Customers want to feel like you know them personally. They also want things faster, whether that’s rewards for showing loyalty to your brand or discovering a product they’ll love as soon as they land on your website. Trying to meet these expectations used to pull marketers in opposite directions: more personal meant more manual work, and more automation meant more generic messages.
Our latest product update closes that gap. Bringing you AI agents and a brand new loyalty platform, you can now deliver personalized messages that feel less like marketing and more like a one-to-one relationship with your brand.
That’s just the beginning of what’s coming. Let’s take a closer look.
Turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers with Dotdigital Loyalty
Dotdigital Loyalty is your new home for customer loyalty and retention, and it lives right inside the Dotdigital platform. Your loyalty data (points, tier progression) and your marketing data (recent opens, products purchased, marketing preferences) sit side-by-side from day one, so experiences are built on what you know about your customers.
Customers earn points for the moments that build a relationship, not just the ones that drive a sale: purchases, of course, but also birthdays, anniversaries, reviews, social follows, or SMS sign-ups. You’re celebrating the people who spend the most and the ones who show up for your brand in smaller ways, making every customer feel valued.
Programs are yours to shape. Build up to four tiers, set your own rewards, and let customers progress through tiers automatically as their points add up. Rewards are flexible and range from fixed discounts to free shipping and free gifts, redeemable at checkout online or in-store through Shopify POS.
Because those rewards are built on real customer data rather than a generic set of rules, they land differently. For your customers, it’s less like a discount and more like something special, just for them.
The email automations you’ll need to get started (like welcome, points updates, redemption pushes, and expiry warnings) are already built and waiting for you, so your time goes into the program itself, not the mechanics behind it.
If you’re just getting started with loyalty and retention, we’ve pulled together a blog series to walk you through building a program that fits your brand:
- Is a loyalty program right for you?
- Customer loyalty stats you need to know
- How to build a loyalty program that works
- How to launch a loyalty program
If you’re ready to dive in, the new ‘Building customer loyalty‘ marketing course in the Dotdigital Academy walks you through everything you need to know.
Let AI handle the repetitive work, so you can focus on strategy
We have two new AI agents that sit inside the Dotdigital Marketing platform, ready to take on the time-consuming tasks and free you up for the ideas only you can bring.
Content Agent
Our Content Agent lives inside your email editor, so you’ve got a colleague on hand to help brainstorm ideas, draft copy, edit text, style buttons, or generate and edit images. Train it on your brand voice, so every suggestion sounds like your brand, not generic AI copy. And because it lives in the platform and knows your data, it can drop personalization fields straight into the copy it writes.
You approve every suggestion, whether that’s to a single block or the whole campaign, so nothing goes out without a human touch.
Segment Agent
Even with drag-and-drop builders, segmentation takes time, especially when you’re targeting a complex, multi-rule audience. Afternoons can easily get lost filtering through data and setting rules. But not anymore. Now, all you need to do is ask.
Describe the audience you want in plain language, and Segment Agent builds it for you. Ask for something like:
“Build a segment of customers who haven’t purchased in 30 days, are at high risk of churning, follow football or basketball, and live close to our flagship stores.”
That’s a segment that would’ve taken a while to build manually, done in one sentence instead.
And if you don’t have the exact data field you need, Segment Agent works with what you’ve already got, so you spend time crafting the message for the segment, not hunting for the data to build it.
These new agents are available in a private preview for customers. To join the waitlist, register here.
Personalization that moves at your speed
Some personalization tools come with a catch: get it exactly right, and you’re waiting on a developer to get the data and scripts in place. Move fast, and you have to settle for something more generic. But not with Dotdigital. Our updates make it simpler to build, launch, and troubleshoot personalized experiences yourself.
Build triggered emails visually
With this update, triggered emails in Dotdigital Personalization move to visual, no-code building. Create and customize abandoned browse, abandoned cart, and other triggered emails using the same SmartBlocks editor you already use.
Personalize your website with any Dotdigital segment
Your Dotdigital Marketing lists, segments, and contact data fields now sync directly into Dotdigital Personalization, ready to be used to create hyper-personalized on-site experiences. The sync keeps pace with your customers: segments and lists are refreshed regularly, so every website visitor sees the most relevant message.
Get set up without custom scripts
We know you don’t want to always call for help when it comes to connecting your site to your marketing. That’s what our Personalization SDK is here to solve. One tag sends data into Dotdigital Marketing and Dotdigital Personalization at the same time, meaning there’s less onboarding, less maintenance, and no more waiting on developers.
See exactly what your tag is tracking
Tag Explorer is a new in-platform tool for testing and troubleshooting your Dotdigital tag. It launches an overlay directly on your live website, showing what data the tag is capturing in real time and flagging anything that looks off, like whether an issue comes down to a tag error or cookie consent behavior.
Connect Dotdigital Personalization to Shopify faster
The Dotdigital Shopify connector has been updated to use the latest tag code, bringing it in line with the Personalization SDK. One install now automatically sends data to both Dotdigital Marketing and Dotdigital Personalization, with no custom scripts or separate setup required.
Get started with Dotdigital Personalization.
Spend less time building campaigns, more time launching
Campaign creation involves a lot of small steps: clicks, tab-switching, hunting for the right data field. They add up fast when you’ve got a long to-do list. We’re simplifying that with faster workflows and sharper editing tools built right into the Dotdigital platform.
- Copy sent campaigns: Use the new copy button to duplicate a sent campaign and get the next one ready to launch fast
- Image edit panel: Crop, edit, replace, add text, and set alt text and links, all without leaving the panel
- A smoother build, start to finish: Move between steps in any order, so you can select your audience before you even start building. Progress and audience selections save automatically, so you can step away and pick up where you left off, and plain text versions now generate in the background
Keep your customer data connected, wherever it goes
Customer data doesn’t stay still: contacts unsubscribe, numbers change, and platforms fall out of sync with each other. We’re keeping everything connected and easy to reach, wherever it needs to go, so you can easily act on what your data tells you.
Stay connected, even after someone unsubscribes
New API support lets you resubscribe SMS and WhatsApp contacts automatically, syncing straight from your CRM into Dotdigital. Contact details can also be updated even on unsubscribed contacts, so profiles don’t go stale while nobody’s allowed to touch them.
After all, unsubscribes aren’t always goodbyes. Sometimes someone just goes quiet until they need you again. Either way, when they do come back, their profile is already accurate, and you can reach them on their preferred channel once again.
Get a clearer view of every interaction
We’ve expanded the Events API to cover message sends, statuses, and receipts across every channel. However you pull your data out (into a CDP, data warehouse, or analytics tool) it now flows through in one clean connection instead of several. That means richer customer profiles, faster insights, and far less manual data wrangling to get there.
What’s next?
So, you now have a loyalty program that runs on real marketing and customer data, AI agents that take the repetitive work off your plate, personalization you can deliver faster, and data that stays in sync, so it’s ready the moment you need it. Together, that’s what it takes to send to thousands and still make one person feel like you’re only talking to them. We’re making your tech do more of the work, so you can spend more time on the ideas and strategy that make your campaigns flourish.
