I’m Tristan Glenat, Group Product Manager for Connectivity at Dotdigital. I specialize in enhancing our platform’s integration capabilities. I work to seamlessly connect Dotdigital with essential business tools like CRMs and ecommerce platforms, streamlining data flow and improving overall efficiency.

The evolving landscape of ecommerce marketing

The way customers discover and interact with brands has changed dramatically. While paid advertising was once the primary channel for customer acquisition, we’re now seeing a significant shift towards organic discovery, word-of-mouth, and curated content experiences. This shift, combined with increasingly complex data management requirements and rising customer expectations, creates new challenges for marketers.

Some key challenges are:

1. Rising customer expectations

• Personalization has become a fundamental requirement, with customers expecting tailored experiences based on their preferences and behavior
• Cross-platform consistency is essential for maintaining brand integrity
• Real-time responsiveness has become a critical factor in customer satisfaction

2. Shifting customer discovery patterns

• Traditional advertising effectiveness has declined
• Social commerce platforms show engagement rates up to 300% higher than traditional channels
• Community-driven content is increasingly influential in purchase decisions

3. Data management complexities

• Regulatory compliance requirements continue to evolve
• Multi-platform data integration presents significant challenges
• Maintaining data consistency across touchpoints requires sophisticated solutions

Integrating with Dotdigital

At Dotdigital, we’re committed to helping marketers overcome the challenges of the evolving ecommerce landscape by delivering relevant, timely, and personalized experiences at scale. Our comprehensive integration ecosystem is the key to making this possible.

We’ve developed native integrations with leading ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce, Shopline, Shopware, and WooCommerce. These seamless connections ensure a smooth flow of data between your ecommerce platform and our marketing automation platform, allowing you to:

• Synchronize customer data effortlessly, ensuring your marketing campaigns are always up-to-date.
• Automate workflows based on customer behavior and preferences, delivering highly personalized experiences.
• Measure and optimize the performance of your marketing campaigns to drive better results.

Expanding beyond ecommerce

Our integration capabilities extend far beyond traditional ecommerce platforms. We’ve forged connections with a wide range of marketing and technology tools to empower you with even more comprehensive marketing automation capabilities.

Retargeting tools

Reconnect with website visitors who didn’t complete a purchase using retargeting tools like Facebook Ads and Google Ads. By integrating these tools with Dotdigital, you can drive them back to your site and increase conversions.

Loyalty and inventory management systems

Ensure your marketing campaigns are always relevant and timely by synchronizing customer loyalty data and inventory levels. This prevents promoting out-of-stock items and allows for personalized rewards, enhancing the customer experience.

POS (point-of-sale systems)

Integrate your POS system with Dotdigital to capture customer data at the point of purchase. This enables you to personalize marketing messages and offer targeted promotions based on in-store behavior.

UGC platforms

Leverage user-generated content from platforms like Trustpilot or Yotpo to build trust and credibility. Incorporate customer reviews into your marketing messages to personalize your communications and demonstrate social proof.

Personalization that makes a difference

At Dotdigital, we understand that effective personalization is the key to creating memorable customer experiences and driving conversions. Our integration ecosystem enables sophisticated, journey-based personalization that adapts to each customer’s unique path to purchase.

As soon as you acquire valuable zero-party and first-party data, our platform empowers you to create highly personalized interactions across multiple touchpoints:

• Cross-channel consistency: Deliver cohesive, personalized messages across email, SMS, social media, and other channels, ensuring a unified brand experience.
• Dynamic web experiences: Utilize Fresh Relevance to tailor on-site content based on factors such as location, browsing behavior, purchase history, and customer preferences.
• Behavioral triggers: Set up automated campaigns that respond to specific customer actions, like abandoning a cart or browsing a particular product category.

Introducing our hybrid prediction recommendation engine:

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our hybrid prediction recommendation engine. This innovative feature combines the power of machine learning with your unique business rules to deliver hyper-relevant product suggestions at scale. By leveraging both data-driven insights and human expertise, this engine will help you:

• Increase sales by recommending products that customers are most likely to purchase.
• Reduce cart abandonment by offering personalized product suggestions at the right time.
• Deepen customer relationships by providing tailored recommendations that demonstrate you understand their preferences.

With our hybrid prediction recommendation engine, you can take your personalization efforts to the next level and deliver truly exceptional customer experiences.

The power of automation

One question I often get is how automation can improve customer engagement. The answer lies in achieving scale without sacrificing personalization. Our automation features allow marketers to:

• Craft sophisticated triggered campaigns: Deliver targeted messages at the right time based on customer behavior and preferences.
• Construct diverse journey branches: Tailor campaigns to individual customer personas, ensuring a personalized experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
• Implement effective abandoned browse and cart recovery programs: Reconnect with customers who didn’t complete their purchases, increasing conversions and revenue.
• Launch loyalty and win-back campaigns: Nurture customer relationships, reward repeat purchases, and re-engage lapsed customers.

But what truly sets our automation capabilities apart is their seamless integration with other platforms in your tech stack. You can send custom webhooks to trigger promotions, add leads to your CRM, or even automate sending gifts to your VIP customers. This interconnectedness creates a unified customer experience and streamlines your marketing efforts.

By leveraging our automation features, you can:

• Save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks.
• Improve customer satisfaction by delivering personalized experiences at scale.
• Drive conversions and revenue by optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Getting ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday

As we approach major shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I can’t stress enough the importance of having your integrations and automations properly set up. Here’s what I recommend:

• Define clear, measurable objectives: Establish specific goals for the shopping season, such as increasing sales, improving conversion rates, or growing your email subscriber list.
• Review historical data: Analyze data from your previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns to identify trends, successful strategies, and areas for improvement.
• Set up time-sensitive automations: Implement abandoned browse recovery automations within 30 minutes to re-engage potential customers.
• Implement on-site personalization: Utilize Fresh Relevance to create personalized banners and blocks that showcase relevant products, promotions, or content based on visitor behavior.

By following these guidelines and utilizing our abandoned browse and on-site personalization features, you can effectively engage your audience, drive conversions, and maximize your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

What’s the future of ecommerce?

The future of ecommerce is shaped by exciting trends, including the rise of social commerce and a shift toward headless and composable commerce. Dotdigital’s commitment to integration empowers ecommerce businesses to embrace these emerging trends and stay ahead of the competition.

Social commerce

As shopping becomes more social, we are actively investing in social integrations, particularly with TikTok. You can sync your Dotdigital contact lists with TikTok audiences to enhance your retargeting efforts and capture leads directly from TikTok lead forms into Dotdigital. These integrations, along with TikTok’s shoppable features, allow you to create engaging and immersive shopping experiences that resonate with younger audiences.

Headless commerce

We are witnessing a growing trend toward “modern commerce,” where brands seek the flexibility to choose best-in-class tools that seamlessly connect through APIs. This headless and composable approach enables businesses to create personalized and scalable ecommerce experiences.

AI-powered tools

The future of ecommerce is being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI), which is changing how we shop. From personalized product recommendations to advanced chatbots, AI is enhancing the customer experience.

You can utilize WinstonAI to automate tasks, gain valuable insights, and save time. As AI continues to progress, it will become increasingly important in shaping the future of ecommerce.

Final thoughts

Here’s what I’ve learned in my time at Dotdigital, ecommerce success isn’t just about having fancy tools – it’s about making them work together seamlessly. Whether you’re just starting on Shopify or running a massive enterprise operation, we’re here to help you create those personalized experiences your customers are looking for.

The future of ecommerce is connected, personalized, and automated. With the right integration strategy and tools in place, you will not only meet but exceed customer expectations while driving sustainable growth.

This acceleration also brings challenges around trust, scalability, security, flexibility, and importantly, the ability to adapt quickly to ever-evolving customer expectations.

Many companies are set to continue their digital growth and want to do so without compromise to these factors. And so these same companies have made choices around the technology they use, choosing vendors that are experienced in the upscaling of digital business practices, and enable them to do so without delay or disruption to their business goals. Trusted by many, one of these platforms is Salesforce’s (a longstanding dotdigital partner) Commerce Cloud.

To achieve all this it takes a complementary tech stack of platforms that play nice together. Offering seamless and deep integrations to your most important tools is a key part of what we do.

Salesforce B2C commerce (formerly Demandware) was built to allow merchants to create unified, highly personalized, and intelligent digital commerce experiences, putting innovation and flexibility at its core. And what do you know, this as it happens aligns rather nicely with what marketers have come to expect from us at dotdigital!

Dotdigital integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud via a certified cartridge. With it, businesses can drive highly personalized customer experiences and execute engaging cross-channel marketing campaigns that drive revenue. We’ve made some key updates to our integration which we think you’ll approve of, and in particular will help you overcome challenges around trust, localization, and scalable personalization as you ramp up digitally. Let me take you through the top three…

Transactional emails

“Good design lasts forever!” Right?

Unfortunately for marketers, this design principle doesn’t always ring true in the world of digital. Baking your design into templates, and testing your sends are just two simple ways in which you can avoid your brand from being ‘broken’. But there’s more…

Marketers understand the value of delivering consistently beautiful, on-brand experiences at every stage of the customer journey. This is about connecting emotionally with your customers, even in those seemingly little but highly significant moments of them receiving a shipping confirmation, or an invoice.

Yes, transactional emails are just as important as your marketing campaigns. And yet, they are often a very visibly overlooked part of the customer journey. Historically, these types of communications would often require a developer or even an agency to make a simple copy change.

So we set out to make things easier. Our new and improved Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge lets you design stunning, on-brand transactional emails with our drag-and-drop EasyEditor and replaces Salesforce’s native notifications for account creation, new password requests, order and shipping confirmations, and more.

We’re not just talking about static emails here, the relevant data objects are also made available to you and fully documented, so they can be personalized to your heart’s content. Updates can be made in real-time to match your brand bible or guidelines on tone of voice.

Besides being a nicer way to say ‘Thank You’ for that all-important first purchase, branded transactional emails can now be tracked and reported on with ease (all from within Dotdigital, of course), and bring deliverability benefits too.

Multi-store support

Having a greater captive audience online has resulted in a more international customer base for many businesses. If you’re one of them, you’ll know that customer needs and emotions differ from country to country, not to mention language. Having a localization strategy is key to making it away from home. Oh, and your customers will thank you too.

CSA Research report that 31% of international consumers are unlikely to purchase products without information in their own language. Naturally, how you market to them and how effectively or not you localize content to their preferences is going to have an impact too.

So it would make sense if you’ve chosen Salesforce Commerce Cloud for the flexibility with which it lets you manage multiple digital commerce sites with ease and conquer new geographical areas with speed, all from a single multi-tenant instance.

The flexibility doesn’t stop when you integrate with Dotdigital. Depending on how your organization is structured, you can either decide to connect each of your storefront sites to a dedicated child account or link multiples storefront to one main account.

If some of your storefront sites are available in different locales (think multilingual countries), we now give you access to the preferred locale of your customers so you know what campaigns to send and in which language.

And what’s more, all the ecommerce reporting data now supports order-based filtering, which means you can drill down to get insights on how a particular storefront or region is performing or responding to your marketing strategy.

Build AI product recommendations with your custom product data

Product recommendations and their value probably need no introduction. As Salesforce Commerce Cloud merchants, you could already access a comprehensive library of recommendation types, all of which can be overlayed with advanced filtering to match a particular brand campaign, type of products, or specific price range.

With our latest integration upgrade, we now automatically sync any and all product information to your product catalog in Dotdigital. This gives you full control over the products you put in front of customers by letting you filter on native and custom product attributes.

For example, you may want to amplify products made from a particular material, color, size, or weight. Or filter your AI-powered recommendation to only surface products that are available for in-store pick-up! With your custom data at your fingertips, you’re better equipped than ever to make your recommendation strategy a success and redefine what good looks like for email and on-site ROI.

All the details about our latest certified Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge can be found on our Help Center. If you prefer to speak to us and find out more about Dotdigital or how to connect your Commerce Cloud store, book a demo with us.