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. 

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. 

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. 

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.  

Find the perfect customer-campaign fit

Optimize your automation performance with pin-point precision

Put excellence into the expected

Customer experience optimization

What is your fundamental objective?

Ok, now what?

• Focus on clicks If you’re looking for engagement, and believe me, you are. Clicks are where it’s at. If your recipients click on a link in your email, you’ve hit the jackpot. They’ve read your email, want to know more, or your creative is so on point they were drawn to the big shiny button, and the rest is history.
• If you build it, they will open. Have faith. You’ve not just started sending emails; hopefully, you’ve had a bit of a head start. You have an idea of what’s hitting the mark and what isn’t. The playing field may have changed slightly, but the game is still the same. All the techniques you’ve used will work again. You’re going to have to make sure that your content is on point. Cutting corners will not do. This leads me to…
• Zero party data Like any good relationship with a partner or your best friend, the more you’ve listened to what they have to say about themselves, the better you are at buying them gifts or inviting them to concerts; you know it’ll resonate because you know them well. So ask what your customers want, and give it to them. But take an interest in what they tell you. The more you listen, the more you’ll learn about them, the more relevant the content, and the better the conversion rate.
• If it ain’t broke… Similar to my first point, but specifically referring to subject lines. A particular format, addition of emojis or personalization, even a bit of humor will still entice people to open. The inbox isn’t changing; the name of the game is standing out. So…
• Get creative, be the purple lightsaber. In a previous Star Wars-themed blog, I referred to Mace Windu’s lightsaber. It’s purple, and everyone else has a green or blue lightsaber so that you can spot him a mile off in a crowd. That’s what you’re striving for. But it’s not just great subject lines you want. Show-stopping creative, strong imagery, GIFs, interaction from carousels and the like, and collapsible sections are all things to incorporate into the campaign itself. This kind of stuff will make your recipients form a wry smile because they know something special has hit their inbox.
• Give them more than one outlet. If you can communicate with your customers on more than one channel, you’re guaranteed to make them stickier.

How do you define success for your team? What metrics do you look at?  At the core of how we measure our work, we look at customer and prospective-customer engagement. To do this, we keep a close eye on customer engagements using our CRM (Microsoft Dynamics), where we leverage lead-scoring to help identify warm leads and qualify them from a marketing perspective, flagging them as ready to be handed to sales. In service to customer engagement, we also look closely at channel-level metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, and click-to-open rates help give us signals about how our email marketing is being received by our audience. Conversion rates help us optimize the website for better engagement. Ad click-throughs and conversions help us drive engagement and learn about how marketing messages resonate. But all of these metrics point to engagement in some form. What does the MarTech stack at Dotdigital look like? Unsurprisingly, the heart of our stack is Dotdigital – which we love. It integrates beautifully with Microsoft Dynamics 365, our CRM. We use additional distribution channels like Hootsuite, GoToWebinar, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Linkedin Ads. Our marketing site is built primarily on WordPress, we deliver website personalizations with Webeo, setup popups with Wisepops, and use Dotdigital’s Chat as our sales live-chat tool. And what tools, in particular, do you use for reporting and analysis? Our data and insights team are wizards at Power BI which helps surface data kept in our CRM. We rely on that heavily to keep an eye on the sales funnel. On the marketing side, we use Google Analytics, Hotjar, Moz for traffic, conversion, and search engine optimization across the website. Dotdigital’s reporting tools help immensely with our email marketing and contact-database growth measurement. We regularly look at the big advertising platforms’ default reporting, too. Where we want to blend or manipulate marketing data, we use Google Data Studio. What challenges do you face when it comes to reporting? How does this affect you and the team? The biggest challenge, as other marketers know, is getting a ‘view-to-rule-them-all’. Having data stored in lots of platforms means it’s hard to get a single-view to understand or demonstrate how it’s all working together. Which means sometimes insights can be slow to surface and require a deep-dive to pull it all together. What are the key benefits of using Google Data Studio? Data Studio makes it very easy to integrate and blend a wide variety of data and gives users like me the ability to very quickly visualize that data. Interactivity is built into nearly every chart, table, and visualization automatically, making it simple to drill down and filter data in a way that surfaces compelling, actionable data stories. It also makes it very easy to share reports and dashboards. I like it because it’s web-based, very visual, and the learning curve isn’t too steep. The biggest benefit is that it’s free. We recently released a new integration that allows you to connect your Dotdigital campaign reports to Google Sheets. You’ve started using it already, how did you find it? As a Dotdigital power-user, I’m often very excited about new releases and integrations. But this was was particularly exciting, because I knew that connecting campaign reports to Google Sheets meant I could then pull that data into Data Studio! And to make things even better setting up the integration was so, so easy.  It was a matter of like 3 or 4 clicks and done.

How does this make your day job easier? We’re very interested in our email marketing performance over time. In the past, the executives would pull the campaign data manually into a spreadsheet and map that out so we could compare like-for-like campaigns and keep an eye on how CTO, CTR, and CTOR improve as we make optimizations. As marketers know, not all email campaigns are the same or even meant to be compared, so we’ve always wanted to be able to filter and manipulate data in a way to let us see trends across similar campaigns. Now we can do that without having to export campaign reports or making sure our campaigns are tagged perfectly. That data refreshes frequently and is waiting for us in a spreadsheet, ready to be used. And how does this translate to what you do in Google Data Studio?  Because the export is automatic, we can jump straight into the insights. Google Data Studio loves Google Sheets, naturally, so pulling that data into Data Studio is a breeze. Plus, you only have to do it once and your dashboards in Data Studio automatically with the campaign data that is being pulled into the linked Google Sheet. At that point, it’s a matter of setting up charts and tables to visualize the data. This has given me the ability to filter and present campaign data in a highly customized way, empowering me to surface need-to-know insights to the Marketing Director or any of my colleagues. What’s your favorite thing about working in Google Data Studio? Is there a particular feature that you think everyone should hear about? Data Studio makes filter controls so, so easy. The simplest being the date filter, but you can easily assign any filterable data field to the data filter. With a bit of regex, we extract the email type from the campaign names and turn this into a ‘Campaign Type’ data field. I can then add a filter dropdown so the team can look at campaign performance by type of campaign (content, webinar invite, promotion, feature release) with one click. And every chart in the report will then show the relevant data accordingly. Another very close second favorite is the ability to schedule email delivery of a Data Studio report. This means you can automate your monthly campaign reports to land in your boss’s inbox every month.

Syncing your Campaign Reports to Google Sheets means that your dashboards in Google Data Studio are automatically updated. Saving you time. What can you do with all that time saved? Optimization, optimization, optimization. The less time we spend doing the dirty work of mining for insights on past campaigns, the more time we can spend on optimizing our future campaigns. When time is saved, we want to invest that time back into building automations, lifecycle programs, and campaign optimizations that will save even more time in the future. It’s said a lot, but it’s very important to make time to save time. What are the benefits of being able to clearly convey the performance of marketing efforts with the wider business? Ultimately, across this business, and any business, it’s important that we’re all marching in the same direction. Visual insights and reporting—and making those insights easily accessible—helps not just our team but other teams make better decisions in their own work. It ensures that we’re all working from the same insights, and minimizes the likelihood of duplicative work.  This is particularly important in this era of remote working when cross-team collaboration requires more energy and planning.

Whilst data in itself can be interesting, sometimes it needs a helping hand to give it context and bring it to life. After all, for marketers, it always comes back to telling great stories right? How has the Google Sheets integration(and in turn Google Data studio) helped you do this? This is entirely true. And the amount of data that’s available to digital marketers can be overwhelming.  And I’m sure many can relate to the feeling when we’re sent a Slack message from a boss or a colleague like “Can you send me our website traffic stats?” or “What do our email stats look like?” When really they’re asking “Are we getting value from our marketing investment?” or “Which of our activations is making the most impact?” or “Where are opportunities for us to make more impact?”. And to answer these questions some of these many metrics help, but they need to be seen in a blended way, with context and, very often, narrative. Customizable reporting with Data Studio and the easy integrations with key marketing tech, like Dotdigital, make it easier to tell those stories in a visual and interactive way.

What advice do you have for other marketers that want to improve their storytelling with data?

While it’s overwhelming at first, start by taking inventory of all the data metrics you do have access to. Then run through each of them and ask yourself  “What is the practical action I would take based on this metric?” and “How often would I look at this metric to make a decision?” If it’s difficult to define what that practical action you could make is, set it aside. Then group the rest based on the second question. Going through that exercise leaves you with a narrower set of metrics– eliminating the data overload. This helps you as the storyteller and also your audience. It also gives you the rough outline of how to structure your data storytelling. Data you need frequently can be presented in simple, quickly digestible ways.  Deeper data that needs to be reviewed less frequently can be framed with a narrative in a more comprehensive way.

You can find out more about syncing your campaign data to Google Sheets in our Help Center.

Know which metric to measure and what action to take

It’s not just big pivots, but fine-tunes that will help to win the race