Reporting – Dotdigital

When is the best time to send holiday emails?

Natasha Lillibury — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:53:02 +0000

How early should you start emailing about major holidays? It’s the age-old question for marketers and ecommerce planners.

Go too early and you risk giving away margin, overwhelming your audience, or prompting unsubscribes. Wait too long and your competitors may have already captured attention and sales. There’s real pressure in getting this timing right, that’s where data can make all the difference.

Because all kinds of brands send campaigns through the Dotdigital platform every year, we can see exactly when marketers begin referencing key holidays in their subject lines.

We’ve analyzed the last three years of holiday email sends to see how early brands are starting their campaigns. See how this differs by region, looking at the UK and Europe, the United States, and Australia and how this behavior is changing year-on-year. The result is a clear, numbers-led guide you can use to time your holiday emails with precision.

Valentine’s Day email marketing stats

Valentine’s Day has one of the shortest run-ups of any major holiday in this list, and it’s getting shorter each year. In 2025, brands began referencing Valentine’s Day in subject lines an average of 9 days before.

When to send

That short window also creates an opportunity. Because most brands move late, you don’t need weeks of build-up to be competitive, but you do need to be ready. If you can get into inboxes a few days earlier than the pack, you give yourself more room to influence buying decisions before the noise peaks.

What to send

Valentine’s is a perfect excuse to show some love to your subscribers. Take the opportunity to offer something just for them like:

Early access to your Valentine’s Day sale
A stackable discount to layer onto your website offers
Free shipping or a free gift

Perks like this reinforce that being subscribed has real value and builds loyalty long after the holiday has passed.

With a short promotional window, urgency-led messaging and promotions like flash sales or free next-day delivery will encourage conversions in the moment.

Valentine’s Day marketing email marketing campaign statistics

The number of days before Valentine’s Day that brands begin referencing the holiday in subject lines.

2023

Global average: 11
APAC: 13
EMEA: 10
Americas: 12

2024

Global average: 10
APAC: 11
EMEA: 10
Americas: 9

2025

Global average: 9
APAC: 10
EMEA: 10
Americas: 8

Halloween email marketing stats

Falling on the last day of the month, October is the official spooky season. Europe and America both begin sending around 23-28 days before Halloween, and this is consistent over recent years. However, Australia has changed how early Halloween campaigns are sent, with a steady year-on-year decline and 2025 seeing a much shorter lead-up of around 13 days.

When to send

Your audience, your product, and the offers you have to share will all influence when to start sending, but you won’t be creating jump scares in your audience’s inbox if you send any time within October.

What to send

Halloween gives you tons of room to have fun with your email design. There are lots of ways to lean into a Halloween styling, even if you don’t have Halloween product imagery. Get five frightfully good Halloween email campaign ideas in this blog. We share how to make your campaigns captivating, no matter what industry you’re in.

Halloween email marketing campaign statistics

The number of days before Halloween that brands begin referencing the holiday in subject lines.

2023

Global average: 26
APAC: 28
EMEA: 25
Americas: 28

2024

Global average: 23
APAC: 17
EMEA: 24
Americas: 26

2025

Global average: 23
APAC: 13
EMEA: 23
Americas: 28

Black Friday email marketing stats

Black Friday originally began as an in-store discount event in the US, marking the day after Thanksgiving. Now, it’s a worldwide sales holiday that is very much online, blurring the lines with Cyber Monday. This overspill of the day has led to terms like ‘The cyber five’ and even ‘Black Friday month’.

The data shows that around two weeks before is the sweet spot for brands. This is consistent across the three regions studied, proving that Black Friday is cemented as a global sales holiday.

When to send

Aim for two weeks before Black Friday itself, and use the lead-up to encourage people to subscribe to mobile marketing channels like SMS, MMS and WhatsApp. This gives you another direct line to your audience on one of the busiest weeks for email inboxes.

What to send

Get inspiration for Black Friday campaigns with this lookbook full of inspiration and tips from the 2025 season.

Black Friday email marketing campaign statistics

The number of days before Black Friday that brands begin referencing the holiday in subject lines.

2023

Global average: 9
APAC: 8
EMEA: 8
Americas: 15

2024

Global average: 12
APAC: 9
EMEA: 12
Americas: 16

2025

Global average: 12
APAC: 14
EMEA: 11
Americas: 16

Cyber Monday email marketing stats

Cyber Monday was the online equivalent of Black Friday, bookending the holiday weekend. It’s now simply a continuation of the sales weekend. Cyber Monday has a much shorter lead-up than Black Friday, with 3 days being the average lead-up. This tracks as you don’t want to cannibalize your Black Friday traffic by jumping ahead to Cyber Monday.

When to send

As soon as the clock strikes midnight and Black Friday ends, it’s Cyber Monday lead-up time. In the US, brands tend to start earlier than in other regions. Use this window to warm up shoppers ahead of the peak. Set expectations for what’s coming, and encourage customers to follow you on social media or sign up for mobile marketing so they’re first to know when Cyber Monday offers go live.

What to send

Mix up your promotions and messaging so that it doesn’t feel like a diluted version of Black Friday. For design, brands often lean into a silver color palette to evoke the ‘cyber’ theme of the sales event.

Cyber Monday email marketing campaign statistics

The number of days before Cyber Monday that brands begin referencing the holiday in subject lines.

2023

Global average: 3
APAC: 3
EMEA: 3
Americas: 4

2024

Global average: 4
APAC: 2
EMEA: 3
Americas: 10

2025

Global average: 3
APAC: 1
EMEA: 2
Americas: 7

Christmas email marketing stats

Christmas is the biggest moment in the retail calendar, so it’s no surprise it has the longest build-up of any holiday in this blog. What’s interesting is how consistent this pattern is year-on-year, the timing barely changes. That tells us this isn’t a one-off trend, it’s become an industry norm.

In 2025, the global average time brands began referencing Christmas in email subject lines was 65 days before December 25. In 2026, that puts the starting line at Wednesday, October 21. Meaning, many brands are talking about Christmas before Halloween has even happened.

When to send

If you wait until November to think about Christmas, you’re already behind a large part of the market. Even if you don’t go full festive in October, this is the moment to start warming up your audience with early access, wish lists, or “coming soon” messaging, so you’re not playing catch-up when the peak hits.

What to send

Christmas campaigns work best when they build momentum over time. Start with low-pressure messages like gift guides, wish lists, or early-access collections to help shoppers plan ahead. As the season progresses, layer in urgency with delivery cut-offs, limited stock reminders, and last-chance messaging.

Segment where you can, tailor recommendations, and use clear, helpful messaging to make decision-making easier during the busiest shopping period of the year.

Christmas email marketing campaign statistics

The number of days before Christmas Day that brands begin referencing the holiday in subject lines.

2023

Global average: 58
APAC: 41
EMEA: 59
Americas: 69

2024

Global average: 58
APAC: 46
EMEA: 59
Americas: 64

2025

Global average: 65
APAC: 43
EMEA: 67
Americas: 68

Conclusion

Holidays and sales events are great opportunities to grab engagement and orders, as consumers are often in the mood to shop and are actively looking for discounts. The data in this blog gives you a clear view of when most brands ramp up their sending so that you can plan your promotional email calendar with confidence to time it perfectly. Use this data as your baseline, then test around it to find what works best for your audience.

If you want more exclusive email performance data, check out our Global benchmark report 2026 to add insight to your planning and see how your competition performs.

4 ways to use marketing benchmarks to your advantage

Natasha Lillibury — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:58:39 +0000

Marketers are constantly told that data should drive everything we do. But in reality, many of us are working with incomplete pictures, changing customer behavior, and growing pressure to ‘do more with less.’

Not only are marketers grappling with tight budgets and leaner teams, we’re also getting less information from our audience. Zero-click behavior is rising and privacy changes like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection mean some metrics are less reliable than they used to be.

At Dotdigital, we are all about making marketers’ lives easier. Data is something we all need more of. Each year, we create our Global benchmark report, full of marketing data, sourced from our platform, that you can use straight away. In this blog, we’ll outline four ways you can put these benchmarks to work.

How to use marketing benchmarks

Benchmarks are more than ‘nice to know’ numbers. Used well, they become:

Your closest source of competitor insight
A guide for smarter strategy
A tool for setting realistic goals
Evidence for business cases, budget, and headcount
Proof of impact at review time

Now let’s explore some simple, practical ways to use benchmarks to drive better results for your business and boost your own career.

1: Use benchmarks to set expectations

Whether you’re launching a new channel or refreshing the strategy for an existing one, benchmarks answer a crucial question: “What’s realistic here?”

The Dotdigital Global benchmark report can tell you:

See what “good” looks like in your industry and region
Understand the typical performance of each channel
Set goals that are ambitious but achievable

In 2026, we know that email continues to be a strong, reliable channel. However, the data also tells us that while opens are rising, click-to-open rates are falling year over year. So we know that engagement is still there, but other channels are often better placed when you have important calls to action.

This is where mobile marketing channels come in. SMS and WhatsApp drive dramatically higher click-through rates, 7x and 14x email, respectively, making them ideal for driving action.

What changes when you use benchmarks this way

You stop planning in the dark and begin every project with valuable context. Accurate and achievable goal-setting means you‘ll have more confidence in your strategy and there will be fewer surprises in your results. Your work gets the time it needs to perform, without pressure to panic and pivot if initial numbers aren’t as strong as you’d hoped.

2: Use benchmarks to prioritize your strategy

Most marketing teams are stretched, and you can’t do everything at once. Benchmarks help you decide what’s worth doing next.

The Dotdigital Global benchmark report can show you:

Which channels are underutilized in your mix
Where the biggest performance gaps are
Which improvements are likely to deliver the biggest returns

You can see where the biggest opportunities lie for your business and focus there first. For example, you might see that your email open rates are below average and that working on subject line optimization could improve them – hopefully adding a knock-on effect of better click rates too.

Or, you might see that your email engagement rates are above average across the board, indicating that you should look to strengthen elsewhere by adding WhatsApp to your marketing mix to get more conversions.

What changes when you use benchmarks this way

Your roadmap becomes evidence-led, based on tangible potential, and you can be confident in your approach. You’ll have clearer justification for every decision and see results quicker as you’re able to direct your attention to the biggest opportunities first.

3: Use benchmarks to win buy-in

Starting a new channel or investing in new technology can feel risky, especially to people outside marketing. Benchmarks remove the guesswork and give a tangible outcome before you make the leap.

Instead of saying, “We want to try X as we think this could work, ” you can say, “Here’s what brands like ours are achieving today.”

With industry-specific data, you can:

Show what’s possible before you invest
Reduce perceived risk
Frame marketing as predictable, not experimental
Build stronger business cases

This data makes it far easier for people outside marketing to understand the potential return on investment and weigh it against the risk. Whether you’re asking for more budget, additional headcount, or smarter marketing technology, benchmarks give your ideas credibility.

If you’re considering Dotdigital for the first time, our report is especially powerful: every benchmark comes from real Dotdigital customers, so you’re not seeing what might be possible, you’re seeing what’s already being achieved.

Appeal to C-Suite and Senior Leaders

You can take this a step further by translating benchmarks into revenue. Calculate the uplift you could generate by hitting higher targets and tie that directly to business goals. Our survey of 1,500 marketers found that the C-suite’s top priority this year is more qualified leads, while senior leaders are most focused on improving profitability. Adding these benchmarks and the impact they’ll have to your business case helps you speak their language.

What changes when you use benchmarks this way

Our survey also found that HR, IT, and Finance are the teams marketers feel have the least understanding of the value of marketing. They’re also the departments many find hardest to collaborate with.

By adding in solid numbers, relationships and understanding between these teams will improve, making approvals easier and creating more trust in marketing as a business function moving forward.

4: Use benchmarks to prove your marketing impact

Many marketers know they’re doing good work, but struggle to prove it – especially as tech companies restrict tracking and customers are interacting less. Benchmarks give your performance meaning.

They allow you to say:

“We’re outperforming our industry”
“We’ve closed the gap by X% in six months”
“We’re now in the top quartile for engagement”

That’s powerful in:

Monthly and quarterly reports
Budget discussions
Performance reviews
Bonus and appraisal conversations

You’re no longer just reporting numbers without context, but showing progress, impact, and value. You can show your own growth month-on-month and year-on-year, and also give a powerful view of how your performance compares to competitors. Speaking marketer to marketer, they’re also a great reference point to add to job applications.

What changes when you use benchmarks this way

Your work becomes visible, grounded in evidence, and easier to understand. Benchmarks turn your results into something the wider business can clearly see and trust. Not just your team, but the C-suite, HR, and Finance too.

That visibility brings recognition, credibility, and leverage. It helps the people who influence promotions, bonuses, and pay increases understand the real impact of your work, and the value you bring to the business.

Turning numbers into an advantage

Benchmarks aren’t about chasing averages or copying what everyone else is doing. They’re about giving you a clearer picture of where you are, what’s possible, and where your effort will matter most. Used well, they help you make better decisions and tell a more confident story about the impact of your work.

The data is available now and hopefully you’ve identified a few new ways to use it. If you’d like to explore the numbers for your industry, your region, and every major channel, you can download the 2026 Global benchmark report here.

What’s new in Dotdigital: improved analytics and insights

Will Robertson — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:59:42 +0000

As we reach the end of 2022, it’s time for our fourth and final product release of the year. At Dotdigital we’re committed to delivering continuous innovation and empowering marketers with the tools necessary to overcome every obstacle.

As we began planning this release, we knew it was vital that we understand the challenges you’ll be facing soon. That meant thinking about the economic uncertainty facing marketing teams around the world.

So, with this release, we bring you advanced features to navigate the rocky road ahead. The threat of a global recession is looming over economies everywhere. As intelligent marketers you need to be able to:

Demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts
Report on successes and optimize where necessary
Reach audiences at the right moment to drive conversion
Generate new leads efficiently and effectively
Adapt to the changing demands of your audience

Our latest feature update aims to make all this possible and so much more.

Let’s dive in.

Multi-touch revenue attribution

From today, you will be able to gain greater insights into the customer journey and demonstrate the genuine value delivered by your marketing efforts.

How has Dotdigital’s revenue attribution changed?

Dotdigital’s previous advanced revenue attribution feature was an inference-based, last-click model. This model attributed the completion of a sale to the final engagement point customers made when purchasing from you.

How does multi-touch attribution work?

Our new multi-touch revenue attribution model goes even further by taking into account all touchpoints in your customers’ journey and assigning credit to each. By assigning “assisted revenue” to each email campaign your customer interacted with before a purchase you will get a holistic understanding of the marketing lifecycle and can demonstrate the full value of your efforts.

Why is multi-touch revenue attribution important?

Multi-touch revenue attribution gives you an overview of what campaigns have the highest level of influence on each sale you make.

There is an argument that first- or last-touch is more important. First-touch attributes value to the product, page, offering, or campaign that first attracted your customer. Last-touch focuses on the moment when a customer commits to purchasing from your business. It’s simpler, certainly, but simple isn’t always the best.

Only focusing on first- or last-touch revenue attribution could result in you planning your marketing spend based on skewed data. Multi-touch attribution gives credit where credit’s due. First- and last-touch attribution doesn’t explain how a customer can land on your website looking at Crockpots but ends up purchasing an Air Fryer. Multi-touch does, and it reveals the value behind every stage of your marketing campaign.

The insights you’ll gain from using multi-touch attribution will enable you to make more effective and efficient decisions when it comes to the allocation of budgets, plus the planning of your future campaigns. And as a bonus, it allows you to tweak those campaigns already in action.

How to get started with multi-touch attribution

Our new multi-touch revenue attribution feature is available to all ecommerce marketers who have access to the ecommerce area of Dotdigital.

Facebook lead ads

In our latest update, you can now sync contacts from your Facebook lead ads directly into your Dotdigital account. This means you can now easily add them to nurture and re-engagement campaigns to efficiently grow your marketing lists and engage new audiences.

How does Dotdigital’s new Facebook ad sync work?

Dotdigitial’s new integration with Facebook lead ads sync contacts automatically from your Facebook account into your Dotdigital account. Live lead ads on Facebook are linked to an ‘instant form’ which collects customer information such as email, phone number, and custom preferences. Once they’ve clicked on your advert and filled in this form, data is seamlessly synced, so you have everything you need to deliver personalized marketing.

How will Facebook ads sync improve your marketing?

With an economic downturn facing consumers all over the world, they’re becoming understandably picky about where and with whom they spend their money. Simultaneously, with budget cuts looming and attention focusing on profits and ROI, you need to rethink your acquisition strategies to make them more cost-efficient.

Our new integration with Facebook lead ads makes it easier for you to pivot and discover new customers and bring them into your marketing audience. With it, you can:

Identify potential new customers for your business
Collect vital subscriber information for personalized communications
Understand the behaviors and interests of your potential clients
Encourage the download of brochures or whitepapers
Get prospects to enroll in your automation programs

All-in-all, this update will save your team time and money by removing all manual workflows and providing you with the vital information you need to deliver conversion-driving campaigns.

How to get started with Facebook lead ads

Good news, our Facebook lead ads integration is ready to go. All you need to do to get started is go into your Dotdigital account and install the integration from the self-serve integration tab, in the “social” section. After this, you can connect your business’ Facebook account to Dotdigital by logging into your brand’s Facebook account and begin syncing data.

Shopify Hydrogen

The pressure is on for ecommerce brands to stand out from the crowd and meet customers where they are – on any device. Hydrogen, Shopify’s headless commerce framework, makes this possible. For this release, we’re giving existing Shopify merchants early access to our brand-new Hydrogen integration.

How does Dotdigital work with headless commerce solutions?

Headless commerce solutions separate your frontend store from the backend to deliver more agile and consistent experiences for customers. Traditional commerce solutions can connect with third-party integrations but can cause problems to the storefront due to poor architecture or code bloat. This problem is solved with headless commerce which allows data to flow seamlessly from both the front and backend into Dotdigital.

How to achieve a seamless marketing-to-store handover?

Dotdigital’s new toolkit for Shopify Hydrogen means you can now craft outstanding customer experiences that range from their first touchpoint to their final purchase and beyond. Simply set up the integration, enable the automatic data flow, and reap the benefit from Dotdigital’s suite of ecommerce features.

What does early access to Dotdigital’s Hydrogen integration mean for Shopify merchants?

By giving Shopify merchants access to a live demo Hydrogen storefront, we want to make the transition to headless commerce as smooth as possible for our customers.

This means, rather than having to start from scratch, you’ll be able to see how we’ve set up programs such as an abandoned cart, web behavior tracking, and live chat in a Hydrogen-powered store. Through this, you’ll be able to set up your store and store-based automations quicker and easier than starting from square one.

How to get started with the Hydrogen integration

When we’re Hydrogen-ready be able to find us in the Shopify app store. Our partners and developers can get their hands on the toolkit through GitHub. For more information, check in with your Customer Success Manager or Sales representative.

Push notifications

Catching the attention of your customers is not an easy feat. At Dotdigital, we understand this, and that’s why our platform helps you tap into and automate every channel at your fingertips. In this release, we’ve made some important changes to push notifications to ensure they work for you, every time.

How have we improved push notifications?

Push notifications aren’t new, but they haven’t always been the most seamless of experiences for many customers. Think of that moment when your favorite fast-food delivery service sends you a discount to be used that very day. You click on the notification but nothing happens. There’s no link to what they told you about.

So, what have we done about it? We’ve enabled deep linking for your notifications. That means customers who click on your notification will be taken directly to the appropriate page. That 15% discount can finally be claimed and conversions will increase.

As well as improving deep linking, we’ve enabled the ability for notifications to link directly to a website or landing page if the deep linking function doesn’t give the experience you want. Reporting on all campaigns is essential, no matter the channel, so we’ve ensured you can get full analytics of your push campaigns. By monitoring your push notification interaction rates you can use your performance data to optimize your campaigns.

How to get started with Push notifications?

If you’re new to push or want to find out more about how to get started with Dotdigital’s push functionality, you can read all about it in our help center.

Also coming in this release

Consolidated analytics

Account analytics for email and SMS provides you with a bird’s-eye view of your account in one place. This enables you to easily see performance stats across the board. All your KPIs are available at-a-glance, with the ability to deep dive into your results to optimize your marketing for standout results. Previously launched as cross-account analytics our new consolidated analytics is now available for all, to give you better insight into your overall performance.

As part of this, the previous email-focused dashboard is being replaced with an analytics landing page which will include data for SMS as well as email.

Tagging and filtering

When cross-account analytics first launched in May 2022, it gave businesses with multiple child accounts the ability to pull together insights from various accounts. In this update, we have launched the ability to tag and group your accounts with custom tags, giving you the ability to filter and compare campaign performance in a way that matters most to you.

Marketing budgets: how to do more with less

Jenna Paton — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 06:15:27 +0000

Dotdigital Blog

Marketing budgets: how to do more with less

How do marketers navigate working with smaller marketing budgets?

Topics: Industry trends, Reporting

Gartner’s report, The State of Marketing Budgets and Strategy 2022 found that, while marketing budgets have climbed from 6.4% of company revenue in 2021 to 9.5% in 2022, they still lag behind pre-pandemic spending.

While budgets have somewhat recovered, businesses now face more challenges. Firstly, you have to adjust marketing strategies to reflect changing customer behaviors in a post-lockdown world. How will they interact with a brand? What drives the decision-making process? Where and when will they convert?

But marketers are also facing great uncertainty as economies worldwide become increasingly unstable. How will this affect customer behavior and spending? What will it mean for your business?

As you enter another period of uncertainty and instability, marketers are already finding themselves under greater scrutiny. And, with that comes greater scrutiny of marketing budgets.

Declining budgets and rising expectations

Marketers face the greatest business challenge of all: getting maximum value out of every customer interaction whilst delivering engaging and inspiring experiences that foster loyalty.

As businesses continue to recover from the pandemic, the need for growth is paramount. Businesses need new and returning customers to help keep them afloat. That need is exacerbated as we approach what looks like another recession.

Unfortunately, at the same time business uncertainty often leads to increased marketing cuts. To marketers this seems like a clear contradiction – how can businesses expect to grow if they are not investing in marketing?

Still, marketing decision-makers are left scrambling, adjusting plans, and adapting strategies to allow for shrinking marketing budgets. At the same time, expectations for revenue and market share growth have not changed. Marketers are simply being asked to do more with less.

Why are marketing budgets being cut?

Marketing is a frequently underestimated business function. When the focus is set on sales, profits, and growth, external stakeholders can often lose sight of the role marketing plays.

Effective marketing – marketing that generates high-quality leads and inspires repeat customers to spend more money – is not easy. Sadly, not everyone agrees. Many people simply consider the role of the marketing team to be email sending and posting on social media. They don’t understand the considerations that go into every decision and every word you use.

During the pandemic, budgets were cut back due to a mixture of cost-saving measures and because certain marketing activities were put on hold. But still, you survived. Now, it is your survival that has become your undoing.

Marketers are well versed with the expression ‘use it or lose it’.

Coming in under budget is not a virtue in the marketing world. Failing to spend your whole marketing budget can have 2 major implications for your team.

You fail to hit targets which results in the credibility of you and your team coming into question
You hit your targets which gives budget holders the misconception that you don’t need it and therefore reduce your budget for the next financial year.

Recent limited marketing budgets and the hard work and dedication of your marketing team have led many finance budget decision makers to get the wrong impression that you don’t require as much as you once did. As you ramp back up to pre-pandemic capacity, budgets are failing to catch up to demand.

Instead, they’ve been reassigned.

Digital transformation

Over the past few years, your business’s ability to function online has been the factor determining success or failure. Marketing budgets that were once assigned to offline marketing or in-person events were re-invested into digital transformation programs.

According to research by EY, 44% of corporate companies are making good progress with their transformation programs.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of your business. Ultimately, it will change how you operate and deliver value to customers. Simultaneously, it involves a significant cultural change for organizations.

Businesses need to be continuously challenging the status quo, experimenting with new technologies and ways of working, and becoming comfortable with failure if something doesn’t work out.

Allocating marketing budgets

Digital transformation programs present a unique opportunity for marketers. Marketers must stake a claim in digital transformation programs today if they have not already done so. In the same report by EY, only 4% of corporations claimed to have a “highly sophisticated” approach to leveraging data.

If there’s anything a marketer knows, it’s the importance of data.

At a time when budgets are being cut, think wisely and align your technology needs of the business. Marketers need to maximize spending by capitalizing on existing investments in digital and data transformation programs.

As a marketer, you need a platform that can deliver results while saving you time and improving efficiency. All-in-one marketing platforms can do that and more, extending value beyond marketing teams.

With the ability to unite data from multiple, disparate sources and communicate with customers on multiple channels, modern marketing platforms like Dotdigital are perfect for marketing, sales, and customer service teams (to name just a few).

Better access to and use of data across all teams in your business is beneficial to all.

Benefits of all-in-one marketing platforms

Create consistent customer journeys
Allow sales teams to discover customer interest and needs
List ItemInform customer service teams about customer history
Help IT and Digital Transformation team identify UX areas for improvement
Provide feedback on products and services to instruct new product development
Improve organization-wide communications

Marketers are facing great uncertainty as economies worldwide become increasingly unstable. How will this affect customer behavior and spending and what will it mean for your business?

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How to do more with less

Budgets are not the only area where marketing leaders are feeling the pinch. 58% of CMOs reported that they lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategies. This goes beyond technology as spending on in-house labor has remained static over the past few years.

In all areas, marketing decision makers are having to find ways to do more with less all around. Here are a couple of our top tips to do just that.

Align your goals with those of your CDO or CIO. Forming these alliances will help you get the investment you need for your marketing team as they can use digital marketing KPIs to measure the effectiveness of their digital transformation programs.
Economize your marketing spend by tapping into existing digital transformation programs. Focus on marketing use cases that emphasize the potential for revenue growth in technology that provides real-time analytics, personalization, and hyper-targeting capabilities.
Make data capture a priority. Zero-party and first-party data are essential. Ensure you’re collecting it at every touchpoint to build customer-centric lifecycle automations that save time and generate revenue.
Use customer insights such as eRFM to identify high-value customers and sales opportunities. This will focus efforts on customers most likely to convert, therefore improving the efficiency of your marketing team.
Focus on customer lifetime value (CLV) to demonstrate the monetary worth of your BAU marketing activity that inspires loyalty as well as sales.

Research study

The Total Economic Impact of Dotdigital

We recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study into the total economic impact of adding Dotdigital to your marketing stack. The purpose of the study is to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) of Dotdigital.

Download the study and discover:

This study will help you understand the full financial impact of Dotdigital. Get your copy today.

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Marketing reporting: the complete guide to connected reporting

Jenna Paton — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:00:17 +0000

Dotdigital Blog

Marketing reporting: the complete guide to connected reporting

Why is marketing reporting important?

Proving value for money is essential. Every marketer wants to prove that what they’re doing is valuable. Senior management wants to know that departments are hitting growth targets. IT teams want to know they have the best software and tools for their business needs.

Overall, this can lead to businesses purchasing multiple reporting tools and software. Even internal teams in your marketing department can see the benefit of measuring tools that are specific to their needs alone.

The ultimate goal for businesses should be a single, all-in-one system that allows marketers, IT teams, and senior leadership to see relevant data through connected reporting.

Sounds too good to be true right?

In this article we’ll be taking things back to basics, covering what marketing reporting is and why it’s a vitally important business need. We’ll also help you understand what you need to report on and how to turn marketing reports into action.

What is marketing reporting?

We all do it, but how many of us can say that we fully understand what we should be reporting on and how to do it effectively?

Marketing reporting is the process of measuring progress, demonstrating value, and identifying actionable next steps to improve your marketing performance. The result is a clearer, more structured approach to marketing that allows you to meet and exceed your marketing goals.

Why is reporting important?

Whilst for us it’s completely obvious that marketing is a worthwhile investment, there are many people in business who do not see it that way. Many of you will have had an encounter (or ten) with someone who considers marketing to be a support function instead of the business-critical department that it is.

These are the people who are so focused on growth and profit that they’ve lost sight of how it’s achieved in the first place. (Marketing. That’s how.)

Enter: marketing reporting.

Marketing reports show the real, tangible results of your hard work. Through marketing reporting, you can show how your campaigns are fulfilling business goals, generating high-quality, sales-ready leads, and bringing in significant revenue to your company. Ultimately, they prove the value added by you cand your team.

Therefore, it’s essential you’re creating thorough, connected marketing reports.

The benefits of marketing reporting

Demonstrate team value
Prove goal completion
Track number of new business leads created
Monitor revenue generated by team activities
Identify opportunities for improvement
Highlight areas for cost-saving

What needs to be in your marketing reports?

While your marketing report will always be unique to your business goal, there are a couple of sections that are vital to every business.

Summary

Your summary breaks down the key facts – successes, challenges and goals for the next reporting period.

Business impact

This is what all your work results in, the real value your marketing team adds to the business. These metrics include new opportunities, pipeline generated, and revenue.

Traffic

Your traffic report looks at top-of-funnel acquisition broken down by channel and device.

Engagement

Engagement reports look at customer behavior and on-site activity. Metrics can include time or site, bounce rate, and frequency of visits. More advanced reporting might also offer RFM insights.

Conversions

Conversions are generally what interests most stakeholders. This report should break down new conversions by channel, revenue generated, cost per lead, and more.

Choosing what to including in marketing reporting

It can be tempting to report on everything you do as a way of demonstrating precisely how valuable your activities are.

Don’t give into temptation.

Typically, clients, stakeholders, and senior leadership are only interested in a handful of metrics. You need to highlight what is most important.

To identify the metrics, you need starts with understanding your goals and objectives, and what metrics best demonstrate return on investment (ROI). These can include the following:

Channel sources – which channels are performing best and driving the most clicks/leads?
Conversions – how many people have the potential to become customers of the back of actions on a website or at an event or tradeshow?
SERP – what are your top-rated keywords and how are they affecting your ranking on search engine result pages?

Marketing reports show the real, tangible results of your hard work. Therefore, it’s essential you’re creating connected marketing reports. But how?

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Marketing reporting: what to consider

The online nature of most businesses today means that marketers have a wealth of data and information at your fingertips. Customer interactions are occurring on different channels and that data is being collected by different sources and different software.

Modern marketers need a single, all-in-one system that can connect your data and deliver valuable and actionable marketing reports.

When evaluating the effectiveness of a software’s reporting capabilities you should consider:

Integration ability

How nicely does your software play with the rest of your marketing stack?

You can’t discover the ROI of your email marketing campaign if you don’t know how many click-throughs resulted in purchases on your ecommerce store.

Currency conversion

Today’s world of online interactions means that operating in multiple markets is easier than ever. That means closing sales in multiple currencies. You need to ensure your reporting tools are providing real-time insights using up-to-date currency conversion rates.

Google connectivity

For most marketers, the reporting tools they use depend on their budget. As a result, Google’s free Data Studio is a significant player in the marketing reporting sector. It’s also great for sharing with external teams and stakeholders.

Therefore, your software must communicate effectively and efficiently with the Google suite.

Cross-account analytics

No one brand is the same. That means a lot of you with have unique nuances that need to be considered. One such nuance is how many accounts you have.

Maybe you’re an umbrella company and manage the marketing activity of three separate brands. Or perhaps you use specific software for multiple functions, such as a non-profit that uses SMS marketing software for marketing, fundraising, and liaising with volunteers.

Connected cross-account reports enable cost savings and optimizations to be made with ease.

Customer insights

After all, who doesn’t love receiving a personalized experience with a brand?

Customer insights, whether it be eRFM customer modeling, online behavior, or simply marketing preferences, you need a system that can help you identify trends in your customer base to empower optimization across the board.

How to turn marketing reports into action and optimization

Now, here’s an important question: what’s the point of all this reporting is you’re not turning it into actionable takeaways?

It’s all well and good proving the value of your marketing team, but you need to be continuously testing and optimizing to maintain those results. What you need is a strategy for turning marketing reports into action.

Step 1: Frequency

You need to determine how frequently you’ll sit down and review your reports in detail to create new optimization action plans. Once a month? Once a quarter? Every six months? Knowing this will help you scope your action plans.

Step 2: Reporting

What you report on once again depends on the goals of your marketing team. Are you seeking to improve your organic search results, improve revenue generation, increase brand awareness. Your marketing dashboards should include all information associated to these goals.

Step 3: Analysis

Make sure your systems and dashboards are collecting data in real-time and storing this for comparisons to be drawn. This will help you see patterns and identify trends audience behavior.

Step 4: Hypothesis

Following your analysis, you can create a hypothesis as to why something is or isn’t working. This might require some testing on your side to ensure your theory is correct.

Step 5: Action

Once you have established your hypothesis (e.g., high bounce rate on the pricing enquiry page is due to the long form) you can turn this into an action plan. How will you address the issue to improve conversions and customer experiences?

Step 6: Reporting

Has the change resulted in an optimized campaign or customer experience? During the next period of reporting, you’ll discover whether or not the action has worked. Also, with one issue addressed, it will make identifying the next blocker to conversion easier.

Topics: Reporting

Become a reporting expert

For more insight into how you can become a marketing reporting expert, check out our latest webinar.

Develop a digital advantage with data-driven insights

Will Robertson — Thu, 12 May 2022 08:00:41 +0000

Develop a digital advantage with data-driven insights

Since marketing functions have drastically changed from March 2020, marketers across the globe have been faced with the daily ask of understanding how they can deliver better customer experiences, which in turn lead to better engagement, and better conversions.

This is a task that requires understanding your customer through-and-through and knowing what makes them tick, to deliver content that’ll make them click. This may sound like a daunting task, but at the end of the day it all comes down to one thing – data. And it’s data that’ll enable you to better understand your customers, and see them more clearly, and in turn deliver the very best customer experiences.

Let’s take a deeper dive

Dotdigital’s latest release is focused on helping you better understand your customers, deliver personalized campaigns, and bring more data into play. This is all to help you engage better and sell more by seamlessly targeting your audience.

Broaden horizons with cross-account reporting

Wouldn’t it be great if decision-makers in global growing businesses could easily see a bird’s-eye view of all their email performance across regions and business divisions to compare which of their campaigns are performing the best? Well, with cross-account reporting in Dotdigital you can do just that.

This new functionality gives decision makers across your business the ability to see top-down how all of their accounts are performing. We know that decision-makers in marketing functions come in all shapes and sizes, from CMOs to Heads of Engagement to CRM Managers – there are many people who need a holistic overview of how campaign content is performing. Cross-account reporting gives you that benchmark to broaden your marketing horizons.

The dashboard opens up a world of opportunities for you when it comes to clearly seeing performance data up-front. There, you’ll be able to compare and track the details of multiple child accounts for any time-frame within the last two years. The simple to view performance tiles allow for easy comparison of up to six key metrics against one email campaign, or alternatively, six email campaigns against one key metric.

The ability to understand engagement performance at such a top-level makes it easier to gain an understanding and share your market success across the board, and help foster a culture of cross-team learning.

Don’t forget you can speak to your customer success manager to find out more about cross-account reporting.

Target more accurately with enhanced Single customer view

Valuable customer relationships take time to develop. Failing to generate deep customer insights means you’ll be unable to effectively engage audiences and build those relationships. With Dotdigital’s enhanced SCV, it’s now easier to look back on what’s worked in the past, so that you can optimize your future campaigns.

We first released Dotdigital’s SCV back in November 2021 giving you a 360-degree of your customer. Since then, we’ve taken on board valuable feedback from our customers to further develop the SCV, making it infinitely more actionable. Let’s dive in.

Firstly, the new functionality makes it easier to create and develop more targeted messages for your customers, with increased levels of personalization. An opened up date-range flexibility means that your view of customer interaction has increased from 30-days, to one year. This gives you increased visibility, and flexibility. This is great for holiday campaigns as you can now see what your customers did last year, and use this information to target them better this time around.

We’ve also added in an expanded customer view to identify likely product recommendations, to keep your customer engaged. What did customer ‘A’ purchase that customer ‘B’ will also like? Show customers products they’ll like and see your conversion rate increase.

Last but not least, you can now easily create lookalike segments of your ideal customer to create more targeted and personalized messages for all of your customers – with a single click. We’ve even included affinity scores to show you as a percentage how confident you can be that a particular product fits the wants and needs of an individual customer. You can see the affinity score when you preview a product recommendation against a particular customer.

We’re offering all of this whilst being proud of the responsible marketing practices that we champion. What we mean by this can be found here in our Rise of the Responsible Marketer report. And remember, Dotdigital is not only ISO 27001, ISO 27701, but also ISO 14001 certified, meaning you can rest assured you are developing out a single view of your customer in a platform that puts customers first, encourages responsible marketing practices, and will benefit your business in the long run. You can learn more about our credentials in our Trust Centre.

Integrations you can rely on

There’s a lot of data available to marketers on a daily basis. But without knowing what any of it means, or what to do with it, it’s not going to be very useful. This is why integrating data with other platforms is so important, as it’ll enable you to make the most out of your data and use it to make informed decisions when it comes to your marketing functions. Let’s take a look into these newest integrations.

Seamlessly target audiences with Reviews.io

Modern day purchases are very different to those carried out ten years ago. With online shopping especially, people want reassurance before they purchase something they’ve never seen in-person. This has led to an astonishing 93% of customers saying that their purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews.

With Reviews.io and Dotdigital, you can now bring your customer review data into play, and use it to help retarget your customers. You now have the ability to use your customer’s review history to strengthen email campaigns, boost your click-through rates, and ultimately increase your revenue using the Reviews.io integration with Dotdigital.

Use review data to effectively segment your audiences and send them targeted follow-ups. For example, secure second chances with customers who have had a less-than-perfect experience when purchasing a product from you. The integration makes it easy to retarget them with a follow up that points them to your support team, or ask them how you could have done better and use it as a learning opportunity.

On the flipside, you can target your 5-star fans with a simple ‘thank you’ message or an exclusive discount code that they can use against their next purchase. Make every review the beginning of something new.

Engage better and sell more with Zendesk Sell

Building understanding of your customers is a key element when creating campaigns that’ll better engage and resonate with them. Being able to ensure that all marketing functions are working together towards a common goal is important to ensure high levels of success.

The new Dotdigital for Zendesk Sell integration enables you to sync contact, lead, opt-in and opt-out, and product catalog data between Zendesk Sell and Dotdigital. With your data in one place, you’ll have marketers and sellers singing from the same song sheet. Giving you all that you require to trigger cross-channel communication flows to the right people, and accelerate opportunity development for enhanced sales productivity.

Simplify your analysis with Google Sheets

Last year we gave you the ability to sync campaign data to Google Sheets.

So many of you have since asked us if we can build the same Google Sheets integration for address book and segment data, as well as form responses. Now you can. Our latest release means you can track your segment and address book growth over time, and seamlessly sync form stats and response data into your Google Sheets of choice by using our new Google Sheets integrations, available in the Integration hub.

Syncing your address book and segment data to Google Sheets allows you to track your address book and segment growth over time, be it hourly, daily or monthly. We give you control over how regularly you’re pulling this data across to exactly where you need it to be.

Secondly, by pulling form data and responses to Google Sheets you can further analyze these in whatever 3rd party tools you use, such as Google Data Studio. It’s fully automated – and removes another manual process from your day, so you can spend more time on your favorite part of your job.

Whatever your data requirement, these integrations, plus the many others available to you in our integration hub, will make it more straightforward for you to analyze your data to make it work even harder for you, and help you to drive your business growth. We know you’ve got big plans for your business, so being able to make the most of reliable data will help you every step along the way.

Summary

To find out more about this latest product release, and how it can help you you achieve your goals in 2022 and beyond, tune into one of our deep-dive training webinars in June. We are running a session for those in EMEA, one for the US, and one for APAC.

What’s new in Dotdigital

Juliette Aiken — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 11:01:58 +0000

What’s new in Dotdigital

Today marks the release of our first product launch of 2022. Thousands of people use our platform every day to deliver better customer experiences. With the plethora of channels available, reams of data that will make the hardiest of data gurus dizzy, and an API library that would keep you entertained for days (if you were so inclined), it can be hard to know where to start.

Whatever your marketing goals for 2022 may be, there’s something for everyone this quarter. Let’s dive in.

For the data-driven

We’re not the first to highlight a shift in best practice when it comes to data acquisition. Our Rise of the Responsible Marketer report which was published last year unpicks the relationship between trust, marketing, and loyalty. Various industry forces have made it harder for marketers to rely on third-party data. Brands and marketers are expected to leverage first-party data in their personalization and retargeting efforts.

First-party data is information about your audience that you have obtained firsthand, it is collected and owned by you. First-party data includes information you hold in your CRM system, data from your website, app, and social media accounts, data around the purchases your customers are making, engagement data derived from the messages you send your addressable audience, and of course survey data. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it gives you a flavor of what is meant by first-party data.

All of these data points can be immensely valuable when devising a digital marketing strategy that lands where you need it to; in the mind of your (future) customer. It’s likely that there is a ton of first-party data you already hold. Yet 87% of marketers say data is their company’s most under-utilized asset.

At Dotdigital we want to change that. Last year we launched segment analytics and single customer view (SCV). Paired with our advanced customer analytics capabilities (remember eRFM?), you can start using these insights to better understand your customer at every level. Single customer view, as the name suggests, can be a powerful tool with which you can research your personas in granular detail, it can also be used as a way to validate your data acquisition strategy. Single customer view in Dotdigital shows you what data points you are collecting, and where there is room for improvement.

Segment analytics is the next level up from that, you can gain engagement, web, and order insights into any segment you create in Dotdigital. So, how has the feedback been? In a nutshell, many of you told us this is awesome, but wanted this level of insights for address books too.
Wish granted.

So with this February release, we give you address book analytics. Similarly to segments, you can now dive into the detail of any address book in your Dotdigital account, and understand what day of the week they are most likely to engage with your content, what products they view on-site, what the purchase profile for that cohort of customers looks like, and more.

Ultimately, this will help you gain a deeper understanding of your customer, and use data-driven insights to improve how you market to your audience.

For the campaign masters

The new year can be a great time to experiment with new channels. Got a mobile app? Then we have something for you. Improvements to push notifications make it a much more versatile channel with which you can drive meaningful next steps, and shorten your subscribers’ journey to complete that all-important action. That may be a purchase, a prompt to confirm a booking or appointment they’ve made with you or a push to discover a new set of subscriptions that you have launched in-app.

Push notifications work best as part of a cross-channel marketing strategy when used sparingly. They can boost overall app engagement by 88%, and achieve high click-through rates when personalized and timed well. For example, the push notification reaction rate peaks at 11 pm at night and is at its lowest around 8 am and again at 6 pm. It’s not hard to deduce what is happening here; consumers are less likely to engage during rush hour (even if fewer people are physically traveling into a place of work, we’re still in ‘wind-up’ or ‘wind-down’ mode at the start and end of our working day).

Then there is the point around relevance, instead of using mobile push notifications as a channel on which you plainly repeat what you already emailed your subscriber base about, use it as an opportunity to reinforce that message, personalize it further, and bring the ball back into your court.

With our February release, you can send customers to a deep-link in-app (i.e. a product or category page) instead of your app homepage. Make it clear where you want them to go, what you’re going to be telling them, and what’s in it for them.

Secondly, you can now set your push notifications up to be super-smart and perform a number of actions when they click through. Say you run a loyalty program and there’s a new message waiting for them in-app that explains all the benefits of the tier they have just hit, your push notification can be set to open this message on click. Similarly, if you choose to run an app-exclusive sale that is time-sensitive, you can now set your push notification to show the relevant products on sale and deliver a streamlined, one-click order process for customers who are ready to seal the deal. The opportunities are endless and largely untapped. Speak to us to find out more about what’s possible with mobile push notifications.

For developers

Let’s talk API’s. API stands for “Application Programming Interface” and gives you a way to programmatically tell one application to talk to another. This might be used to retrieve reporting data, check for events, and even trigger a perfectly timed alert, reminder, or notification. We’ve given our own Dotdigital Developer Hub a much-needed revamp. A collection of comprehensive guides document the art of the possible with our own library of API’s. Especially if you are the more-marketer and less-developer type, knowing what’s possible can help you have constructive conversations with your own development teams and agencies you partner with.

One of the changes we have made with this product release is the increase of our API request size limit (from 15MB to 50MB). This makes it easier to import vast amounts of data, such as contacts. It also opens up possibilities when using our transactional email API to send attachments.

Transactional messaging is a key part of any customer journey. It’s all good and well (and expected) that you prompt customers pre-point of purchase with information about your brand, product, and services. What will really make you stand out from the crowd, however, is completing that experience post-purchase with branded messages that provide updates on their order, an invoice confirmation (this is where that attachment comes in!), or simply a message of support should they require an escalation path in future. Read more about transactional messaging and all things aftersales in this blog.

Not so fast, 2022

Juliette Aiken — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:16:58 +0000

A look back at 2021

Not so fast, 2022

Every year Dotdigital gives its employees a break between Christmas and the new year. It’s the perfect time to relax, reset, and also reflect.

And so before we jump straight into what’s to come, I wanted to share some of my reflections with you here, and provide a recap of some of our favorite launches of 2021.

Did you know…?

We typically launch four product releases a year. We are continuously deploying smaller updates and hotfixes, but anything significant that will affect how you work or inspire new ways of working is tied to quarterly releases.

Dotdigital has a public product roadmap, so you can see what we’re working on. Plus, check out the ‘Have an idea?’ tab next to your scroll bar, where you can post ideas of your own. We receive hundreds of ideas from customers and staff every month, which are all periodically reviewed. You never know, you may just see your idea on our roadmap next!

You can sign up to receive news, free resources, event invitations, and important product announcements here.

In case you missed it

With four product launches a year, even I find it hard to keep up. Here, I recap some of the big announcements that you’ll definitely want to note as you embark on your 2022 strategy.

Integrations hub

In 2021 we launched the Integration hub in the Dotdigital platform. The Integration hub houses a range of self-serve integrations that you can set up in minutes. Think Eventbrite, Zoom Webinars, Typeform, Google Sheets, and more. Check out this Q&A with Dotdigital’s Head of Online Marketing, Blake Jackson, in which we discuss how the Google Sheets integration has helped his team tell better stories through Google Data Studio.

We are working on more self-serve integrations so make sure to keep an eye on the Integration hub in your account with every product launch!

eRFM

e-R-F-M. Engagement. Recency. Frequency. Monetary.

eRFM is an ecommerce behavioral model that uses order and engagement data to organize your (soon-to-be) customers into differentiated segments based on their propensity to buy. In Dotdigital, eRFM powers the Opportunities dashboard, which uncovers engagement and revenue opportunities within your existing contact base.

What was wrong with retargeting in 2020? Not a huge amount, at least for its time. If like many brands you’ve experienced waning repeat purchase and customer retention rates. Consider this: marketers are marketing more, and in turn, consumers are engaging with more digital content than ever.

We’ve observed triple-digit increases across email opens and clicks across some industries. We’re all consuming more content digitally, but our wallets and minds are still the same ‘size’. This means more brands are vying for that same share of mind and share of wallet. Part of the answer lies within the sophisticated tools that Dotdigital has to offer.

The eRFM-powered Opportunities dashboard helps you be where others aren’t, and do what others are not. Check out this ebook which shows you how to use the Opportunities dashboard and find opportunities where the competition isn’t even looking.

Segment analytics

Another update that has helped brands the world over segment smarter, is Segment analytics.

Segment building is part of the day-to-day for many marketers, and lacking data often hinders their optimization. Segment analytics turns segment creation on its head and gives decision-makers and marketing executives a plethora of information that will help them create more considered customer cohorts.

As you build out your segment you can see real-time data about the contacts within it, helping you find the optimum customer-campaign fit, before you hit send. Our customers have loved this functionality so much that they soon turned to us requested we offer the same for address books. And so come February when our next product release lands, you’ll be able to access address book insights too.

Program analytics

Program reporting is nothing new, but we found that marketers struggle to uncover what steps in their marketing programs are sealing the deal, and which are ripe for optimization. Whereas Program reporting continues to give you a birds-eye view to track overall program performance, we decided to introduce Program analytics in September 2021.

Program analytics gives you an in-situ view of your program’s performance, encourages a test-learn-test mindset, and paves the way for channel and message experimentation.

Single Customer View

We expect consumers to voice concerns around data privacy and security more loudly than ever in 2022. Contrary to popular belief, your SCV doesn’t get better with every piece of data you point to it. Building a SCV requires planning, consideration, and curation. And always start with ‘Why’ – when considering what customer data to collect.

Our last release of 2021 gave our customers the ability to build a more responsible SCV. You can use it to gain a better understanding of what it is your customers really want, check that your data enrichment strategy is effective, and drive a customer-centric agenda across your organization. Read more about what the new SCV looks like on our blog.

Apple iOS 15

I couldn’t conclude this blog without a mention of Apple iOS 15, which gave consumers the ability to take control of their data and what is shared with the brands they engage with.

Mail Privacy Protection and Hide My Email are two key parts of the iOS 15 update that have preoccupied the minds of many a marketer in the past few months. For example, Mail Privacy Protection allows iOS 15 users to load email content privately, and not reveal their IP address. Unfortunately for us marketers, this reduces the reliability of your open data.

And so we have given all our users the ability to deprioritize opens and use clicks as a primary metric across our platform, in doing so we provide you with a truer view of customer engagement.

What’s next?

Our Product and Technology teams are working away on some exciting projects that will amongst many other things see the introduction of more self-serve integrations, improved onboarding for new customers, and increased flexibility when it comes to revenue attribution. Have I said too much? Maybe. Just be sure to sign up for our newsletter to ensure you hear about Dotdigital product launches first. 2022 has a lot more in store for us all.

In the meantime, check out our What’s new page to read more about 2021 releases in full.

Marketing analytics 2.0 – dashboards meet workflows

Juliette Aiken — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There is good reason to be optimistic though. We’ve been working away on developing ways in which we can bring analytics and actionable insight into your everyday workflows. Why am I talking about workflows? Well, all dashboards contain data, but not all data has to culminate in a dashboard. The thing about dashboards (no matter how much I love good data vis) is that they typically represent hindsight. And whilst hindsight can be a beautiful thing, sometimes you just need the right data to inform your next decision there and then, and help you decide what you do with your campaign or automation program whilst you’re in build mode(and not when you’re in your next marketing team meeting). And that’s where workflows come in. Most marketers spend a fair amount of time building the perfect segment and crafting a better-than-ever customer journey in Program builder. So that’s exactly where we now serve you your very own valuable, relevant data. Meet dotdigital’s latest platform release in which we bring you major updates that will help you make data-driven decisions every single day.

Find the perfect customer-campaign fit

Firstly, hats off to the 15,000+ users who already use dotdigital to create segments they can market to, this one is for you. Directly in Segment builder, you’ll now find Segment analytics. Segment analytics gives you more insights into (you guessed it) a segment as and when you build it. Across email, web, commerce, and RFM analytics, you have all the data you need to make strategic improvements based on your data. This means you can optimize your audience based on a campaign objective, optimize your content to fit the behaviors the people in your segment are displaying, and learn about your prospects and customers on the go. Email and content marketers will find email and web analytics particularly useful. You can start building out your segment based on demographic data, and use these views to ascertain what day of the week they are most likely to engage, whether they are a high-intent audience based on past engagement, and what pages on your site they’re most interested in. This allows you to optimize your send, select what content you should include, and make informed decisions on where on your site you should drive them to. Ecommerce marketers benefit too from the commerce and RFM analytics tabs. You might discover that your segment has a penchant for a particular product category, has a higher AOV than your average customer, or that your segment consists of a large number of lapsing customers. In turn, you can optimize your campaign by changing your promotion or the logic that underpins the product recommendation type you plan to feature. Plus, we give you the opportunity to benchmark what the analytics are telling you against your own data, by using the ‘Compare segments’ view which lets you compare your newly created segment to any existing one. And naturally, it all works for existing segments too.

Optimize your automation performance with pin-point precision

Another great update for all our customers using Program builder to orchestrate winning customer journeys is the introduction of Program analytics. Earlier this year we introduced improved Program reporting, which gives you a birds-eye view to track the overall performance of each marketing automation program. Now imagine your manager said ‘Our nurture program saw 25% fewer clicks this month versus the previous – can you check that out?’. Sure, you can. But knowing which campaign, text, or touchpoint in that program contributed to that change was hard. Until now. Program analytics in dotdigital gives you an in-situ view of program performance, so you can see exactly what part of your program is working hard and fast, and where it could be optimized. You can see everything from where your contacts enrolled from (a schedule enrolment, enrolled via abandoned cart, a signup form, and more) to how each campaign is performing, whether that’s email, SMS, push notifications, or any other channel you have featured in your program. Another nice way to benchmark your program’s performance against your data is by using the ‘compare campaigns’ view, which lets you compare the performance of campaigns featured in that program. Program reporting and program analytics combined give you all you need to always be optimizing and test new automation strategies with confidence; knowing that you’ll have the insight to determine what is moving the needle.

Put excellence into the expected

Last but not least, we have introduced a myriad of updates that will help you deliver better-than-ever customer experiences. Live chat and timely, relevant transactional communications (think: account creation confirmations, order and shipping updates) are increasingly becoming hygiene factors and key contributors to how your customer perceives your brand. You can use dotdigital Chat to answer any incoming query in a flash, and even acquire new contacts with our integrated Pages and forms functionality. Check out this case study to find out how Converse used live chat to increase its footprint in new markets. We’ve made the Chat widget super-smart with this release, which gives you more flexibility over when it is displayed on-site, and whether you receive notifications of an incoming message via email or web push (or both). Our transactional email API too now makes it even easier for you to deliver a better customer experience. You can add attachments using the API (no more tickets that they can’t log in to view their invoice!) and include metadata via the API to further personalize the email. In the hospitality sector, for example, you might use this to include details about someone’s booking (booking location, booking ID, and more) in an email in which you request they confirm their reservation. We then offer webhooks that report back when they hit ‘Confirm’ in real-time, resulting in a seamless experience for you and your customer.

Customer experience optimization

There’s a lot more in this release, from updates to our WooCommerce plug-in to an all-new Zoom Webinar integration. You can read more about everything that’s new in dotdigital this September here. And we’re not stopping there. Save the date for October 27th when we launch our next product release, it’s going to be a good one. Make sure you’re set up to receive product updates from us by updating your preferences.

Who cares about open rates?

Gavin Laugenie — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Who does care?

Email open rates have always been a controversial topic matter. I’ve worked with many brands who regularly ask what a reasonable open rate is for their campaigns; they search high and low for benchmark reports to give them the stats and figures they need to show the powers that be that they conform and they’re keeping up with their peers. But who is driving this obsession? Who really cares? Well, on some level, we all do. And quite rightly so. We all want to know what we need to do to make our emails better, more effective, and lucrative. So all marketers care about email open rates. The real question is, should we? And the answer is… not really. Opens have always been a “noisy” metric. As a result, it should always be considered a guide, a possibility that the end recipient has opened your email. The reason for that lies in the mechanics of how opens work; they don’t allow for pinpoint accuracy. An open can be tracked in an email because they include a tracking pixel. That pixel is displayed when the recipient opens an email. That image downloading notifies our servers, and the email is recorded as being opened. So any open, a 2 second peek, and accidental click of a mouse will be recorded as an open. So with that being said, your open rates aren’t as accurate as you’d hope. Also, comparing one email open rate to another isn’t fair; there are so many factors that come into making an email successful or not. The time of day, subject line, content, design, placement of the call to action (CTA), and those are just the factors that you control. You need to also factor in recipients who (and I hate to break this to you) aren’t sitting with their laptops and mobile phones open, waiting for your email to pounce on and have a read. They have lives and will open as and when they want to and when they have the time. That means (unfortunately) they won’t open every email. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not engaged. It’s like not picking up a call from a good friend or answering a text message straight away when you’re busy, it’s not a good time right now, but when you’re free, you’ll pick up the phone and find out what they wanted. I’ll apologize now if I’m bursting your bubble here, but opens aren’t perfect; they’re flawed. And yes, Apple’s forthcoming changes will make our noisy metric a little nosier and less reliable and accurate, but that doesn’t mean we should stop using the metric altogether. It would appear that Apple will be serving up a false open for all active users of its Mail Privacy Protection. Still, a positive byproduct of this could be if Apple flags your email as open, indicating that this email address is alive, well, and active. Every cloud ay. All this being said, an open will not deliver what we need, the more important question to be bear in mind should be…

What is your fundamental objective?

Whenever we hit that send button and our emails travel across the internet, what are we hoping to happen? If you’re saying an open, you’re mistaken. Well, not entirely, yes, of course, we want our recipients to open our emails, but that’s the end game. We want a link to be clicked, a document downloaded, a forward to a friend, products viewed on our website or landing page (so we can track them), a demo booked, purchase, or donation. We want engagement. Whether you consider yourself a pure-play commerce marketer or a non-commerce marketer, an open won’t do any of that for you. But it will get the ball rolling. So as I said, don’t give up on them. Keep working on making each subject line more engaging than the last. Of course, ensure that your deliverability is as strong as it can be. At dotdigital, we have a fantastic deliverability team who are always happy to lend advice and consult on what can help your emails perform better and make sure everything is working as it should. We need to consider working on our email design and driving the recipient to our CTA(s) and deliverability. That conversion, whatever it may be, is not going to happen in your email. Even if your email is an abbreviated version of war and peace, and your plan is for the recipient to read it, you still want that person to pop to your website for more good stuff after that epic read. So make your intentions clear, and let your recipients know what to do next. If it’s not apparent, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Ok, now what?

Ok, Gavin, if you’re so bright, how do we know people are engaged if we can’t see that they’ve opened our emails? Well, that’s an excellent question, reader, and I’m glad you’ve asked.

Focus on clicks If you’re looking for engagement, and believe me, you are. Clicks are where it’s at. If your recipients click on a link in your email, you’ve hit the jackpot. They’ve read your email, want to know more, or your creative is so on point they were drawn to the big shiny button, and the rest is history.
If you build it, they will open. Have faith. You’ve not just started sending emails; hopefully, you’ve had a bit of a head start. You have an idea of what’s hitting the mark and what isn’t. The playing field may have changed slightly, but the game is still the same. All the techniques you’ve used will work again. You’re going to have to make sure that your content is on point. Cutting corners will not do. This leads me to…
Zero party data Like any good relationship with a partner or your best friend, the more you’ve listened to what they have to say about themselves, the better you are at buying them gifts or inviting them to concerts; you know it’ll resonate because you know them well. So ask what your customers want, and give it to them. But take an interest in what they tell you. The more you listen, the more you’ll learn about them, the more relevant the content, and the better the conversion rate.
If it ain’t broke… Similar to my first point, but specifically referring to subject lines. A particular format, addition of emojis or personalization, even a bit of humor will still entice people to open. The inbox isn’t changing; the name of the game is standing out. So…
Get creative, be the purple lightsaber. In a previous Star Wars-themed blog, I referred to Mace Windu’s lightsaber. It’s purple, and everyone else has a green or blue lightsaber so that you can spot him a mile off in a crowd. That’s what you’re striving for. But it’s not just great subject lines you want. Show-stopping creative, strong imagery, GIFs, interaction from carousels and the like, and collapsible sections are all things to incorporate into the campaign itself. This kind of stuff will make your recipients form a wry smile because they know something special has hit their inbox.
Give them more than one outlet. If you can communicate with your customers on more than one channel, you’re guaranteed to make them stickier.

For more information on iOS 15, read our blog. Alternatively, you can watch our webinar on the same topic here.