What’s new: The Dotdigital Academy, Shopline integration, and MMS success

Our first release of 2024 is here, and it’s designed to help you elevate your marketing. We know that marketers are under pressure, budgets are tight, expectations are high – from customers and board members alike.

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