Dotdigital’s 2023 releases wrapped up: what’s landed this year

As we bid farewell to 2023, it’s time to reflect on the incredible advancements we’ve made throughout the year. With four major releases, we’ve continued to push the boundaries of marketing technology, empowering you as a marketer to achieve more than ever before.

In this blog, we’ll explore the top five platform changes that have made the most significant impact on marketers like yourself across the globe. We’ll also discuss how they provide you with the tools to elevate and enhance your marketing in 2024 and beyond.

1. Revolutionizing marketing with WinstonAI™

WinstonAI, Dotdigital’s cutting-edge marketing intelligence engine, has been a game-changer for marketers in 2023. We launched it in May and have been adding new functionality throughout the year. WinstonAI provides you with usable AI-driven insights, letting you make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns in seconds.

By integrating generative AI into Dotdigital, we’ve made it accessible in your day-to-day work by providing you with personalized inspiration when creating email and SMS campaigns, that will save you a whole heap of time and keep you focused.

It offers tips on improving email tone, identifying areas that need more detail, and highlights opportunities to make your campaigns even more engaging. WinstonAI can even help you create better subject lines and increase open rates, by providing three alternative suggestions based on data from your most recent 25 email sends to figure out what’s most appealing to your audience.

WinstonAI also includes grammar and spell check, streamlining the campaign creation process. This feature, built into the campaign builder, scans content across email, SMS, surveys, and pages and forms, identifying errors and offering suggestions. By reducing time spent proofing campaigns, you can focus on being more creative and strategic.

Another innovative feature of WinstonAI is the one-click email to SMS conversion which helps you adhere to the 160-character limit for SMS. It analyzes text and provides a shortened version of your email campaign. This allows you to easily convert content to SMS, aligning the copy and keeping the core message front and center. This cross-channel approach is essential for driving engagement and delivering seamless experiences.

The latest release in November included the ability to ask WinstonAI to rewrite messages based on tone, shortening or expanding text, rephrasing, and including emojis. This helps you tailor your message and tone to your audience, ultimately improving campaign performance.

WinstonAI is seamlessly integrated into the Dotdigital platform making it an indispensable tool for busy marketers as we move swiftly into 2024.

2. Streamlining data management with unified contact data

In today’s data-filled world, marketers are always on the lookout for ways to bring everything together to better understand their customers and deliver the most personalized experience possible. That’s why we rolled out unified contact data in September this year, which helps you combine all your customer data into one spot so you can create more joined up and relevant experiences for your customers.

Unified contact data makes life easier by bringing all data together into a single record, offering a comprehensive 360-degree view of each customer. With all your contact data in one place, you’ll save time and effort, waving goodbye to manual data syncs or juggling multiple variations of customer data.

With a complete view of customer data, you can create seamless cross-channel experiences, engaging customers on their preferred channels and ensuring a consistent brand presence throughout their journey.

Let’s dive into some key use cases of unified contact data:

• Engage with your customers on their preferred channel: unified contact data helps you pinpoint your customers’ preferred channel (whether this is email, SMS, or another channel), so you can reach out to them in the most effective way possible.
• Ensure your customers get a tailored experience: with unified contact data, you can ensure automations you create in the program builder cater to your customer’s preferences, which could be email, SMS, or a combination of both.
• Create segments that include both email and SMS engagement data: unified contact data allows you to create segments that take into account both email and SMS engagement data, giving you a more accurate picture of your customers’ behavior.

As your business grows and evolves, your customer data sources will grow with it. Unified contact data ensures that Dotdigital remains a future-proof platform, capable of adapting to the changing needs of you and your organization. By providing a single source of truth for contact data, we’ve enabled you to build deeper connections with your audience and deliver campaigns that resonate on a personal level.

3. Expanding communication channels with SMS and MMS

With its high engagement rates, SMS is an indispensable part of a successful cross-channel marketing strategy.

On top of our already extensive SMS offering, this year, we’ve added even more functionality that will help you get even more out of engaging with your customers on SMS. We’ve added advanced revenue attribution for SMS, which will give you valuable insights into campaign performance by tracking both direct and assisted campaign revenue. This comprehensive understanding of each customer’s journey and individual campaign impact is crucial for optimizing campaigns and planning future marketing efforts.

We’ve also added the ability to capture SMS opt in during the checkout process to allow you to capitalize on mobile shopping habits. By offering your customers the option to provide their mobile numbers during checkout, you can acquire more opted-in contacts to send them tailored mobile offers, discounts, and keep customers informed throughout the entire purchase process. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and stronger brand loyalty.

In addition, we’ve introduced advanced personalization which allows you to create highly targeted and personalized SMS content using liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language. This results in better engagement, improved conversion rates, and a more seamless customer experience.

For North American audiences, we’ve introduced MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). MMS enables you to send visual messages, such as images and gifs, to your customers and is proven to enhance mobile engagement and conversions by 41%.

The importance of SMS and MMS in marketing can‘t be overstated. As mobile devices continue to dominate the way consumers shop, marketers must embrace these channels to stay connected with their customers and deliver personalized and engaging messages.

Dotdigital’s latest functionalities and improvements in SMS and MMS offer you the tools you need to elevate your marketing strategies and drive success well into the future.

4. Enhancing customer experiences through UI, UX, and API improvements

Throughout 2023, we introduced significant visual enhancements to the Dotdigital platform aimed at saving you time and making your life easier. These improvements were driven by your feedback and designed to streamline the platform, making it more efficient and user-friendly.

Our updated navigation offers you a more seamless experience, with all channels now consolidated under one campaign section and a new audience area for managing contacts, segments, personas, and more. The analytics section has been revamped for easier access to reporting, while the new connect area caters to all your data requirements.

Additionally, campaign management tools have been improved to simplify day-to-day tasks, such as campaign replies, sign-off processes, and campaign tags management. These changes enable you to save time and focus on creating engaging campaigns.

One of our customers’ favorite features we’ve introduced is the campaign heat maps, which provides a visual representation of email engagement. By using a traffic light system to indicate click rates, you can optimize your email content placement to maximize engagement. This valuable insight helps you to refine your emails and drive better future results.

The acquisition of Fresh Relevance in September further enhanced the platform’s capabilities, and to support our joint customers, we developed the ability to switch between accounts seamlessly. This integration streamlines the user experience and promotes efficient workflows.

These enhancements to our platform are important for you to adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape. By providing a more efficient, user-friendly platform, we’re empowering you to create more effective campaigns and drive better results, both now and in the future.

5. Strengthening integrations and partnerships

Having data together in one place is one of the most important priorities for marketers. When all your data is in one spot, it can be easily combined to create powerful and actionable insights that you wouldn’t have had if your data were siloed. That’s why, this year we’ve continued to add more integrations into our platform to let you connect as easily as possible, so you can have far more ‘aha’ moments.

In September, we introduced our new Connect area so you can easily manage your data and integrations in one convenient location, ensuring you’re set up for success. The Connect area houses all of your data including insight and commerce data and lets you connect digital marketing channels, and a vast array of integrations, including both self-serve and verified partner-built ones.

Over the past year, we’ve added more than 30 in-house integrations including eStar, Marketplacer, Commercetools, Gorgias, and Netsuite Oracle, bringing the total number of integrations to over 150.

This year, we also introduced the ability to create more engaging and personalized campaigns through the use of branded dynamic app blocks. These new blocks are available as drag and drop in EasyEditor and allow you to easily incorporate third-party content into your emails and landing pages without any coding required.

This not only helps you get more out of their existing martech stack but also reduces unsubscribe rates from your customers, as they’ll receive more relevant and personalized content.

These top 5 release elements from 2023 are just the tip of the iceberg of what was released to Dotdigital customers in February, May, September, and November. These advancements empower you to elevate your marketing strategies and achieve better results in 2024 and beyond.

To make the most of these innovations and enhance your marketing efforts, log in to your Dotdigital account and explore the new features today. Alternatively, get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to see how you can enhance your marketing in 2024 and beyond.

If you’re not a Dotdigital customer yet, you can discover how Dotdigital’s cutting-edge marketing technology can transform your business. Request a demo and experience the power of Dotdigital’s platform for yourself.