We know that in today’s increasingly competitive online retail environment, it’s crucial that brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. The responsibility to deliver good CX increasingly sits on the shoulders of marketers. We also know that consumers are loyal to brands that offer personalized, engaging experiences across the entire buyer journey—not least on their website.

By blending Dotdigital’s customer insight and cross-channel engagement capabilities with Fresh Relevance’s own cross-channel capabilities and especially its on-site personalization tools, we’re able to offer a solution that empowers marketing teams to drive excellent CX at every point in the customer journey.

Welcoming Fresh Relevance to the Dotdigital Group

For me, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be taking the combined business forward. We’ve worked with the Fresh Relevance team for years as partners and have similar values when it comes to how we innovate and how we take care of our people and customers.

The cultural alignment across our organizations gives me confidence that customers old and new will soon reap the benefits of a more tight-knit offering that doesn’t stop at traditional marketing channels.

As part of the Dotdigital group, Fresh Relevance will continue to operate under its existing brand and Mike Austin will retain a leadership position in his new role as SVP Personalization. Existing customers of Fresh Relevance will continue to enjoy the same levels of service as Dotdigital continues to invest in Fresh Relevance.

About Fresh Relevance

Fresh Relevance was launched in 2013 with a vision to optimize the customer journey and solve the challenges of data aggregation in the ecommerce space. Since then its offering has extended to personalize customer experiences across web, email, mobile app, SMS, and ads. Capabilities include triggered emails, product recommendations, onsite popovers, dynamic content, behavioral and geotargeting, optimization, and customer data management.

Fresh Relevance has more than 300 customers around the world spanning consumer and B2B ecommerce, and travel. Customers include Rip Curl, Dreams, Hoseasons, and Wowcher.

“Over the last ten years, Fresh Relevance and Dotdigital have built a very successful partnership, integrating our technologies to provide incredible value to our mutual customers. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be joining forces with Dotdigital, an organization whose values align so closely with ours. Bringing Fresh Relevance’s industry-leading cross-channel personalization capabilities to Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform will help marketers better engage with their customers, drive repeat purchases, and build lifelong loyalty across all touch points. I’m proud of what the Fresh Relevance team has built and look forward to the next evolution of this market at Dotdigital.”

Mike Austin, CEO and Founder of Fresh Relevance and incoming SVP Personalization at Dotdigital

A partnership built on proven success

Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance have been long-time business partners and have a growing list of shared customers who already benefit from orchestrating seamless experiences across inboxes, message centers, and websites. We share similar values across our people, culture, and approach to innovation. We’re excited to continue building on this success.

Fresh Relevance already has a strong technical integration with Dotdigital that helps marketers drive engagement with contextual email content like weather feeds, social media feeds, individualized coupons, and web-scraped content. The integration allows users to trigger real-time marketing messages through Dotdigital from a range of Fresh Relevance event triggers including reduced price alerts, new stock availability, browse abandonment, and replenishment. The integration will continue to be available to existing and new customers shared by Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance.

With roots in marketing automation, Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance are experts in building innovative tech that helps marketing teams scale and boost ROI. Over time, we will take our combined strengths and continue to build solutions that empower marketers to build authentic, hyper-personalized customer experiences that are memorable and inspire loyalty. We also look forward to extending Fresh Relevance’s product offering geographically into the Americas and APAC markets.

We are excited about the future—and together with our new colleagues now look forward to delivering even better experiences for our customers, so they can deliver better experiences to theirs. Stay tuned for more updates as we embark on this new journey together!

Resources/further reading:

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, we can walk together.” Lila Watson

• National Police Accountability Project
• The Bail Project
• Black Lives Matter UK
• Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust

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

Free chat to keep connected with customers

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

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

Tips and tricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips and tricks

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

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

Send instant updates with SMS

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

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

Tips and tricks

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

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

Get started

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

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

Get onboard

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

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

The UK and EMEA

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

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

The Americas

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

APAC

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

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

Stay in touch

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

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

We’re all in it together

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

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

Managing communications in times of crisis

Effectively communicating your business continuity

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

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

Business continuity – COVID-19

Following the recent developments surrounding COVID-19, I feel it’s important I provide you with visibility of our business continuity plans and our stance on core business considerations that I think are important to you. Firstly, I would like to say that our thoughts are with everyone who’s been affected by the coronavirus outbreak. We wish anyone who’s sick a full and speedy recovery. And our hearts go out to the people who have sadly lost loved ones at this time. Everyone here at Dotdigital is in admiration of the dedicated, selfless healthcare workers helping everyone in need and tackling the virus around the world – you are an inspiration to us all.

Secondly, I would like to assure you that my executive Leadership Team already has full business continuity planning in place, so that we can effectively manage incidents such as this outbreak. We are confident, therefore, that we can minimize the impact to our customers and partners.

Working from home

We’re taking COVID-19 seriously. That means no more face-to-face meetings or office working across all our global locations. All Dotdigital members of staff will be working from home for the next three weeks, at least. I want to reassure all customers and partners that it will still be business as usual. As a tech company, we’re in a lucky position to be able to work remotely easily. Our entire workforce works from laptops; and we have a robust and secure infrastructure that allows remote access to all our technologies. All of our systems and technologies are enabled for remote working, which means we can look after our employees while delivering the best service with no interruptions.

On Monday 16^th March we conducted a global test, with the entire workforce working from home. There were no hiccups or service disruptions, so we’re fully confident we can continue to function and work remotely for the time being. We are all due back in the office on 6th April, but this will be closely monitored over the next three weeks depending on how the pandemic evolves.

This is a key part of our contingency planning to mitigate risk to our employees, our customers, our partners, and our business. We would ask you to ensure you keep us updated if your offices have any restrictions in place that we should consider.

We understand that you and your business might be working remotely, too. Our teams are well equipped to keep the focus on you, no matter where you are. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to in touch with your customer success manager, account manager, or partner manager.

Volunteer days

During this uncertain time, we want to empower our employees and help the wider community. There are many vulnerable people out there who don’t want to go outside, and need help because they live alone. We can help.

Every year, all dotdigital employees are allowed to take two volunteering days to either give back to the local community or volunteer with a larger charity – anything that will make a difference.

All dotdigital staff can now use additional volunteering days to assist people where they can. It’s an amazing initiative and we’re keen to take steps to make this period more positive for those more in need.

Ongoing communications

We will continue to make the most of our internal technologies such as video conferencing to ensure effective communications are maintained; and where necessary pause any plans that would involve large-scale and widespread travel to events. To that end, we have taken the decision to postpone our global customer Summit and the dotties. This event is set to take place later this year to ensure the safety of our customers, partners, and employees. We will provide updates to our plans as they develop.

We hope you stay safe and well. If you have any questions or any specific guidelines you would like us to follow as part of COVID-19, please contact your customer management team.

For status on the Dotdigital platform, please click here. And if you need any information or guidance from our Help center articles, please click here.

Forbes Agency Council predicts that conversational marketing will be one of the top 15 marketing trends that may impact 2020. With Dotdigital’s many years of ecommerce and marketing heritage, we understand the challenges this brings to marketers, not just in how to deal with real-time interactions, but also how best to manage this data to power engaging consumer experiences.

In November 2015, dotmailer (now Dotdigital) was announced as Magento’s first-ever premier marketing automation partner, shortly followed by being one of the first to be bundled directly into Magento’s core code base. Ever since, we have been the preferred choice for merchants and partners to deliver the best, most integrated and seamless experience for ecommerce and marketing teams working in collaboration, to deliver the best customer experience possible.

Our relationship with Adobe has continued to grow and develop post acquisition of Magento by Adobe in 2018. We have been an active supporter of the fantastic community and ecosystem which surrounds Magento, and wanted to give something back to the many who have supported us and our continued growth. Live chat enables B2C and B2B merchants to interact with their consumers, assisting their purchase experiences and solving their challenges in real time. For those who want to take the next steps with larger teams of agents, you will be able to upgrade and add more. For those who want their omnichannel touchpoints and conversational data to drive the ultimate marketing experience, merchants can upgrade for full access to Dotdigital.

We have built the underlying chat infrastructure to be in real time, the technology is ‘API-first’ and as part of subsequent releases we plan to expose many of these API endpoints to the community. Customers and partners will be able to design highly interactive chat experiences integrated into unique merchant workflows. Soon we will also be enabling multi-team support which makes AI bot integrations possible. On the horizon, omnichannel chat will enable businesses to engage in conversational commerce and offer a superior customer service, all from one space, no matter the customer’s channel of choice.

Milan Patel, CEO Dotdigital