Making mobile messaging as easy as email

Mobile marketing is an essential element of any cross-channel marketing mix.  This year we provided marketers more tools to reach their customers more effectively on their favorite devices.  

It can be hard to find the perfect message in 160 words. That’s why we rolled out the WinstonAI features you know and love for email out to SMS, too.  To save time when creating an SMS campaign, you now have the option to have WinstonAI perform a spelling and grammar check, add emojis, rewrite your copy in a different tone, and shorten or lengthen your copy. 

SMS personalization leaped forward with the introduction of Liquid script, a flexible and dynamic markup language that enables creating highly personalized and targeted content in SMS campaigns. Now, you can use Insight data like order and booking details to create highly personalized experiences going far beyond basic contact data.

Our MMS functionality officially launched for customers in the United States and Canada, delivering impressive results. Companies like ScentAir reported an impressive ROI of 28:1 on when using MMS. MMS offers various benefits, such as enhanced engagement with multimedia content, higher conversion rates, improved brand recognition, and a better customer experience.

We also improved existing integrations with the likes of Adobe Commerce, Hyvä themes, and Zapier, to make mobile syncing as seamless as email.

And we’re not stopping there. To help marketers build deeper connections through mobile messaging, watch out early next year for full details of our native WhatsApp capability. This will include self-service campaign management, two-way chat, user-friendly editing, and much more.

Seamless cross-channel personalization

Our Fresh Relevance platform gives you access to all of the tools you could ever need to ensure that the journey of a prospect or customer is highly personalized and engaging across web and email.

It allows you to create a customized experience for your audience before you even know their name, by leveraging their behavior, location, weather, and price preferences. 

With the Advanced Personalization pack, Dotdigital customers can access this powerful functionality more easily than ever:

• Countdown timers to help add urgency to your promotions and limited-time offers to encourage immediate action.
• Weather tools to allow even more personalized email content based on real-time weather conditions in the recipient’s area.
• Website easy-editor to quickly and easily customize your website’s appearance, layout, and messaging.
• Image personalization supporting the delivery of tailored images reflecting individual preferences, contributing to an engaging visual experience.
• Advanced popovers which enhance the user experience with personalized pop-over messages and banners.
• Advanced product recommendations, providing users with highly relevant product suggestions to boost conversions and sales.

Dynamic social media integrations

Consumer expectations are higher than ever, so it’s important that you reach them on their preferred channels.

Our focus on integrating with additional platforms and channels continued throughout 2024, with a number of new integrations including LinkedIn and TikTok.

Maximizing the potential audience reach on social media platforms is vital for a successful marketing strategy. Dotdigital’s integrations with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and TikTok enable you to create highly personalized campaigns to maximize your ROI.

With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, you can easily capture leads by pre-filling LinkedIn profile information, resulting in high conversion rates due to the detailed, company-related data provided. Our integration enables seamless syncing of these leads with Dotdigital, so you can follow up and drive conversions through targeted campaigns.

The TikTok integrations opened up possibilities to engage with over 1 billion users worldwide. With the TikTok leads integration, valuable leads can be automatically synced from TikTok to Dotdigital and segmented based on user interests. Our TikTok audience retargeting feature allows you to create hyper-personalized ads by syncing and targeting your most engaged Dotdigital contacts, optimizing your TikTok ad spend.

We also rolled out new ways to help you engage your customers on whatever channel you prefer. With self-service webhooks, you can programmatically push data from Dotdigital to other platforms to create your own bespoke customer journey, whether that’s to your CRM or to fuel a direct mail campaign.

Sharpen your skills with the Dotdigital Academy

Acknowledging the ever-increasing demands on marketers, we launched the Dotdigital Academy to empower our customers to stay on top of industry trends and improve their overall marketing skills. This learning platform covers a wide range of on-demand topics, from campaign creation and automation to analytics and industry best practices.

The Dotdigital Academy lets you learn at your own pace and offers courses tailored to your specific needs and interests. Whether you’re a beginner looking to enhance your marketing prowess or an experienced professional seeking to refine your skills, the Academy has the resources to help you excel. 

As we continually expand the Academy with new courses and certifications, you can stay ahead and unlock your full potential as a marketer.

You asked, we listened

As always, we listen carefully to customer and partner feedback. This year we’ve taken this on board to launch a number of most-requested improvements to help make the day-to-day that little bit easier for marketers.

These time savers include:

• Easily excluding a segment at the point of sending an email
• A quick-find search bar in settings
• Mobile push notifications included in your CXDP allowance – unlocking an extra channel at no extra cost
• Dozens of new verified, quality-assured partner integrations (check out our new and improved partner directory here)
• Easier and deeper reporting on the things that matter, like revenue attribution

Got an idea? Let us know via our roadmap page and it might appear on this blog next year.

Dive deeper

In this article, we’ve just given a snapshot of all the new releases from this year. For a full overview, check out our release summary blogs:

• February 2024 release
• May 2024 release
• September 2024 release
• November 2024 release

What’s next?

Our product team is busy as ever working on new ways to help marketers achieve more through their cross-channel marketing campaigns in 2025. As always, you can find details of our upcoming launches on our public facing roadmap. We’re excited to work together and be part of your success in 2025 and beyond.

Stay tuned for more updates.

That’s why we are excited to introduce a suite of powerful tools designed to enhance your marketing efforts across all channels.

Whether you want to capture attention on TikTok, personalize at scale, or gain deeper customer insights, our updates work seamlessly with your existing tech stack to help you achieve one goal: delivering experiences that convert.

Drive repeat sales with social retargeting

TikTok’s explosive growth has created a massive audience of over 1 billion users worldwide. This presents a unique opportunity to reconnect with customers and boost repeat sales. Our latest TikTok integration allows you to easily transfer valuable leads to Dotdigital, enabling you to deliver highly personalized experiences based on their interests.

What’s new

TikTok lead forms integration

Convert more leads from your TikTok ads by automatically passing them into Dotdigital and enrolling them in dedicated programs. Benefits include:

• Save time by automatically syncing data from TikTok forms to Dotdigital, you can automatically create high-intent audiences ready to push into a campaign and convert.
• One-click pre-filled forms with profile information pulled from TikTok
• Increased conversion rates for shoppers scrolling through their feed

TikTok audience retargeting

Eliminate guesswork when building your TikTok ads audience by syncing and targeting your most engaged Dotdigital contacts. This feature allows you to:

• Create hyper-personalized ad experiences faster
• Sync segmented groups of contacts directly to TikTok
• Maximize your TikTok ad spend by targeting your most valuable audience. 

Whether you’re re-engaging past customers or capturing new leads, our TikTok integration provides the tools you need to drive repeat sales in today’s social-first marketplace.

Cut through the noise with hyper-personalization

Delivering personalized experiences is essential for standing out. Our Fresh Relevance personalization platform empowers you to create consistent and tailored experiences across your website, emails, and more.

What’s new

Global expansion

We are thrilled to announce the global expansion of Fresh Relevance is now available in the JAPAC region, with a US launch coming soon. This expansion enables businesses worldwide to leverage hyper-personalization and enhance customer engagement.

Improved user experience

To enhance user experience, we have revamped our table user interface, making it cleaner and easier to navigate. This update ensures that you can access and interpret your data more efficiently, leading to better decision-making and optimized campaigns.

SmartBlocks integrated within Dotdigital

You can now edit Fresh Relevance SmartBlocks directly within Dotdigital. This feature allows you to create personalized banners, coupons, countdown timers, and advanced product recommendations without the need for extensive training or switching between platforms.

With these updates, creating hyper-personalized experiences has never been easier. As you prepare for busy periods like Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year sales, our tools will help you cut through the noise and deliver compelling messages that resonate with your audience. 

Drive better results with advanced reporting

In our latest update, we’ve introduced powerful new reporting features to help you better understand and optimize your marketing efforts. These enhancements are designed to save you time, provide deeper insights, and inform your marketing strategy.

What’s new

Revenue per recipient (RPR) metric

We’re excited to introduce the revenue per recipient (RPR) metric, a game-changing addition to our reporting suite:

• This new metric helps you easily calculate the return on investment per recipient of your marketing efforts
• RPR saves time on manual calculations, freeing you up to focus on strategy

Whether you’re analyzing email campaigns or reviewing cross-account performance, RPR reporting helps you understand the true revenue impact of every send, regardless of audience size.

Enhanced program reporting

We’ve significantly expanded our program reporting capabilities to give you a more comprehensive view of your automated journeys:

• 19 new metrics across email and SMS
• Key performance metrics including direct orders, conversion rates, and revenue per recipient

Convert more without lifting a finger

As Black Friday approaches, it’s important to save time and concentrate on what truly matters. Our latest updates are designed to streamline your marketing efforts into a seamless, automated experience. This will help you convert more customers during this busy sales period while you concentrate on growing your business.

What’s new

Improved product recommendations

Our new hybrid product recommendation system, powered by WinstonAI, intelligently selects the best-performing model to showcase the most relevant products. This ensures a tailored shopping experience for both new and returning customers.

Additionally, you can preview results from your entire catalog, making it easier to optimize offerings during the cart and pre-checkout phases across both email and website channels.

Abandoned cart and browse enrolment 

With the Dotdigital tag, you can enroll customers in abandoned cart programs almost in real-time. This feature allows you to set default abandoned session timings that range from just 30 minutes to 12 hours, giving you the flexibility you need during busy sales periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Wishlist functionality 

We are excited to introduce a new wishlist feature that improves your customers’ shopping experience. With our integration with Wishlist.io, customers can create personalized wishlists to show what they want to buy later.

Through this integration, you can easily add wishlist product blocks to your emails, enabling you to create tailored content based on customer preferences and behavior.

Other integrations and updates

Enhanced security with time-based two-factor authentication (2FA)

Cyber security threats continue to evolve and intensify. To help protect your business and customer data, we’ve strengthened our security offerings with 2FA across all Dotdigital products. 

• Introduced time-based one-time password (TOTP) option for two-factor authentication
• Offers enhanced security by requiring authentication via an authenticator app
• Provides an additional, time-sensitive security barrier against unauthorized access

Customer reply addresses

We’ve launched a feature to personalize and streamline customer support messages:

• Set reply-to addresses: Customize at both account and campaign levels.
• Direct replies: Route emails to specific support members, improving ticket management and customer interactions.

Program enhancements

Recognizing that programs can be complex and time-consuming to set up, especially if you have multiple accounts with Dotdigital, we’ve introduced:

• Copy programs between accounts (preview): Easily replicate programs across multiple accounts, saving time and minimizing errors, especially for those managing multiple brands or regions. Speak to your Customer Success Manager to join the preview.
• Multi-account management: Simplify account administration for large teams with our enhanced team management tools.

Raisers Edge integration

Streamline your donor management by synchronizing data between Raiser’s Edge and Dotdigital. This integration saves time and effort, enabling you to focus on what truly matters – strengthening donor relationships.

In this release, we’re excited to introduce powerful tools designed to enhance your marketing efforts across all channels—from mobile messaging to social media—regardless of your existing tech stack. You’ll also benefit from improved reporting, streamlined campaign creation tools, and new integrations that simplify your workflow.

Mobile messaging

Capturing a mobile number is now considered just as valuable, if not more so, than capturing an email address. Dotdigital’s enhanced mobile messaging capabilities empower you to unify your mobile and email messaging and reach customers on their preferred channels.

What’s new

Improved existing integrations:

• Instant Adobe Commerce data sync: Our improved integration syncs customer data, orders, products, transactional SMS, and subscription statuses in real-time. Send order confirmations, status updates, and welcome messages the moment they happen for a frictionless customer experience.
• Hyvä theme compatibility expanded: Adobe Commerce merchants using Hyvä themes can now enjoy expanded functionality with the integration of SMS capture and validation. This powerful addition complements existing features like web behavior tracking and coupon codes, providing a more comprehensive and personalized customer experience.
• Effortless Zapier integration: Save time and money with our enhanced Zapier integration. Update both email and mobile numbers in a single Zap for a unified and streamlined workflow.
• Microsoft Dynamics: Unlock SMS capabilities by easily syncing mobile numbers from CRM into Dotdigital. Create a unified contact profile with both email and mobile information.

The future of mobile messaging

We’re constantly helping you build deeper connections through mobile messaging:

• Native WhatsApp: Be among the first to experience self-service campaign management, two-way chat, and user-friendly editing, all with easy reporting and segmentation.
• Branded mobile messaging: Send SMS-like messages branded with your logo and verified tick to reassure recipients that it isn’t spam. 

Pre-register your interest in WhatsApp and branded messaging today.

Dynamic social media integrations

If you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, your audience is using social media. With billions of users, ineffective targeting can lead to wasted money. By connecting your Dotdigital account with leading social platforms, you can create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with your audience. This will help you maximize your ROI and transform social media into an effective marketing tool.

What’s new

LinkedIn leads integration

With LinkedIn now having 1 billion users, it has become a critical platform for B2B marketing strategies. Our new integration with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms allows you to capture leads more efficiently:

• Forms are pre-filled with LinkedIn profile information, making it easy for users to complete.
• Advertisers gain access to detailed, company-related information including job titles, resulting in high conversion rates.

The integration enables you to select a LinkedIn form and map customer data fields, syncing leads directly to your chosen lists and programs in Dotdigital. This process streamlines data flow, whether you are sending leads to Microsoft Dynamics for qualification via our connector or to another CRM or tool using a webhook.

Pre-register for TikTok

We’re excited to announce two new integrations with TikTok.

• Audience retargeting: Sync contacts from a list in Dotdigital to an audience in TikTok, enhancing your retargeting efforts.
• Lead generation: Sync leads from TikTok lead forms directly into Dotdigital, streamlining your lead capture process.

These integrations also offer the flexibility to dynamically manage your TikTok Ad audiences by syncing contacts to and removing them as needed.

To stay at the forefront of this exciting development, pre-register your interest now and be among the first to leverage these powerful new capabilities.

Enhanced ecommerce reporting

ROI is the cornerstone of ecommerce success. That’s why we’ve listened to your feedback and created a suite of enhanced ecommerce reporting tools designed to give you a deeper understanding of your business performance.

What’s new

Cross-account revenue attribution 

Get a holistic view of revenue across all your accounts. Whether you have a parent or child account, our new cross-account analytics make it easy to track and compare performance. Identify top-performing accounts, uncover optimization opportunities, and trace the customer journey through key metrics like revenue, assisted revenue, direct orders, assisted orders, and conversion rates.

Multi-currency support

Operating in multiple regions? Our reporting now supports multiple currencies, giving you a global perspective on your business. Analyze revenue in your preferred currency and gain valuable insights into your international performance.

Back in stock notifications report

Stay informed about customer demand with our new product notifications report. See who has subscribed to notifications for which products and optimize your stock levels accordingly.

Streamline campaign creation

We understand that crafting segments and configuring webhooks can be time-consuming. Our latest updates make campaign creation a breeze, so you can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.

What’s new

Campaign send exclusions

Building segments often takes time, and you may find yourself excluding the same criteria in every campaign. It can be a repetitive process for busy marketing teams. That’s why we’ve created campaign send exclusions. Simply create a list or segment you would like to exclude to guarantee your marketing lands with the people who need it. 

This new feature lets you exclude segments, lists, and preferences directly at the time of sending your campaign. You can also exclude groups from your messages. This means that if you have a specific group of contacts that you want to avoid sending messages to, you can easily add them to your exclusion list. This is a simple yet powerful way to target your audience more precisely and reduce the risk of sending unwanted emails.

Program webhook templates

We’ve made it easier to use webhooks in your programs by introducing program webhook templates. Our program webhook templates simplify the process, allowing you to drag and drop pre-configured templates into your programs. With just a few clicks, you can set up webhooks that integrate seamlessly with your other systems.

Improved custom product recommendations

With our enhanced features, creating engaging product recommendations is a breeze. 

Last browsed recommendations:

• Expanded layout options: Enjoy greater design flexibility with a new horizontal product layout, allowing up to two rows of products.
• Personalized call-to-action: Each product can now feature its unique call-to-action.

Also bought/bought together recommendations:

• Efficient block creation: Save time with the ability to duplicate recommendation blocks.

Other integrations and updates

Stamped.io

Sync your review data with Dotdigital contacts. You can use this valuable information to create targeted segments, trigger automated campaigns based on reviews, and personalize content tailored to your customer’s preferences.

Dotdigital tag for commerce platforms

The Dotdigital tag simplifies the process of connecting our platform to your ecommerce store, whether you’re using Shopify, BigCommerce, or Shopline.

Previously, the integration process required the manual installation of multiple scripts, which was time-consuming.

The Dotdigital tag now consolidates all necessary scripts into a single, efficient solution, streamlining the process. This includes:

• Site tracking
• Web behavior tracking
• ROI tracking
• Onsite recommendations
• Fresh Relevance script (for joint customers)

Verified partner integrations

We have expanded our network of verified partner integrations to provide you with even more options. You can now enhance your marketing strategies with tools like:

• Social Clique
• Upzelo 
• Bon Loyalty
• Fast Simon
• GoCertify
• OptinMonster

Fresh Relevance

Fresh Relevance has undergone significant user experience (UX) improvements to streamline workflows, unify the loading experience, and align the platform with the Dotdigital brand.

We hope these new features empower you to create even more personalized and engaging campaigns across all channels, including email, social media, and mobile messaging.

Want to learn more? Request a demo, or speak to your Dotdigital account manager.

What is revenue attribution?

Revenue attribution is a method of connecting different data sets to paint a picture of which marketing channels are producing the best sales and revenue. It essentially draws a line (direct or otherwise) between the efforts of a marketing campaign and the revenue generated as a result, so you can see what is or isn’t working when it comes to your marketing strategies. 

Whatever your product, market, or role, finding the right attribution model for you and your business is critical for getting the most accurate information that’ll help you and your marketing strategies.

Not only do businesses and products differ, but your roles differ too. What a Marketing Director wants to take away from an attribution model will differ from that of a Content Manager, so having the flexibility to change your attribution tracking window for multiple users is a useful tool for accurately tracking revenue attribution.

How do you measure revenue attribution?

Tracking revenue attribution is done through a variety of different models. Depending on your role within or connected to marketing, different models will provide you with details more relevant to you and what you want to know. There are five commonly used models when it comes to tracking revenue attribution, each of which has pros and cons. Let’s take a look at these models below:

First touch

As the name implies, this model attributes 100% of the success of a marketing campaign to the very first touchpoint used. It’s good as it can help you identify which of your channels are attracting the most new customers, as the emphasis is placed on the top of the funnel marketing channels. Its downside is that doesn’t help you see to what extent the first touchpoint actually contributed to the final conversion.

Last touch

Converse to the first touch model, the last touch model attributes 100% of a campaign’s success to the final touchpoint ahead of conversion. It’s a simple and easy-to-track model, but it doesn’t attribute any success to other marketing channels used before the final conversion, even though multiple channels may have been used and engaged during the lifecycle of a campaign. This model is called the “direct campaign revenue” model in Dotdigital.

Linear

This is one of the more simple models, as it just splits the success of a campaign equally across all touch points. So if you had a five-channel campaign, each of those channels will be allocated 20% success to the final conversion. 

The downside to this is that it doesn’t take into account the potential for different channels to be more successful than others, therefore, it won’t efficiently inform you which of your marketing strategies are more successful than others.

Time-decay

As with the Linear model, this distributes campaign success across multiple touchpoints, but where it differs is that it gives more credit to touchpoints closest to the final conversion. Essentially the model assumes that the closer a touchpoint was to the conversion, the more influence it had in the process. 

It’s effective for determining which channels are regularly driving conversions, but will never give a completely accurate summary of how the top-of-the-funnel marketing activities have performed. In Dotdigital, this model is referred to as “assisted campaign revenue”. 

Positional

This model splits the credit of a campaign across all touch points, with 40% being allocated to both the first and last touch points, and the remaining 20% being allocated equally across all of the middle touch points. This still doesn’t often place high enough value across the middle touchpoints which can often skew the results

At Dotdigital, we offer either a “last touch” or “time-decay” model, along with a fully flexible conversion window tailored to your business and your customers. 

Revenue attribution for email

Revenue attribution for email in Dotdigital works with two key models; direct campaign revenue (similar to “last touch”) or assisted campaign revenue (which is a combination of the “last touch” and “linear” models). These models work through the tracking of interactions (i.e. clicks) between a contact and a campaign, before looking into the purchase data. 

After this is done, inference logic is used to track the conversion journey, which can be both multi-touch and cross-device. When a customer clicks on a link within your email, a unique tracking code will be assigned to that customer. The code is then stored as a cookie, allowing Dotdigital to track all subsequent actions, such as making a purchase.

Once the purchase is completed, Dotdigital will attribute the generated revenue from that purchase to the marketing campaign that led to the sale. This is completed by analyzing the campaign interactions preceding any contact’s purchase, within the conversion window. This allows you to understand which of your campaigns are driving sales and contributing to revenue. 

As well as tracking and attributing the revenue, Dotdigital provides a series of comprehensive reporting tools to analyze the revenue attribution data. These reports support you in identifying high-performing campaigns and allow you to make data-driven decisions to further optimize marketing campaigns. 

Revenue attribution for SMS

SMS is the ideal channel to support email, due to high open rates and engagement from customers. So offering revenue attribution for SMS gives you that extra overview of overall campaign success. As with email, it tracks both direct and assisted campaign revenue to easily track how different touchpoints are performing throughout the customer journey. 

It works the same way as revenue attribution for email. Each SMS is assigned a unique tracking code and is embedded in all links included in the SMS message. This allows you to track all interactions with the message, such as clicks and conversions. 

Any click will be recorded and associated with the specific campaign and message. If your customer then goes on to complete a purchase, the revenue attributed will be generated from that action to the corresponding SMS campaign. 

Overall, revenue attribution for SMS helps you to identify your most effective SMS campaigns and strategies, allowing you to refine future campaigns to ensure they’re more targeted and effective. They can also help identify valuable customers and segments, allowing you to better serve customers who engage and purchase through SMS marketing. 

ROI vs. revenue attribution

For many years, ROI was the gold standard for checking how your marketing is performing vs converted sales. But since revenue attribution came on the scene, it has begun to take over as the leading method of tracking marketing effort vs sales. 

There are several benefits to using revenue attribution over traditional ROI methods of tracking. It goes far beyond the “This is what we’ve spent in total vs this is how many sales we’ve made” comparison that ROI uses. Here are the key benefits of revenue attribution: 

• Revenue attribution provides more granular insights to pinpoint specific marketing activities that are driving sales, enabling better decision-making and optimization of each channel. 
• By understanding which channels and campaigns contribute the most, you can distribute and allocate budgets more efficiently and prioritize high performing channels.
• Attribution models can consider multiple touchpoints, so companies can measure the impact of their entire marketing funnel across various channels. ROI only looks at the whole picture without breaking down the details.
• Revenue attribution helps identify the most effective marketing channels and campaigns, enabling companies to refine and focus their strategies and efforts on what works best.
• While ROI provides a general measure of the profit generated from marketing investments, revenue attribution attributes value to specific touchpoints, offering a more detailed analysis of marketing performance.
• Revenue attribution equips you with better information for creating long-term marketing strategies and adapting as needed. You can also use this for annual campaigns by using the results from the previous year (such as Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns).
• By mapping out the customer journey across touchpoints and stages, you can create more personalized and engaging marketing experiences.

How to get started with revenue attribution

If you’re an existing ecommerce customer of Dotdigital, you can get started with revenue attribution right away. If you use our customer and retail dashboards, you’ll find there is a wealth of data at your fingertips ready to help you get started. 

You could start by looking at amending your attribution window (the default is set to five days, but remember you have the flexibility to change this to reflect your sales cycle) to help you find the best conversion window for your needs. 

The good news is, whatever conversion window you choose, it’s not ‘forever’. You can always come back to your settings later and tweak it should it not feel quite right. You should also bear in mind the average sales cycle of your products when it comes to setting your window. If your product generally has a longer sales cycle, then your window should be set to reflect this. 

On the other hand, if your products have a much shorter cycle, then again it would be better to set your window to a much shorter period. It’s good to bear in mind what your other existing attribution models are telling you. For example, Google Analytics is set to a 30 day window by default.

What makes the Dotdigital revenue attribution stand out even more is that it’s ready to see the world. It doesn’t matter if your customers complete their transaction in dollars, yen, pounds, euros, or any other currency – our integrated Forex conversion rates will track the exchange rate back to the day of the transaction, giving you the confidence that the numbers you see can be relied on.

All existing customers get in touch with your Customer Success Manager, who’ll happily guide you through the process of getting started with revenue attribution.

If you’re not currently a Dotdigital customer, get in touch with us today to explore how the platform can help you advance your marketing strategy.

We’re also releasing an improved way of working with webhooks, new integrations, and improved reporting based on your feedback. Let’s get started.

Advanced cross-channel personalization

Our new advanced personalization pack gives you access to all of the tools you could ever need to ensure that the journey of a prospect or customer is highly personalized and engaging across web and email.

You can utilize an individual’s behavior, location, weather, and their price preferences to deliver a hyper-personalized web experience before you even know their name. The next step is to automatically capture personal data, to empower you to deliver memorable one-to-one interactions via email, at scale. You’re then able to deliver real-time dynamic content and combine it with key features such as countdown timers and individual coupons to drive urgency and conversions.

What’s new

Access to advanced website and email personalization functionality, including:

• Countdown timers
• Weather tools
• Website easy-editor
• Image personalization
• Advanced popovers
• Advanced product recommendations

Deliver an engaging and reliable cross-channel experience

New self-serve webhooks

Ensure your entire customer journey is joined up with webhooks. We’ve made creating webhooks easier and faster than ever and if you are on our CXDP plan, you can now set up these webhooks yourself. Webhooks allow you to programmatically push data to other platforms to create your bespoke customer journey, whether that’s into your CRM or to fuel a direct mail campaign.

Free mobile app push

Cross-channel experiences are crucial to maintain engagement in today’s fast-paced world and mobile app push notifications are a really strong way to get your message out there. As of today, if you’re on the CXDP plan, you can send mobile app push notifications without drawing down on your messaging allowance.

Connect your complete tech stack

Enable deeper personalization

With our latest integrations, you can connect more of your tech stack to feed more actionable insights into Dotdigital and enable deeper personalization. We are launching brand new integrations with Hyvä, Centra, Retail Express, Cin7, EC Force, and Microsoft Entra ID.
Plus, we have improved our existing integrations with BigCommerce (multi-store front), Zapier, Gorgias, and Trustpilot.

What’s new

New ecommerce integrations:

• Microsoft Entra ID: Sync your employee list to send internal communications via Dotdigital.
• Hyvä: Merchants using a Hyvä theme for their Magento store can now benefit from full Dotdigital functionality.
• Centra: Syncs contact data, order data, and products.
• Retail Express: A new point-of-sale (POS) platform integration available for customers in the APAC region.
• Cin7: An ecommerce connector primarily for inventory, POS, and warehouse management available for customers in the APAC region.
• EC Force: Syncs contact data, order data, and products for customers in Japan.

Improved existing integrations:

• Zapier: New support for unified contacts and new actions can be created for email or SMS contacts.
• Gorgias: It is now possible to create tickets in Gorgias based on SMS replies.
• Trustpilot: Review invites are now able to be sent out via SMS.
• Coming soon: BigCommerce – new multi-store front options allow BigCommerce merchants to have multiple accounts from one backend page work seamlessly with Dotdigital.

Improve your reporting

We’ve listened to your feedback and made it easier for you to show off all the great results you’ve delivered through your Dotdigital campaigns. With this release, you can understand the revenue impact of your campaigns quicker, dive into cross-account revenue analytics, export more reports, and save time with a raft of other reporting improvements.

What’s new

• Attributed revenue will now be displayed on account analytics and the email dashboard.
• Improvements to reporting:
  • Percentages for date ranges: We’ve added percentage metrics for date ranges as a Beta on email reports.
  • Triggered campaign reporting: You can now see the campaign type filter (triggered vs. standard campaign) as a Beta in email reports.
  • Export options: Download the top requested reports (including SMS report, link click report, and daily breakdown) on a Beta page.
  • Campaign identifying data: Send dates, subject lines, campaign tags, and campaign types have been added to the most used reports, to help you identify your campaigns.
  • Report view: Now all reports across the entire platform will remember the date range filters you’ve applied.

Fresh Relevance updates

We’ve made some improvements to Fresh Relevance features based on feedback from our customers. You’ll also now see a design that matches Dotdigital’s platform and we’ve improved the usability thanks to some clever design tweaks.

We’ve also made some changes to the ways you can get support in Fresh Relevance. Users can now contact support using live chat, and the knowledge base has been updated with improved documentation to make it easier for you to get the answers you need fast.

What’s new

• Create personalized SmartBlocks using custom data:
  • Reduces time and complexity when creating personalized SmartBlocks.
  • Allows for the easier storage of data.
  • Provides additional design flexibility.
  • Use case: For travel brands, banners can be adjusted to customers’ favorite destinations.

• Improved coupon management:
  • Notifications for low remaining coupon codes.
  • Ability to see which codes have been uploaded in order to update and modify them.
  • Create coupons faster with five new customizable and responsive best practice templates.
  • Ability to copy and paste coupon codes from coupon images.

We hope you find the functionality in our latest release useful. You’re now all set to create end-to-end personalized experiences for your customers.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what MMS is, the key differences between MMS and SMS (short message service), and how implementing MMS can increase engagement between brands and their audiences.

What is MMS?

MMS is a way for brands to send visual messages to their customers on their mobile devices. This includes multimedia content such as images, audio files, and video clips alongside text messages. Ever sent or received a picture message on your phone? That’s MMS in action. MMS takes text messaging to a whole new level, providing rich and interactive content that goes beyond the traditional 160-character text limit.

By integrating MMS into their communication strategies, brands can create more colorful and engaging messages that capture their customers’ attention. Dotdigital offers MMS capabilities for audiences in the United States and Canada, providing brands with customers in these regions with a powerful new tool to stand out from the competition and generate an impressive return on investment (ROI). 

What is the difference between MMS and SMS?

It’s important to understand the differences between MMS and SMS to choose the right marketing tool to reach your target audience. Here are the key distinctions between the two:

Content type and flexibility

SMS only allows you to send text messages up to a certain character limit. On the other hand, MMS allows you to share a variety of multimedia content with text messages, including files of up to 750KB in formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF, making it more visually appealing. By incorporating multimedia content, MMS can increase your engagement levels.

Message size and character limit

A single SMS message can only accommodate 160 characters (including spaces). If your message exceeds this limit, you’ll need to send multiple messages, which will increase the cost of your campaign. MMS provides a much larger message length of 1600 characters (10x greater than SMS), enabling you to send detailed and engaging messages at a fraction of the cost.

So with Dotdigital MMS, you have the flexibility to include high-quality multimedia files while still enjoying the benefits of increased message length. This combination of rich media and additional text enables brands to create captivating, informative, and persuasive messages designed to drive customer action.

Cost and carrier compatibility

While SMS messages are generally cheaper due to low data requirements and widespread carrier support, MMS messages may incur additional costs for end-users and brands due to larger file sizes and increased data usage. However, the visual appeal and potential for higher engagement and conversion with MMS can directly offset the added cost, making it a valuable investment.

What are the benefits of MMS?

MMS is an essential part of any mobile marketing strategy, providing businesses with a range of benefits. Some of its key advantages include:

Enhanced engagement

MMS messages have been proven to have a more engaging impact on recipients compared to plain text messages. This is because MMS messages can include rich multimedia content such as images, videos, and GIFs, making the recipient’s experience more memorable and immersive. As a result, recipients are more likely to take the desired action. 

One example of the effectiveness of MMS messaging is TractOptics, a US-based customer, who utilized MMS during its Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. TractOptics saw an impressive 17:1 ROI (return on investment) after utilizing MMS messaging. This highlights the potential benefits of using MMS messaging to enhance engagement and improve the chances of achieving a higher ROI for businesses.

Greater flexibility and versatility

MMS provides a broad range of options to create visually appealing content that caters to diverse marketing applications and industries. Whether you want to send promotional offers, event invitations, or product launches, MMS offers you the creative freedom to design messages that resonate with your target audience.

Higher conversion rates

MMS messages have the potential to drive higher conversion rates than traditional text messages by optimizing messaging with persuasive multimedia content. With visually appealing content and enhanced engagement, you can encourage recipients to take the desired action, whether that’s making a purchase or signing up for notifications.

Improved brand perception

MMS marketing can be a game changer if you’re looking to improve your brand recognition. Using multimedia content in mobile messages can help differentiate your brand from competitors who rely solely on plain text messages. By including visually appealing and engaging content, you can make a stronger impression on your audience and foster better relationships with them.

Repeated exposure to your brand visuals and logo through MMS messages is essential for building brand recognition. Studies show that 91% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that they recognize and trust. This is especially true in mobile communications, as messages that include your brand visuals or identifiers are considered more trustworthy and authentic by recipients.

Elevated customer experience

In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers have high expectations for personalized and visually appealing experiences. Using MMS, you can create more engaging and interactive experiences that can help you connect better with your customers. By incorporating multimedia content like images, GIFs, and videos into your messages, you can encourage your customers to take action and build deeper relationships with them. 

For instance, if you run a travel agency, you can send an MMS that features a beautiful image of a beach sunset to your customers, inspiring them to plan their next beach holiday. Similarly, if you provide event management services, you can send a GIF of their favorite artist performing live in town to promote your event management services. The possibilities to get creative and engage with your customers through MMS are virtually limitless.

How MMS can be used to increase customer engagement

There’s a wide variety of opportunities when it comes to using MMS to increase customer engagement. The ability to include visually engaging content allows you to create more exciting promotions and offers by sharing eye-catching visuals when advertising sales, discounts, and other special offers. The same can be optimized when launching new products by utilizing images or GIFS to showcase the new product and generate excitement amongst your shoppers. 

Event invitations can be given a new lease of life by creating and sharing visually appealing invitations to a concert, webinar, or workshop to drive audience attendance. MMS can also be used to boost customer support by providing visual instructions, demonstrations, and more which can be used to troubleshoot and enhance customer satisfaction levels.

MMS messages can be highly personalized to individual customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and much more. The introduction of incorporating liquid (a templating language to create highly personalized content) to SMS and MMS for Dotdigital means you’re able to incorporate multiple personalized fields.

This can be seamlessly previewed as each customer so you can be confident that your recipient will receive a message highly targeted to them directly. WinstonAI can also be used to help you set the tone for your MMS messages. 

Getting started with MMS

For now, MMS with Dotdigital is available to businesses with customers in the United States and Canada. To enable MMS in your Dotdigital account, contact your Customer Success Manager, who will guide you through the setup process. Once MMS has been activated in your account, you’ll see the SMS section in your left-hand navigation now reads SMS/MMS. 

If you’re not a Dotdigital customer yet, you can request a demo of the platform.

Conclusion

MMS is a powerful marketing tool that enables you to enhance your mobile communication strategies by providing visually appealing and engaging content. By incorporating multimedia content alongside text messages, MMS can increase engagement levels, improve brand perception, and drive higher conversion rates. With Dotdigital’s MMS capabilities, brands can harness the power of MMS to reach their audiences effectively and generate an impressive return on investment.

In this blog you’ll find the details of the brand new Dotdigital Academy, created exclusively for our customers so you can get the most from the platform and enhance your own marketing knowledge. We also have exciting updates to SMS and MMS – two channels that are often overlooked, but consistently drive high engagement and generate strong ROI for our customers. This update gives you the support to capitalize on the growing success of these channels, even if you’re new to them.

Plus, we’re giving you the inside scoop on tons of new functionality within the platform designed to make your life easier, alongside some really exciting new integrations. Let’s get into it.

Introducing the Dotdigital Academy

Marketers are expected to ‘wear many hats’, and with a multitude of channels, new trends, new regulations, it can be hard to keep up sometimes, let alone set aside time for personal development. Make time for yourself and sharpen your marketing skills with on-demand Dotdigital training videos.

We’re excited to share that we’ve taken our educational content to the next level and the new Dotdigital Academy is now live. The Dotdigital Academy allows you to take courses on your own time; it’s on-demand learning, covering the topics you care about the most. You can access the Academy directly here.

The Academy is a great way for you to ensure you’re getting the most from Dotdigital. Plus, the Academy is a fantastic resource for any new starters in your team, and hey, taking training courses is always a good thing to shout about on LinkedIn and to your boss come review time.

This is just the beginning of the Dotdigital Academy, we will be adding new courses and certifications all the time, so watch this space. And don’t forget to let your CSM know what you want to see more of.

Enhanced SMS and MMS capability is now live

In our last release, we announced updates to the SMS and MMS functionality were being launched in a beta preview. The customers who joined the preview saw great results and also provided us with some valuable feedback which we’ve actioned. As a result, we’re excited to launch these changes into general availability today.

Stronger SMS personalization

SMS is a fantastic channel for brands and frequently delivers high ROI. Our customer London Lash saw an impressive ROI of 700% within just 6 months of launching the channel. In this release, we’re taking SMS further by launching advanced personalization powered by Liquid script.

Liquid is a flexible and dynamic markup language, allowing you to create highly personalized and targeted SMS content. You can preview your SMS campaigns as a specific customer to see the campaign complete with personalization just as the customer would, to ensure you’re sending with confidence. Thanks to customer feedback from the preview, Liquid scripts now have syntax highlighting and line numbers to make the Liquid code much more readable.

Now including access to Insight data, this update expands the existing SMS personalization utilizing contact data fields, such as customer names, to advanced personalization created with intricate data, such as order and booking details.

SMS and WinstonAI

Also as of today, the WinstonAI features you know and love for email are also available for SMS. When creating an SMS campaign, you now have the option to have WinstonAI perform a spelling and grammar check, add emojis, rewrite your copy in a different tone, and shorten or lengthen your copy. These tools save time, and are super useful to you if you’re new to writing for SMS. Plus, remember our one-click email to SMS feature is great for executing a cross-channel strategy with minimal work.

MMS success

We’ve also launched MMS for the United States and Canada. SMS is already super successful at engaging customers, and MMS takes this to the next level.

During our beta preview Dotdigital customer, ScentAir, said “While SMS generally performs well for us, we observed even better results with MMS”. The brand’s Black Friday MMS campaigns saw an incredible ROI of $28 for every $1 spent. The numbers speak for themselves.

If you’ve not yet got SMS and MMS enabled in your account yet, reach out to your Customer Success Manager today.

Updated features to improve your day-to-day

These updates focus on a variety of key improvements to the Dotdigital platform. Combining our customer feedback with the results of our annual Hack Week, these changes will speed up your workflow and give you more time and headspace to dedicate to your other tasks.

New product recommendation category

Introducing a new product recommendation category, ‘bought together’. This category surfaces products bought together by other shoppers. It is similar to our existing ‘also bought’ option, the key difference is that ‘bought together’ means bought at the same time – meaning it’s a much better option to include when upselling an existing basket, vs. encouraging a further purchase another time.

Easily retarget contacts across multiple platforms

A cross-channel experience is crucial for customer engagement in today’s world. We talk about that all the time. In this update, we’ve made it even easier to include a variety of channels in your programs. You can now easily add Facebook Messenger, push notifications, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads into your programs straight from the program builder.

Ensure you’re utilizing your customer data to drive targeted campaigns across the entire customer journey. Let paid social support your efforts and keep your brand front of mind as your customers move around the web. One example of this is taking your abandoned cart or browse data from Dotdigital using the program extension, to create a new audience on Facebook. Then you can create highly targeted and relevant Facebook ads that are more likely to convert, and your budget is spent more effectively.

You’ll now find a channels item in the automations menu in the sidebar linking straight to the default program extensions. We’ve also added a dedicated program extensions reporting page so you can see what’s working easily.

Some of our packages can benefit from this update right away, otherwise, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to find out the options available to you.

An update to campaign tags and segment creation

Campaign tags are a powerful way to label, organize, and report on your campaigns. In this update, we’ve made it super easy for you to use these tags to create a segment. Say you want to target any contacts who’ve clicked a campaign with the tag of ‘events’ you can now do this in one-click in the segment builder.

Checkbox form field update

Previously, checkbox answers from surveys and forms couldn’t be saved as data fields due to the multiple-choice element conflicting with data fields only holding one value at a time. Now you can map checkbox data from surveys and forms easily thanks to a change to allow these values to map to multiple data fields. This allows you to easily segment and personalize based on a customer’s answers to your surveys and forms.

You can also now save survey and form responses as Insight data. This is more useful when the data is transient and may change, whereas data fields are still best for any data that won’t change. Form responses being saved as Insight data happens automatically and you don’t need to do any manual mapping.

Easily change your settings

You’ll now find a search bar on the settings page in Dotdigital. Simple, but time-saving, this new update makes it easier than ever to find what you’re looking for.

Improving the Developer experience

New API updates give Developers clearer error information, show multiple errors in one response, and provide the ability to create or update contacts and set channel statuses in just one call. All of this is to save your Developers time and make their experience run a lot smoother.

New integrations to Dotdigital

Shopline integration

We are very excited to announce our new integration with Asia’s largest ecommerce platform, Shopline. Shopline is an all-in-one commerce solution that helps brands sell, market, and operate their online and offline business more efficiently. Our integration with Shopline will sync all product, customer, and order data into Dotdigital so marketers can use it to deliver personalized cross-channel marketing experiences.

Six new verified integrations

We also have six new, verified integrations. We work hard with our tech partners to ensure the quality is high and that the integrations work seamlessly with the Dotdigital platform and make sense for our customers. In this update we are introducing new verified integrations with ViralSweep, Preezie, Crowdin, Personizely, CartSave, and Searchspring.

Fresh Relevance updates

At Fresh Relevance, now a Dotdigital company, there are some exciting new updates that improve the user experience. Based on customer feedback, key product information is now available at a top level, search functionality is improved, and there’s a new and enhanced product variant view allowing you to search and view analytics much easier.

The Fresh Relevance site editor has also improved, all focused on useability. The team has added the ability to search and filter by page type so configuration is much easier, especially for those of you with high amounts of blocks. As well as this, now when you want to update a live block, you can copy a version to draft so that you can edit it offline before putting it live, without needing to turn your current set-up off.

There are also updates to the testing of countdown clocks and exciting new coupon smart blocks. To see more of what the Fresh Relevance team is working on, visit the blog for the latest news.

Watch the new release webinar

In this blog, we’ll explore the top five platform changes that have made the most significant impact on marketers like yourself across the globe. We’ll also discuss how they provide you with the tools to elevate and enhance your marketing in 2024 and beyond.

1. Revolutionizing marketing with WinstonAI

WinstonAI, Dotdigital’s cutting-edge marketing intelligence engine, has been a game-changer for marketers in 2023. We launched it in May and have been adding new functionality throughout the year. WinstonAI provides you with usable AI-driven insights, letting you make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns in seconds.

By integrating generative AI into Dotdigital, we’ve made it accessible in your day-to-day work by providing you with personalized inspiration when creating email and SMS campaigns, that will save you a whole heap of time and keep you focused.

It offers tips on improving email tone, identifying areas that need more detail, and highlights opportunities to make your campaigns even more engaging. WinstonAI can even help you create better subject lines and increase open rates, by providing three alternative suggestions based on data from your most recent 25 email sends to figure out what’s most appealing to your audience.

WinstonAI also includes grammar and spell check, streamlining the campaign creation process. This feature, built into the campaign builder, scans content across email, SMS, surveys, and pages and forms, identifying errors and offering suggestions. By reducing time spent proofing campaigns, you can focus on being more creative and strategic.

Another innovative feature of WinstonAI is the one-click email to SMS conversion which helps you adhere to the 160-character limit for SMS. It analyzes text and provides a shortened version of your email campaign. This allows you to easily convert content to SMS, aligning the copy and keeping the core message front and center. This cross-channel approach is essential for driving engagement and delivering seamless experiences.

The latest release in November included the ability to ask WinstonAI to rewrite messages based on tone, shortening or expanding text, rephrasing, and including emojis. This helps you tailor your message and tone to your audience, ultimately improving campaign performance.

WinstonAI is seamlessly integrated into the Dotdigital platform making it an indispensable tool for busy marketers as we move swiftly into 2024.

2. Streamlining data management with unified contact data

In today’s data-filled world, marketers are always on the lookout for ways to bring everything together to better understand their customers and deliver the most personalized experience possible. That’s why we rolled out unified contact data in September this year, which helps you combine all your customer data into one spot so you can create more joined up and relevant experiences for your customers.

Unified contact data makes life easier by bringing all data together into a single record, offering a comprehensive 360-degree view of each customer. With all your contact data in one place, you’ll save time and effort, waving goodbye to manual data syncs or juggling multiple variations of customer data.

With a complete view of customer data, you can create seamless cross-channel experiences, engaging customers on their preferred channels and ensuring a consistent brand presence throughout their journey.

Let’s dive into some key use cases of unified contact data:

• Engage with your customers on their preferred channel: unified contact data helps you pinpoint your customers’ preferred channel (whether this is email, SMS, or another channel), so you can reach out to them in the most effective way possible.
• Ensure your customers get a tailored experience: with unified contact data, you can ensure automations you create in the program builder cater to your customer’s preferences, which could be email, SMS, or a combination of both.
• Create segments that include both email and SMS engagement data: unified contact data allows you to create segments that take into account both email and SMS engagement data, giving you a more accurate picture of your customers’ behavior.

As your business grows and evolves, your customer data sources will grow with it. Unified contact data ensures that Dotdigital remains a future-proof platform, capable of adapting to the changing needs of you and your organization. By providing a single source of truth for contact data, we’ve enabled you to build deeper connections with your audience and deliver campaigns that resonate on a personal level.

3. Expanding communication channels with SMS and MMS

With its high engagement rates, SMS is an indispensable part of a successful cross-channel marketing strategy.

On top of our already extensive SMS offering, this year, we’ve added even more functionality that will help you get even more out of engaging with your customers on SMS. We’ve added advanced revenue attribution for SMS, which will give you valuable insights into campaign performance by tracking both direct and assisted campaign revenue. This comprehensive understanding of each customer’s journey and individual campaign impact is crucial for optimizing campaigns and planning future marketing efforts.

We’ve also added the ability to capture SMS opt in during the checkout process to allow you to capitalize on mobile shopping habits. By offering your customers the option to provide their mobile numbers during checkout, you can acquire more opted-in contacts to send them tailored mobile offers, discounts, and keep customers informed throughout the entire purchase process. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and stronger brand loyalty.

In addition, we’ve introduced advanced personalization which allows you to create highly targeted and personalized SMS content using liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language. This results in better engagement, improved conversion rates, and a more seamless customer experience.

For North American audiences, we’ve introduced MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). MMS enables you to send visual messages, such as images and gifs, to your customers and is proven to enhance mobile engagement and conversions by 41%.

The importance of SMS and MMS in marketing can‘t be overstated. As mobile devices continue to dominate the way consumers shop, marketers must embrace these channels to stay connected with their customers and deliver personalized and engaging messages.

Dotdigital’s latest functionalities and improvements in SMS and MMS offer you the tools you need to elevate your marketing strategies and drive success well into the future.

4. Enhancing customer experiences through UI, UX, and API improvements

Throughout 2023, we introduced significant visual enhancements to the Dotdigital platform aimed at saving you time and making your life easier. These improvements were driven by your feedback and designed to streamline the platform, making it more efficient and user-friendly.

Our updated navigation offers you a more seamless experience, with all channels now consolidated under one campaign section and a new audience area for managing contacts, segments, personas, and more. The analytics section has been revamped for easier access to reporting, while the new connect area caters to all your data requirements.

Additionally, campaign management tools have been improved to simplify day-to-day tasks, such as campaign replies, sign-off processes, and campaign tags management. These changes enable you to save time and focus on creating engaging campaigns.

One of our customers’ favorite features we’ve introduced is the campaign heat maps, which provides a visual representation of email engagement. By using a traffic light system to indicate click rates, you can optimize your email content placement to maximize engagement. This valuable insight helps you to refine your emails and drive better future results.

The acquisition of Fresh Relevance in September further enhanced the platform’s capabilities, and to support our joint customers, we developed the ability to switch between accounts seamlessly. This integration streamlines the user experience and promotes efficient workflows.

These enhancements to our platform are important for you to adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape. By providing a more efficient, user-friendly platform, we’re empowering you to create more effective campaigns and drive better results, both now and in the future.

5. Strengthening integrations and partnerships

Having data together in one place is one of the most important priorities for marketers. When all your data is in one spot, it can be easily combined to create powerful and actionable insights that you wouldn’t have had if your data were siloed. That’s why, this year we’ve continued to add more integrations into our platform to let you connect as easily as possible, so you can have far more ‘aha’ moments.

In September, we introduced our new Connect area so you can easily manage your data and integrations in one convenient location, ensuring you’re set up for success. The Connect area houses all of your data including insight and commerce data and lets you connect digital marketing channels, and a vast array of integrations, including both self-serve and verified partner-built ones.

Over the past year, we’ve added more than 30 in-house integrations including eStar, Marketplacer, Commercetools, Gorgias, and Netsuite Oracle, bringing the total number of integrations to over 150.

This year, we also introduced the ability to create more engaging and personalized campaigns through the use of branded dynamic app blocks. These new blocks are available as drag and drop in EasyEditor and allow you to easily incorporate third-party content into your emails and landing pages without any coding required.

This not only helps you get more out of their existing martech stack but also reduces unsubscribe rates from your customers, as they’ll receive more relevant and personalized content.

These top 5 release elements from 2023 are just the tip of the iceberg of what was released to Dotdigital customers in February, May, September, and November. These advancements empower you to elevate your marketing strategies and achieve better results in 2024 and beyond.

To make the most of these innovations and enhance your marketing efforts, log in to your Dotdigital account and explore the new features today. Alternatively, get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to see how you can enhance your marketing in 2024 and beyond.

If you’re not a Dotdigital customer yet, you can discover how Dotdigital’s cutting-edge marketing technology can transform your business. Request a demo and experience the power of Dotdigital’s platform for yourself.

Become your own editor with WinstonAI

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?

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

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

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

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.

Enhanced UTM link tracking

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.

Product block search

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

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, 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

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

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

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 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.

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