integration with Yotpo and develops it a step further. Now customers can pull UGC-based reviews into their marketing and support their goals of creating highly personalized marketing content at a time when businesses need to push the boundaries of their customer engagement.”

Steve Shaw, CTO, Dotdigital

How can reviews drive conversions?

So why is user-generated content (UGC), such as reviews, so important to brands? Well – quite simply, reviews are one of the most important elements of a new buyer’s journey. Let’s look at some details:

  • 93% of consumers say their purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews
  • 84% say that they trust online reviews as much as they do a personal recommendation from a friend or family member
  • 68% are willing to pay more for a product with a higher review rating
  • 49% see reviews as an absolute must-have when it comes to purchasing a product

We can see that UGC is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle that brands need to get right, particularly since the introduction of social media. Brands now need to be seen online as well as in traditional advertising spaces. This in turn leads to brands fighting for their share of audience attention, taking place 24/7, 365 days a year.

Trust leads to loyalty, which leads to sales

Yotpo is an organization founded with a mission to provide brands with everything they need to create winning customer experiences from discovery to purchase.

It helps brands enable advocacy by leveraging social proof to increase trust and sales. Once trust has been built and the consumer makes their first purchase, Yotpo powers loyalty programs that can turn customers into longtime brand advocates. In turn, this will increase customer lifetime value (CLV) and – with its latest Subscription product – build a recurring revenue stream for brands.

We all know that customer advocacy and retention are incredibly important, no matter which sector or area your business operates in. You may sell a product that a customer buys once in a lifetime, but their review of that product can help attract new customers and keep the cycle going on and on.

It’s estimated that it takes twice as much work to gain a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. Reviews about your brand or product can help encourage potential customers to buy-in into your brand, products, and services, and become a customer.

Reviews and other UGC are probably the most authentic type of content available to help promote brands. It’s unscripted and a first-hand review directly from a customer – either positive or negative. UGC is the 21st-century word-of-mouth referral and enables customers to directly participate in the growth of their favorite brands, rather than sitting on the sidelines.

How does the Yotpo Reviews and Dotdigital integration work?

The integration between Dotdigital and Yotpo Reviews enables joint customers the ability to create campaigns and automated programs that are based on the review score a consumer left.

By proactively following up on negative reviews, brands can fix issues and reward their shoppers, making them more likely to come back. On the flip side, thanking customers for positive reviews, or segmenting consumers by recent positive reviews, allows them to drive more engagement in social posts and, ultimately purchases.

Combined with the Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals integration, merchants can promote their referrals page to customers, provide a meaningful and cost-effective customer acquisition channel, and reward purchases and reviews with loyalty points, turning consumers into loyal brand advocates.

With out-of-the-box campaigns available, customers are able to get up and running quickly, but also have the option to further develop campaigns based on advanced segmentation based on Yotpo Reviews data. 

Virtual Joais, a Brazil-based jeweler set up a program using Yotpo Reviews and Dotdigital with great success:

We created a program with two emails in order to analyze our buyer personas. At first, the emails were only directed to people who had recently made a purchase on our website, but the program was not working as expected.

As soon as we received the email about the Yotpo integration with Dotdigital, we had the idea of adding the segment of people who left a 5-star review on Yotpo and it worked very well. In just a few days we saw much more engagement, had the answers we needed and were able to analyze our Buyer Personas.

Letícia Lessa, Marketing Analyst, Virtual Joias

To find out more about Yotpo and the Dotdigital integration, you can head to their website to find further resources about how to get set up, and how the integration can work for you and your brand. 

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Marketing reporting: the complete guide to connected reporting https://dotdigital.com/blog/marketing-reporting-the-complete-guide-to-connected-reporting/ Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:00:17 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=40347

Marketing reporting: the complete guide to connected reporting

Why is marketing reporting important?

Proving value for money is essential. Every marketer wants to prove that what they’re doing is valuable. Senior management wants to know that departments are hitting growth targets. IT teams want to know they have the best software and tools for their business needs.  

Overall, this can lead to businesses purchasing multiple reporting tools and software. Even internal teams in your marketing department can see the benefit of measuring tools that are specific to their needs alone.

The ultimate goal for businesses should be a single, all-in-one system that allows marketers, IT teams, and senior leadership to see relevant data through connected reporting.

writer working on laptop

Sounds too good to be true right?

In this article we’ll be taking things back to basics, covering what marketing reporting is and why it’s a vitally important business need. We’ll also help you understand what you need to report on and how to turn marketing reports into action.

What is marketing reporting?

We all do it, but how many of us can say that we fully understand what we should be reporting on and how to do it effectively?

Marketing reporting is the process of measuring progress, demonstrating value, and identifying actionable next steps to improve your marketing performance. The result is a clearer, more structured approach to marketing that allows you to meet and exceed your marketing goals.

Why is reporting important?

Whilst for us it’s completely obvious that marketing is a worthwhile investment, there are many people in business who do not see it that way. Many of you will have had an encounter (or ten) with someone who considers marketing to be a support function instead of the business-critical department that it is.

These are the people who are so focused on growth and profit that they’ve lost sight of how it’s achieved in the first place. (Marketing. That’s how.)

Enter: marketing reporting.

Marketing reports show the real, tangible results of your hard work. Through marketing reporting, you can show how your campaigns are fulfilling business goals, generating high-quality, sales-ready leads, and bringing in significant revenue to your company. Ultimately, they prove the value added by you cand your team.

Therefore, it’s essential you’re creating thorough, connected marketing reports.

The benefits of marketing reporting

What needs to be in your marketing reports?

While your marketing report will always be unique to your business goal, there are a couple of sections that are vital to every business.  

Summary

Your summary breaks down the key facts – successes, challenges and goals for the next reporting period.

Business impact

This is what all your work results in, the real value your marketing team adds to the business. These metrics include new opportunities, pipeline generated, and revenue.

Traffic

Your traffic report looks at top-of-funnel acquisition broken down by channel and device.

Engagement

Engagement reports look at customer behavior and on-site activity. Metrics can include time or site, bounce rate, and frequency of visits. More advanced reporting might also offer RFM insights.

Conversions

Conversions are generally what interests most stakeholders. This report should break down new conversions by channel, revenue generated, cost per lead, and more.  

Choosing what to including in marketing reporting

It can be tempting to report on everything you do as a way of demonstrating precisely how valuable your activities are.  

Don’t give into temptation.  

Typically, clients, stakeholders, and senior leadership are only interested in a handful of metrics. You need to highlight what is most important.  

To identify the metrics, you need starts with understanding your goals and objectives, and what metrics best demonstrate return on investment (ROI). These can include the following: 

  • Channel sources – which channels are performing best and driving the most clicks/leads?
  • Conversions – how many people have the potential to become customers of the back of actions on a website or at an event or tradeshow?
  • SERP – what are your top-rated keywords and how are they affecting your ranking on search engine result pages?

Marketing reports show the real, tangible results of your hard work. Therefore, it’s essential you’re creating connected marketing reports. But how?

Marketing reporting: what to consider

The online nature of most businesses today means that marketers have a wealth of data and information at your fingertips. Customer interactions are occurring on different channels and that data is being collected by different sources and different software.  

Modern marketers need a single, all-in-one system that can connect your data and deliver valuable and actionable marketing reports.  

When evaluating the effectiveness of a software’s reporting capabilities you should consider:  

Integration ability

How nicely does your software play with the rest of your marketing stack? 

You can’t discover the ROI of your email marketing campaign if you don’t know how many click-throughs resulted in purchases on your ecommerce store.

Currency conversion

Today’s world of online interactions means that operating in multiple markets is easier than ever. That means closing sales in multiple currencies. You need to ensure your reporting tools are providing real-time insights using up-to-date currency conversion rates.

Google connectivity

For most marketers, the reporting tools they use depend on their budget. As a result, Google’s free Data Studio is a significant player in the marketing reporting sector. It’s also great for sharing with external teams and stakeholders. 

Therefore, your software must communicate effectively and efficiently with the Google suite.

Cross-account analytics

No one brand is the same. That means a lot of you with have unique nuances that need to be considered. One such nuance is how many accounts you have. 

Maybe you’re an umbrella company and manage the marketing activity of three separate brands. Or perhaps you use specific software for multiple functions, such as a non-profit that uses SMS marketing software for marketing, fundraising, and liaising with volunteers. 

Connected cross-account reports enable cost savings and optimizations to be made with ease.

Customer insights

After all, who doesn’t love receiving a personalized experience with a brand? 

Customer insights, whether it be eRFM customer modeling, online behavior, or simply marketing preferences, you need a system that can help you identify trends in your customer base to empower optimization across the board.

How to turn marketing reports into action and optimization

Now, here’s an important question: what’s the point of all this reporting is you’re not turning it into actionable takeaways? 

It’s all well and good proving the value of your marketing team, but you need to be continuously testing and optimizing to maintain those results. What you need is a strategy for turning marketing reports into action.

Step 1: Frequency

You need to determine how frequently you’ll sit down and review your reports in detail to create new optimization action plans. Once a month? Once a quarter? Every six months? Knowing this will help you scope your action plans.  

Step 2: Reporting

What you report on once again depends on the goals of your marketing team. Are you seeking to improve your organic search results, improve revenue generation, increase brand awareness. Your marketing dashboards should include all information associated to these goals.  

Step 3: Analysis

Make sure your systems and dashboards are collecting data in real-time and storing this for comparisons to be drawn. This will help you see patterns and identify trends audience behavior.  

Step 4: Hypothesis

Following your analysis, you can create a hypothesis as to why something is or isn’t working. This might require some testing on your side to ensure your theory is correct.

Step 5: Action

Once you have established your hypothesis (e.g., high bounce rate on the pricing enquiry page is due to the long form) you can turn this into an action plan. How will you address the issue to improve conversions and customer experiences? 

Step 6: Reporting

Has the change resulted in an optimized campaign or customer experience? During the next period of reporting, you’ll discover whether or not the action has worked. Also, with one issue addressed, it will make identifying the next blocker to conversion easier.  

Become a reporting expert

For more insight into how you can become a marketing reporting expert, check out our latest webinar.
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Third-party cookies: everything marketers need to know https://dotdigital.com/blog/third-party-cookies-everything-marketers-need-to-know/ Wed, 20 Jul 2022 06:45:17 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=38896

Trends briefing

Third-party cookies: everything marketers need to know

young man online marketing working on laptop with smartphone in hand

For a long-time marketers have relied on cookies and website tags to detect and track online activity. But as we prepare for a cookieless future, what can we do to prepare and ensure we can continue to measure and optimize our campaign success? 


What are cookies?

In its simplest form, a cookie is a small file that is downloaded onto your computer when you visit a website. They serve a range of purposes, including remembering preferences, recording items added to shopping carts, and counting the number of people visiting your website.  


What types of cookies are there?

There are three types of cookies:  

  1. First-party cookies. First-party cookies are stored by the domain a browser is visiting. They are typically used to identify which pages users visit, remember preferences, and store shopping carts. Nowadays, every website uses first-party cookies.  
  2. Third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are the opposite of first-party in that they are stored under a different domain to the one a user is visiting. They’re mostly used to track user behavior between websites and display relevant ads, but can also be found in a support chat function provided by a third-party service.  
  3. Second-party cookies. You probably haven’t heard about second-party cookies. That’s because a lot of people say they don’t exist. Generally, second-party data is first-party data shared between partners, so second-party cookies are part of the data related to cookies.  


How do third-party cookies work?

Third-party cookies are cookies tracked by websites other than the one a user is currently visiting. The most common third-party entities are advertisers, marketers, and social media platforms.  

Third-party cookies in action 

The best way to explain how cookies work is to see them in action.  

Let’s use travel companies, as I’m sure we’ve all been re-targeted by a travel brand or two. Imagine last week you decided to look into a holiday in Greece. You browsed a couple of websites and checked out flights, hotels, and top attractions but ultimately, to be able to afford that Santorini holiday of your dreams, you’re going to hold off and save up. Next year will be your year.  

A few days go by, you’ve set yourself a savings goal, then you begin to see ads for Santorini villas on many of the websites you visit.  

Coincidence? I think not.  

You’re seeing these ads because your browser stored a third-party cookie and it is being used to send you targeted marketing.  


Why are third-party cookies bad?

The biggest problem with third-party cookies is that most website visitors don’t realize they’re there or doing what they’re doing. After all, how many of the giant cookie popovers explicitly tell you how and where the cookies you’re ‘consenting’ to will be used.  

What’s more, cookie notifications have become such a nuisance to web browsers that people rarely pay attention to them. With the implementation of CCPA, ePR, and GDPR, the privacy rights of web browsers are increasingly protected.  

Users are now entitled to know what information is being collected about them and with whom it’s being shared. At the same, they have the right to opt-out at any time.  

Pressure has steadily built from regulators and consumers demanding the era of third-party cookies end. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default. Google Chrome is the last of the major players to block third-party cookies. With 67% of the market share and 90% of its revenue generated through advertising, it’s easy to understand why Google has been reluctant to follow suit.  


When will third party cookies be phased out?

Google initially announced its third-party phase-out in February 2020 but it was the brand’s March 2021 announcement that sent marketers’ heads spinning.  

“Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”  

According to Google’s statement, “[it doesn’t] believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long-term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.”  

While there has yet to be a specific date set, Google has announced that it will stop using third-party cookies by the end of 2023.  


What does the end of third-party cookies mean?

First things first, the end of third-party cookies is not the end of tracking. Cookies aren’t the only technology marketers have today that can be used for tracking web browsing behavior.  

Just like third-party cookies, these existing technologies track user behavior in the same way:  

  • Local Storage 
  • IndexedDB 
  • Web SQL 

Technologies have already discovered workarounds for users using Safari and Firefox, and they’ll likely find one for Google too. The secret to successful tracking will be compliance.  


What does it mean for marketers?

Tracking technology may be changing, but data protection laws aren’t and they still require end-user consent.  

In some ways, this could end up strengthening tracking. New technologies will ensure a greater level of certainty, fixing issues in tracking precision and ad fraud by bots.  

We’re about to witness is the rise of zero-party data. 

First-party cookies will continue, and thanks to GDPR and emerging laws like CCPA and Brazil’s LGPD, consent will remain as a central requirement. Your website still needs to ask for and obtain explicit consent from users for any data stored, regardless of what technology is being used.  

This means, that as the curtain falls on third-party cookies, marketers will have to work harder to build trust with web browsers to obtain consent. Trust and consent will ensure compliance with the data privacy regulations that have changed the marketing game. In turn, compliance will enable you to innovate how you track and target your customers.  

Luckily, your email marketing, marketing automation, and customer data platforms have been preparing for this for years. Keeping track of consent and managing individual users’ consent via single customer view are just a couple of ways you can rest assured that you’re already more prepared than you thought you were.  

So, as a final note, I think it’s important to change the way we think about the death of third-party cookies. It’s not the end of marketing as we know it. It’s an opportunity to improve and a chance to ensure we – as marketers – are protecting the rights of our customers, whilst providing them with exceptional experiences.  



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How does your stack measure up? https://dotdigital.com/blog/how-does-your-stack-measure-up/ Mon, 20 Jun 2022 07:14:56 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=37892

How does your stack measure up?

woman looking at technology

A marketing stack is a key element of many businesses nowadays. In this blog, we’ll cover the history of marketing technology, why it’s important for your business, and how the Dotdigital Integration Hub is a great place to start, or add to, your stack.

In recent years the marketing technology landscape – or martech for short – has grown as the very nature and remit of the marketing function has evolved and expanded. This is a result of increased emphasis on the importance of having a martech stack that supports and drives the needs of your business growth. Research organization, Forrester, found that martech stacks now account for over 20% of the total marketing budget. In the same report, it was highlighted that 56% of businesses planned to increase their allocated budget to spend on martech.

There are a wide array of technologies that support your marketing functions, and bringing them together into your stack is the best way to ensure that you’ll get ahead of the game. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as an out-of-the-box template to get you started with your martech stack, but by working alongside a marketing automation platform that integrates and supports a vast and continuously expanding range of integrations for you to develop now and into the future is incredibly important.

So, what is a martech stack, and why are they so important for your business? Let’s take a look at what they are, how the landscape has changed over recent years, why they’re important to your business, and how Dotdigital can help you develop a winning stack.


What is a martech stack?

Martech is a technology or software that enables you to centralize your marketing function and achieve your business goals as efficiently as possible.

These tools are designed to save you time and help grow your business as they streamline and automate your marketing processes from start to finish. They also enable you to accurately analyze the success of your marketing efforts – such as ROI on a campaign, or lead conversion rates.

A “stack” is a group of platforms combined to elevate your marketing and business functions and will vary from business to business. They’re tailored to your individual business needs and are highly likely to be different from your competitors. The great thing about martech is that there’s a wide range of tools that can be used for all kinds of marketers, not just digital marketers. Depending on your business and the sector you operate in, there are a variety of tools and categories your stack may fit into. The tools could include email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, etc., and the categories would range from data, advertising and promotion, to commerce and sales. The list is vast!

What one business includes in its stack will be very different from what another uses. You can see this example of a stack used by Cisco, which highlights the 39 different technologies they use within their marketing function, all of which are focused on their core customer base.

Example of Cisco martech stack

Source: chiefmartec.com

One way to help simplify which tools you require is by breaking down your martech goals into three stages:

  • Attraction
  • Engagement
  • Analysis & optimization

We’ll look at how you can utilize these stages in more detail below (Why are martech stacks important?).

Organizations will use multiple martechs within their stack. There’s even an awards program – The Stackies – for marketers to send in a visual representation of their marketing stack, which gives you insight into how brands across all different industries pull martech into their stacks to support their business goals.

What platforms you pull into your stack really depend on your business, your goals, and more. If marketing stacks were clothing – it’d be a bespoke tailored suit, measured and trimmed to your business needs. How it measures up, plus the fit, the material, the pattern, the buttons, and everything that makes it fit you perfectly is all based on you and your business.

Your stack might include three elements. It could be six. According to Forrester, it could be as many as 19. It doesn’t matter, as long as it supports your business and growth goals, your stack will rarely look the same as your competitors because it’s built around your business – not theirs.


How has martech changed?

In the past 10 years, the martech landscape has changed drastically. Back in 2011, there were around 150 different platforms available for marketers to use. Fast-forward to 2022 and there are over 9,900. 24% of these have appeared since March 2020 (when there were around 8,000 platforms) when covid changed how we work, shop, and everything in between.

With a 5,233% growth rate since 2011, it’s clear that the demand for martech solutions is still scaling at a remarkable rate. This is reflected in the levels of investment seen within the martech industry. As of 2021, the global martech market is estimated to be worth nearly $345 billion.

When it comes to key trends and areas where significant changes will take place in the coming years, marketing leaders have identified three key areas where they are expecting to see growth over the coming years. These are:

  1. Personalization at scale – gaining a 360-degree customer view (or, a single customer view).
  2. Creation of the value exchange – boosting the benefits for both the seller and buyer in order to create longer-lasting and profitable customer relationships.
  3. Customer data management – increase the use of marketer-friendly solutions to deliver a more sophisticated customer engagement experience.

 


Why are martech stacks important?

So how exactly do martech stacks help marketers? Well, they help by streamlining your existing processes and removing repeated actions that take up time and effort away from other priorities.

For email marketers, software (such as Dotdigital) enables you to automate and gather actionable customer insights which in turn will help to drive better content and ultimately, boost customer engagement. As we discussed above, martech categories can be simplified down into three stages: attraction, engagement, and analysis and optimization.

Attraction: 

No matter what your function, business size, or market you fit into, lead generation will be a key part of your marketing strategy. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy task – but there are many different ways to help you attract leads, which can include the use of search engine optimization software, social media ads software, webinar software, and many more. This is your opportunity to use the tools within your stack to build trust in your brand and generate traffic through your channels.

Engagement:

This is the second stage which takes place after you’ve attracted potential customers to your website, or signed them up for your newsletter or a product demonstration. Now your goal is to keep them interested in the product(s) you have to offer them. Martech that fits into this stage might include email marketing software, retargeting software or CRM, and customer tracking tools, just to name a few.

Analysis and optimization:

So you’ve reached stage three – you’ve attracted your customers, and engaged with them. Now what, job done? Far from it.

A successful marketing strategy involves continuously monitoring and analyzing the data you receive from your customers so you can optimize your marketing activities and campaigns to ensure they’re continually successful. It’s rare that a new campaign will be successful from day one, but with streamlined data and optimization, you’ll be able to improve your campaigns as you learn more about your audience, their shopping habits, preferences, and much more.

Martech platforms that fit into this stage could include business intelligence, content intelligence, and conversion rate optimization tools – just to name a few.


How do I get started with a martech stack?

With more than 9,900 martech platforms across the globe to choose from, getting started and developing your stack may seem pretty daunting. So, before you get started here are a few questions you need to answer so you can clarify exactly what you need before getting started.

  1. What are your marketing objectives, and how can you identify them?
  2. What challenges do your team(s) face day-to-day and what is making their jobs harder?
  3. What is your budget and where does it need allocating?
  4. What tools will you need to consider for your martech stack?
  5. Are there any non-marketing tools you’ll need (such as project management, or chat tools)?
  6. What data needs to be transferred into your stack?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’re ready to start building your stack… but remember that you’ll need to allocate a team member per tool to create and support the workflow. That’ll help you as you start using the tools within your stack more effectively, and ensure that none of them are just sitting there gathering virtual dust.

Your new stack might take some getting used to, with different tools pulling you in different directions. To ensure you don’t inadvertently add more complexity to your stack, make sure you keep a roadmap of where you’re going (your strategy) and don’t veer too far from the path. You’ve created it for a reason, and your strategy is the number one goal when it comes to why you’ve developed your stack.


How can Dotdigital help you?

At Dotdigital, we have a wide range of martech integrations that work with our platform. These range from CRM, engagement, event management, order management, and much more. We’ve partnered up with these platforms to help you achieve your business goals as efficiently as possible.

We work with a huge array of businesses across a wide range of sectors globally, and we help to support them as they grow and scale – which is why we have such a wide range of martech available at your fingertips to pull into your stack and help you get the most out of your business.

Existing customers can head to the Integration Hub in your Dotdigital account to view our featured and self-serve integrations.

To find out more about Dotdigital and how our platform can help you as you scale your business and marketing function, get in touch with us today.



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You’ve got Mail… Privacy Protection https://dotdigital.com/blog/youve-got-mail-privacy-protection/ Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:55:01 +0000 https://dotdigital.com/?p=37610

You’ve got Mail… Privacy Protection

Woman looking at her email inbox on a computer

Back in June 2021, Apple announced at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference that they’d be introducing Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). This caused a bit of a panic at the time, as businesses around the globe worried about the future of open rates and the impending death of the ability to track email engagement. Fast-forward to September 2021 and it finally arrived. Apple users with the Mail.app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and more recently macOS, were able to activate MPP, throwing a blindfold over the eyes of email senders who were unable to see which of their Apple device users were engaging in their content.


Was MPP the end of engagement metrics?

We’re not as blind to customer engagement as many people thought. First of all, lets take a look into how the MPP works. It hides the IP address of the user which prevents senders from linking the opened email to other online activity, or even tracking their location. On top of this it stops the sender from being able to see if and when the email has been opened, because the email will be ‘opened’ automatically by the MPP when received on an MPP enabled device. Currently, Apple have set up the MPP with no default, meaning that users have to manually select if they want to protect their mail activity or not (but we know what choice most users would pick from reading Apple’s description of how the MPP works).

This choice is then automatically synced across all devices associated with the same Apple ID. In fact, Apple have recently released an advert in the US encouraging their users to activate Apple MPP, and turn off in-app tracking altogether – you can watch this here.

Screenshot of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection notice

When an email is sent to a recipient opted in to the MPP, the message is first sent through a proxy server where the content (including tracking pixels) are pre-loaded – or ‘opened’ – before being sent on to the user. This means the email will show as having being opened, despite the fact the user might have deleted it ‘unread’ from their inbox and never engaged with the content.

So is that it? Have we lost the ability to track consumer engagement with content? Far from it. We know that the important elements of tracking an email campaign includes the sends, opens and click-through-rates. So we can still track engagement with emails – but we have to focus on viewing key metrics holistically to ensure we can better track email engagement.

Following the implementation of Apple MPP, marketers have seen their open rate metric increase. Your open rates are likely to have significantly increased, so using the traditional open rates as a metric in 2022 won’t give you an accurate overview of how your content is being engaged with by your audience. Understanding the new normal and using click-throughs along with your other metrics such as revenue, interactions through other channels – any data you have – will give you a more accurate overview.

An email opened by MPP won’t have had any of the links or content clicked on by the user, therefore that gives a metric that we can start to use to track customer engagement. Now you may be thinking that the click-through rates alone won’t help to show increases or decreases in engagement over time, so ideally you’ll need to refer to your data prior to September 2021 as a starting point to set the benchmark to track your engagement. Viewing and using your existing data, whilst incorporating your new data as a way to benchmark the new normal (which can include all data holistically and not solely focusing on clicks) will give you the ability to better track engagement levels now MPP is live. If you’d like other supporting metrics, there are others you can use including revenue increase or decrease from your content (where applicable).


Some red flags to avoid

Across the industry, some tools will enable you remove any Apple MPP enabled device data in an attempt to prevent MPP open rates from inflating your real engagement numbers. This is a dangerous practice though, because opens made by a human use exactly the same mechanisms as non-human opens, therefore are completely indistinguishable. Indiscriminately removing MPP interactions will result in genuine human interactions being removed from your reporting insights, therefore you’re losing a key amount of usable and actionable data when it comes to developing and improving your marketing practices.

Excluding Apple MPP users not only removes them as a source of tracking open rates, but you also loose the ability to accurately score your customers and track their activity across the board, and you’ll be blind to click-rates, bounce rates, and other key metrics that will give you the tools to consistently improve your marketing function. Remember – just because a user has Apple MPP activated, doesn’t mean that they aren’t engaging in the content themselves, but using other metrics will help you develop a better overview of your customer and their engagement.

There’s a wealth of other metrics and usable data at our fingertips which can be used to keep track of how your contacts engage with you. What we definitely wouldn’t suggest is filtering out Apple MPP enabled devices when it comes to tracking your data, as that could easily be 70% or more of your data, which won’t give you accurate insights into your engagement rates.

MPP graph

MPP graph


How can Dotdigital help you track your customer engagement?

At Dotdigital, we have a variety of ways to track genuine contact engagement. Firstly, we have a tool which can filter out all non-human activity. This includes opens and clicks which have occurred during the sending of an email or campaign. This removes any false engagement and interaction rates which can skew your reports, leaving them inaccurate and avoid using misleading data when it comes to planning your future campaigns.

We also have our enhanced Single customer view which can be used to get a better overview of your contacts and their activity. It’ll enable you to know who they are, what their interests are and what drives their purchasing decisions. It combines all actionable and real-time data in a single location meaning you can gather and use the correct data to engage with your contacts as if you were speaking to them one-to-one by creating personalized campaigns and content.

The SCV contains six key elements of data:

  • Customer information
  • Channels
  • Memberships
  • Sales
  • Engagement
  • Activity timeline and recent orders

Single customer view in Dotdigital gives you multiple metrics through which you can holistically track engagement, including:

  • The number of emails sent
  • The date of the last email you sent to them
  • The date of the last email open
  • The date of their last visit to your website
  • The total number of visits to your website within a defined time-frame


So what are the takeaways from Apple MPP?

We’ve been able to delve in to the detail using our in-house data science and analytics teams to more accurately identify which opens are happening from Apple MPP enabled devices. This research has also shown us that since January 2022, the majority of Apple users who are going to upgrade to iOS 15 and activate MPP have done so. You’ll be able to see from your own data that the increase in open rates between September 2021 and January 2022 has levelled off, which you can now use to create your benchmark when it comes to using your data before and after MPP came into affect.

We’ve also been able to see that the largest proportion of open rates by a group of customers is done on MPP enabled devices. Globally it’s over 50% of all opens for Dotdigital customers, but in some regions (including the AMERICAS), this customer segment increases to 70% and above. Total opens per day have almost doubled to pre-September 2021 levels, and with no current way to tell if the open on an Apple MPP enabled device was a real user or an automated open, the risk involved with removing that segment of users from your data is that you’ll be losing a large proportion of quality information, rather than just your opens metrics.


Our summary

To summarize, we know that the Apple MPP has ruffled a few feathers, but it has definitely not taken away the ability to track customer engagement. You have the data available, but you just need to review your metrics, understand your new baseline, and tweak the ones you’re using. We have a whole host of content for you to view across our blog from engagement, clicks, and split testing, so make sure you take a look today.

To find out more about Dotdigital can help you, get in touch with us today.



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