What’s new: AI that sounds like you, conversational SMS, and much more

Marketing moves fast, and at Dotdigital, keeping you ahead of that change is what we do. That means giving you more control, more context, and more ways to act on your data — and the new tools in this release to do exactly that.

We’ve launched AI that learns your brand voice, two-way SMS, and a wave of new and improved integrations that mean less time wrestling with data and more time using it. Here’s everything that’s new.

Create content in your own brand voice

AI is an amazing tool helping marketers all over the world work smarter and faster, but AI-generated copy is all starting to sound a bit… samey. You don’t want to sound like every other brand, and we don’t either.

Dotdigital’s WinstonAI learns exactly how your brand sounds. Upload your guidelines, share some examples of your favorite content, or just answer a few questions about your writing style, and WinstonAI will start writing (and checking) your campaigns in your voice, not a generic one.

You can share dos and don’ts, flag words you’d never use, and point to real examples of your brand at its best. The more you give it, the better it gets. And from there, WinstonAI picks up on your industry, identity, tone, and the kind of language your audience expects. Test and refine the output as you go to make sure every word sounds like you.

For marketers using Dotdigital, this means faster campaign creation, less time tweaking, and content that sounds authentically you.

Plug in Dotdigital to your favorite AI tools

If you’re already using ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool, you can now connect it directly to your Dotdigital account to get faster, conversational insights. It works through something called a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

An MCP server is a standardized way to let AI tools talk to platforms like Dotdigital. Setup depends on your AI tool of choice, but can be as easy as copying and pasting a URL, ID, and secret key from your Dotdigital account. [Link to setup guide when available]

Once connected, you can ask your AI tool real questions about your data, and even ask it to take action, like creating marketing lists and adding contacts to lists. Put it to work with prompts like these:

• “Show me our email open rates for the past 3 months, broken down by week.”
• “Show all contacts tagged as VIP in Dotdigital.”
• “Create a new list called ‘Event Attendees – Q4’ and add all contacts who filled out our October survey.”
• “Show average Net Promoter Score from last month’s responses.”
• “How does our open rate compare to the industry average in retail?”

Plus, you’ll soon be able to use it to build new email templates and much more using insights from your account. It’s a faster, more conversational way to get more out of your data.

Have real conversations with two-way SMS

SMS is one of the best-performing channels for marketers. And it’s now two-way. You can now view and reply to SMS responses directly inside Dotdigital, in the same place you already manage your WhatsApp and chat conversations.

When a customer replies to a campaign, you can see what they’re responding to and act fast and with context. Customizable quick replies and keywords like “STOP” are filtered out, so your team only sees active, engaged conversations.

Use two-way SMS for lead qualification, appointment confirmation, feedback collection, product recommendations — basically any moment where you want a speedy response from an engaged customer. No more flipping between tools and channels to talk directly to your customers.

Pull more data out of Dotdigital with fewer API calls

The new Events API is for teams that pull large volumes of data from Dotdigital. Now you can pull more data in a single API call. Think: opens, clicks, page views, bounces and unsubscribes. You get more up-to-date data, fewer headaches, and a cleaner connection to whichever CRM, CDP, or analytics platform you’re using.

Bring your whole data stack together

If your team runs on Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery,  you can now sync order, contact and product data into Dotdigital. Integrating your marketing data with your data warehouse lets you build on your single source of truth, so data from other tools and platforms you’ve connected to it can flow straight into Dotdigital, with no custom pipelines needed. 

And getting data out has gotten more powerful, too. We’ve expanded our data firehose to push more insights, including contact updates, consent changes, and preference updates automatically into your tech stack. For teams using both firehose and data warehouses, a full two-way sync is possible.

Get deeper data syncs with updated HubSpot CRM integration

The Dotdigital and HubSpot integration has had a serious upgrade. You can sync lists, email and SMS opt-ins, custom properties (like deal value and industry), plus marketing events, form submissions, and custom events as usable data in Dotdigital.

In practice, these upgrades look a little like this: two contacts sign up for your webinar. One attends, one doesn’t. This data syncs from HubSpot to Dotdigital to trigger the relevant follow-up campaign — no workarounds and no need for third-party tools to connect your CRM and marketing automation platform. 

Target subscribers at exactly the right moment with Recharge

If you’re a subscription-based business, customer subscription data is some of the most powerful insight you can act on, and now it’s in Dotdigital. Our new Recharge integration syncs subscription data into your Dotidigital account, so you always know where a customer is in their subscription journey, whether they’ve hit pause, are due for renewal, or are ready to upgrade. That context turns into campaigns that land at exactly the right moment.

Surface customer reviews and UGC inside your emails 

Two new integrations with BazaarVoice and Judge.me make it easier to bring social proof and user-generated content (UGC) into your campaigns. With new app blocks now available for the popular review platforms, you can pull star ratings and reviews directly into your email campaigns. Convince any undecided shoppers to convert with your top five-star ratings. 

Website personalization that stays fresh

Personalization is only as good as the data behind it. Our latest update to Fresh Relevance makes it easier to keep your data current. Now, you can drag-and-drop any Dotdigital audience to your Fresh Relevance Slots and serve hyper-personalized web and email experiences based on real behavior and insight data like recent purchases, eRFM scores, and channel preferences. Personalization should move as fast as your customers, so as soon as their behavior changes, their experience refreshes, too. 

Available as a private preview for Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance customers.

Launch and test popups without a developer

You can now launch, test, and disable popup campaigns on any web page instantly and without involving a developer. You control where the pop-up appears and preview it before go-live, so you can fine-tune the experience and drive more conversions.

That’s a wrap

Every update in this release is built to give you the tools to move faster, make smarter decisions, and create customer experiences that actually resonate. Whether that’s AI that learns your brand voice, data that flows freely across your stack, or channels where you can have real conversations — it all adds up to giving you more control, context, and ways to act on what you know.