This February, Dotdigital announced some exciting additions in its latest update, including new features to empower marketers to fine-tune their email strategies with greater precision. In this blog, we dive into our email heroes' favourite new features and explain how you can leverage them to elevate your email marketing performance.

Overview of Dotdigital's February Update

Dotdigital Academy: A comprehensive learning hub, empowering users to optimise the platform's capabilities and maximise their email marketing expertise.

Expansion of MMS into US and Canada: A leap forward in audience engagement, offering opportunities to interact with rich media and broaden your brand reach.

Winston AI Enhancements: Harness the power of AI to fine-tune the tone of your communications, enhancing customer engagement.

Improved Product Recommendations: A strategic upgrade facilitating more personalised shopping experiences, strengthening upselling strategies and driving increased revenue.

Shopline Commerce Integration: A new alliance that intertwines e-commerce and email marketing, positioning Dotdigital as a superior ESP in today's market.

Brand New Verified Integrations: Enhancements that streamline your workflow, improve synchronisation, and ensure your email marketing strategy is as effective as possible.

Empower Your Learning with Dotdigital's New Academy

Undeniably, mastering email marketing is a pivotal step towards business success. Acknowledging this, Dotdigital's latest unveiling is the Academy - an educational dynamo devoted to honing your team's email marketing abilities. This comprehensive resource centre welcomes those new to the Dotdigital interface along with seasoned operatives and offers an array of tactics, strategies, and avenues. Check out our service, where we where we explain how best to train your team to achieve better results!

Discover the art of crafting powerful campaigns that consistently resonate with your target audience and deliver measurable results. The Academy turns this into a reality. From understanding to mastering Dotdigital's functionalities, the journey is just a few courses away. 

MMS Now Available for the US and Canada

The expansion of Dotdigital's Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to the U.S. and Canada presents a game-changing opportunity for brands looking to diversify their outreach and cultivate more interactive relationships with their customers. More and more customers in these regions expect and appreciate MMS interaction, underscoring its significance in today's dynamic marketing landscape.

How to Use Dotdigital's MMS:

• MMS is a powerful tool enabling brands to deliver dynamic content directly to customers' mobile devices.
• Rich media like images and GIFs can be included in your MMS messages. Providing an engaging sensory experience that extends beyond the simple text.
• For businesses that thrive on visually stimulating content, such as retail and D2C brands, MMS messaging fosters a unique opportunity to showcase their products by accepting media files like jpg, jpeg, png, and gif up to a file size of 750KB.

When to Implement Dotdigital's MMS:

• MMS becomes a strategic asset when launching new initiatives or events. For example, when ticket sales for a concert are about to commence, MMS can deliver captivating images of the performers in action, motivating immediate purchase.
• As a part of your email marketing strategy, MMS can bring about heightened customer interaction, strengthening your campaigns with compelling content and enabling your brand to distinguish itself in a busy digital environment.

Benefits of Dotdigital's MMS:

• The use of MMS is proven to enhance brand exposure and stimulate customer engagement, creating a lasting impression.
• The power to send high-quality media directly to consumers revolutionises how brands communicate, making their communication more impactful and leading to higher conversion rates.
• Businesses that integrate MMS into their strategies have the potential to improve conversion rates, bolster customer loyalty and enhance their overall marketing efforts. The net result can return up to 28 times on investment.
• The ability to distribute appealing content directly to customers' mobile devices transcends traditional brand communication.

Mastering Tone of Voice with Winston AI

Winston AI adds a fresh perspective to email marketing personalisation. It enables users to perfect their tone of voice, ensuring every communication connects effectively with its target recipients.

Here's how Winston AI enables this:

• Facilitate more emotional and friendly holiday campaigns effortlessly. With a single click, let Winston AI infuse your message with a hearty and friendly tone.
• Simplify your messaging by eliminating technical jargon, making your content attractive and comprehensible to a wider audience.
• Enhance readability by requesting Winston AI to refine and simplify intricate sentences.
• Integrate relevant emojis into your messages to communicate essential information, like ⛈ to inform your audience about a weather forecast and the need to carry an ☔.
• Implement A/B tests for your content by enlisting Winston AI to generate two variants of the same message, ensuring the most effective version reaches your audience.
• Beat writer's block by giving Winston AI a concept and hitting "Expand". Watch as it generates an entire paragraph about any given topic.

Whether the required tone is informal and warm for a newly established startup or authoritative and informative for a consolidated financial service, a well-curated tone significantly boosts the efficacy of your campaigns.

Mapping Check-box Responses: Turning Feedback into Insight

In the February update, Dotdigital introduced the ability to map check-box responses directly into your customer data fields. This advancement simplifies the collection and analysis of onsite surveys and forms.

Converting raw data into actionable insights allows users to adapt their email marketing strategies. This feature reduces manual data entry and enables real-time responsiveness to customer preferences. For instance, if a customer indicates interest in a particular product category, this information can trigger targeted and relevant product recommendations. It’s an efficient way to personalise the customer journey, increase relevancy, and enhance the customer experience. Mapping check-box responses streamlines how feedback is utilised, making it a powerful tool in the arsenal of any data-driven marketing team.

New Product Recommendation Feature = Efficient Upselling

Dotdigital's new product recommendation feature is a strategic addition for marketers looking to drive revenue through upselling. Through analysing customer profile data and past purchasing behaviour to suggest relevant products that complement what they have already bought or shown interest in.

This intelligent system simplifies the upselling process, making it more efficient and effective. It provides customers with personalised recommendations tailored to their needs, enhancing the shopping experience and encouraging additional purchases. By integrating this feature into their emails, marketers can ensure that every communication is an opportunity to deliver a personalised shopping experience to the customer. It's a seamless way to strengthen relationships and boost sales with minimal additional effort.

New Commerce Integration: Introducing Shopline

Introducing Shopline, an already renowned e-commerce platform in Asia with over 500,000 merchants onboard, is now fully integrated with Dotdigital. Users now have seamless access to Shopline's robust e-commerce capabilities with Dotdigital's full suite of marketing tools. 

Key features:

• Effortless Synchronisation: Seamlessly sync customer data and transactional records from Shopline to Dotdigital in real-time.
• Personalised Campaigns: Create personalised and timely email campaigns catering to every customer's interests and purchasing behaviour.
• Unified Customer View: This collaboration knits together a comprehensive perspective of the customer journey, encompassing all stages from browsing to purchasing.
• Automated Marketing: The system empowers marketers to automate follow-up emails, re-engagement campaigns, and pinpointed promotions, enhancing efficiency and efficacy.
• Simplified Content Delivery: This connection refines content delivery to offer relevant recommendations seamlessly, rekindling repeat purchases and nurturing customer loyalty. Delivering relevant content is streamlined, sparking repeat purchases and nurturing customer loyalty.

All New Verified Integrations to Elevate Your Email Strategy

This February update has seen Dotdigital make considerable investments in its integrations. All integrations added in this update have been through their verification process. Meaning marketers can use any of their partner integrations with a superior level of quality assurance. These new integrations will help you extract maximum value from your tech stack. The full details of these verified integrations are listed on the platform. But here are a few of our favourites...

ViralSweep: ViralSweep is a platform for crafting and managing enthralling contests, sweepstakes, and promotions. Their integration into Dotdigital permits users to synchronise their promotion engagement data with Dotdigital, which can be utilised to segment and personalise marketing. It further synchronises contact data of new leads procured through ViralSweep activities.

Preezie: Preezie is an interactive e-commerce technology that aids brands in acquiring, converting, and retargeting more customers. This integration synchronises quiz data submitted by a contact after a Preezie journey into Dotdigital. This data is transferred as Contact Data fields and Insight data. By utilising the explicit quiz data Preezie amasses, users can segment, establish or inform marketing campaigns effortlessly to advance their metrics further.

Crowdin: Crowdin is localisation software. With this integration, customers can translate Dotdigital content with convenience. This integration allows customers to automate the localisation of their emails with no cutting-and-pasting required. It’s a two-way sync: texts for translation are dispatched from Dotdigital to Crowdin > translation process takes place in Crowdin > translations are synchronised from Crowdin to Dotdigital.

Personizely: Personizely is a website conversion platform that comprises features such as pop-ups, web personalisation and A/B testing. This integration allows Dotdigital users to gather email addresses using Personizely’s widgets and forms. The data is passed to Dotdigital in the form of a contact. In addition, Personizely allows personalising the widgets and the website with information from Dotdigital if a unique URL parameter is supplied when a customer visits your website.

Cartsave: Cartsave is an e-commerce cart recovery app that saves a customer's basket, even when they don’t possess an account with your brand. All it requires is an email address. This solution assists users in gathering engaged emails and driving additional sales through abandoned cart reminders. Cartsave’s integration will help users expand their contact lists and send on-brand-triggered cart recovery campaigns.

Real-time Syncs and SMS: Magento Upgrades

Dotdigital has continued to enhance its integration with Magento, focusing on real-time data syncs and SMS capabilities to empower users. These upgrades facilitate instantaneous data synchronisation between Magento and Dotdigital, meaning that any customer action on the e-commerce platform is immediately reflected in the user's dashboard. This real-time data transfer is crucial for sending timely, relevant emails that reflect the latest customer interactions, from cart abandonments to browsing history.

These enhanced SMS features provide a new channel for reaching customers, complementing email campaigns and offering a higher open rate. Magento users can now send text messages directly through Dotdigital, creating a multi-channel digital messaging approach that can significantly increase engagement and conversions. This integration underscores the ever-growing importance of agility in email marketing, enabling brands to react in real time to customer behaviour.

Wrap up

The potential of your email strategy is rooted in the intelligent use of data. This can be reinforced through features like combining and assigning data fields to create a sophisticated approach to personalisation and segmentation. The new integrations included in the update will enrich the data profile of every customer, culminating in a comprehensive overview of every integration they have with your brand. This will allow you to deliver relevant email campaigns that drive engagement.

The February update brings new features, such as an advanced product recommendation tool and a streamlined integration with the Shopline commerce platform. This facilitates a more personalised customer journey and more effective collaboration between e-commerce and email marketing. Moreover, features like the integration of MMS and the ability of Winston AI to fine-tune the tone of messaging will help users boost engagement.

User-friendly platforms like Dotdigital can simplify data field management, liberating your marketing team to focus their time and resources on creating appealing campaigns instead of dealing with complex data management. These February updates firmly establish Dotdigital amongst the most heavy-hitting ESPs available in 2024. See our recommendations for ESPs in 2024 here.