Like most product people, I think about my projects the way some people think about football transfers. Too much. At dinner parties, out loud, even when nobody asked.
So when you put me in charge of building a loyalty product, expect a genuinely excessive amount of detail about tier thresholds. Strong opinions about points expiry. And, eventually, the thing I’m here to talk about today: Dotdigital Loyalty, now live for merchants who want their customers to keep coming back for more without adding another piece of tech to their stack.
Here’s the short version, if you’re in a hurry. We built a loyalty platform that lives alongside your marketing campaigns in Dotdigital. No extra supplier to manage. No waiting until the next day for data you need right now. No second login or invoice. But just in case you want the long version…
Here’s what they’re not telling you about loyalty programs
Most loyalty programs aren’t bad because your product isn’t good enough or your brand reputation is on its knees. They’re bad because the loyalty and marketing platforms don’t talk to each other. In other words, the integration between them is not good enough.
Imagine you’ve spent months building a loyalty strategy, setting your tier thresholds, and figuring out the economics of your points. Your customer hits ‘Gold’ tier, which is a genuinely exciting moment after years of patient relationship-building, and it’s finally paying off. In a lot of setups, your email platform finds out about this approximately… whenever the connector feels like syncing. Could be an hour, could be overnight. Could be never if something quietly breaks and nobody notices for three weeks.
By the time your marketing platform knows, the moment’s gone. You sent the tier celebration email a week late, the customer’s already moved on with your competitor, and the whole thing feels a bit limp. This isn’t a hypothetical. I’ve been lucky enough to meet with countless talented marketers, enthusiastic about doing more to boost repeat purchases or increase average order value. But when asked about how their tools connect, the answer is some version of “well, there’s an integration.” There’s always an integration. There’s never quite enough integration for my liking.
So, we set out to fix that
Dotdigital Loyalty was built so that when your customers show their love for you, your marketing already knows and can react. Not eventually. Now.
A customer earns points; their balance updates in their contact profile immediately. They move up a tier; every automation that should care about that already does. Their points are about to expire; the nudge email can go out without anyone having to build a special flow for it. We didn’t want to create an integration between two products. Instead, we set out to find a solution to today’s customer retention challenge.
I’ll spare you the full feature list (it’s on our website, I promise it’s thorough), but here’s what’s actually in there:
- Decide what’s worth a reward, and reward it. Points for purchases, reviews, sign-ups, birthdays, and giving marketing consent
- Turn your most loyal customers into VIPs. Create up to four tiers, with automatic progression and demotion
- Flexible rewards. Share discounts, free shipping, free products, whatever fits your margins and your brand
- Automate the rewards, not the relationships. Don’t increase your workload; Dotdigital handles that for you since it’s already hooked up to your marketing data
The bit I’m most excited about (and yes, it involves AI)
I know they say you can’t pick a favorite child, but there’s one update in this release I’m genuinely proud of. And it’s not a points multiplier (though Dotdigital Loyalty obviously has that too).
It’s our AI loyalty digest. A regular email written in plain language that tells you how your program is doing. Not a dashboard or a spreadsheet you have to interpret at 8:59 am on Monday. It’s a short, readable summary that says things like: “Points issued were up 34% this week, mostly from a spike in purchases on Tuesday and Wednesday.” This is the kind of thing a colleague would tell you at the coffee machine, if you had a colleague whose entire job was reading your loyalty data so you didn’t have to.
We built this because, whilst most marketers I’ve spoken to care about their analytics, logging in and making sense of a chart takes a kind of intentional effort that a busy week rarely allows for. So we’re bringing those insights straight to you.
It’s not only about your customers. Loyalty programs benefit you, too
When we spoke to marketers about their retention strategies, nobody said: “I wish my customers had more points, and they’re all Platinum tier, and they all get 50% off.” What they actually wanted was to solve some very familiar problems.
We know you want customers to come back and buy again. We know you want to increase average order value without relying on blanket discounting. And when acquisition costs are through the roof, of course, we know you want to recognize and retain your best customers. And they wanted to do all of this without creating even more work for already stretched teams.
That’s exactly what Dotdigital Loyalty is designed to do.
- Boost repeat purchases. Reward the behaviors that matter most, whether that’s a second order, a product review, or joining your VIP tier
- Increase average order value(AOV). Encourage customers to spend a little more to unlock rewards, free shipping, or reach the next tier
- Improve retention. Spot customers whose points are about to expire or whose engagement is dropping, then automatically bring them back with perfectly timed campaigns
And because loyalty data lives natively inside Dotdigital, you can use it everywhere across your marketing. Segment by tier, personalize based on points balance, trigger journeys from loyalty events, and create experiences that feel far less like marketing and much more like a relationship. Which, when you think about it, is what loyalty was supposed to be all along.
Curious about Dotdigital Loyalty?
If you’re a Dotdigital customer already, head straight to your Customer Success Manager, and they can help you get started. We also have an exclusive one-hour-long course for you to get your teeth stuck into. If you’re not a customer, don’t panic. Get in touch, and our experts will show you how awesome it is when loyalty and marketing live in the same place.
