Thanks to the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, I think we can all agree that 2023 to date has already felt like a quantum leap when it comes to AI. We knew from talking to our customers that they loved how these new tools were saving them time and upping the quality of their work.

So, we wanted to make it even easier for our customers to access this new generation of AI in our platform at a click of a button.

Enter, generative AI for Dotdigital.

Digital marketing powered by WinstonAI

WinstonAI encompasses all sorts of known and new smart technology in the Dotdigital platform. Most recently, we added a new power to the mix: Generative AI. For this, WinstonAI draws on Microsoft Azure’s generative AI technology (GPT-3.5) to offer suggestions and inspiration on how to take your campaign content to the next level. Built directly into the Dotdigital platform, WinstonAI can now easily provide you with hints, tips, and advice on how to improve your email marketing. 

But what exactly is generative AI?

Generative AI is a form of machine learning (ML) that can produce different types of content. From text, audio, and imagery – generative AI can analyze huge amounts of data to generate highly relevant content. The leaps in technology made in recent years mean that the power of generative AI is now available to marketers in their day-to-day work – and we’ve incorporated this into the Dotdigital platform. 

Unleash your creativity with AI

With WinstonAI, you can receive campaign feedback on your email content in real-time. Use this feedback to gain inspiration and find data-driven and creative improvements to increase engagement levels.

WinstonAI shows up when you need him most: 

• Email content: WinstonAI appears in the Dotdigital email editor and provides you with personalized recommendations on how to refine your copy. Whether that’s simplifying your language, adapting the tone to fit your message, or giving you valuable tips on how to make your content more engaging.
• Subject line: Improve the open rates of your email campaigns with subject line recommendations. WinstonAI expertly analyzes up to 25 of your previous subject lines and provides tailored suggestions to resonate more effectively with your audience. You’ll receive 3 alternative solutions to choose from.

The benefits of WinstonAI

• Get inspiration quickly. It’s impossible to always be on top of your game. WinstonAI is there for you when you need help getting campaign ideas off the ground.
• Avoid writer’s block. Gone are the days of scratching your head, wondering what to write. Our AI assistant is always learning, so it will never run out of tips and suggestions.
• Focus on what matters. Because he’s in your workspace, WinstonAI saves time, making your workday more efficient and freeing up your time to focus on the bigger picture.
• Improve engagement and conversions. WinstonAI pulls from a vast pool of data and experience, giving you new ideas for campaigns you might not have thought of yet, ultimately leading to more engaging content that delivers conversions.
• Simple and effective. Native in our email builder, you don’t have to worry about integrating new AI software into your existing martech stack, we’ve already done that for you.

What are WinstonAI users saying?

WinstonAI’s users across the globe praise its capacity to simplify email campaign content creation and improve employment rates. Hear firsthand from one of our many happy WinstonAI users, Alana Arthur, from Wittner Shoes in Australia:

How does WinstonAI’s generative AI capability work?

Behind the scenes, WinstonAI draws on generative AI technology from our long-time technology partner Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure was one of the early sponsors of OpenAI, one of the foremost innovators in this space, and the team behind ChatGPT.

We’re proud to work with Microsoft Azure on this because our relationship with them ensures we can deliver high-quality product features, great data governance, and security as standard, so you can be confident that all your data is protected and you’re adopting AI responsibly. 

Some may ask why this is of sadness, especially since the apparent support Belarus is giving Russia. The answer is plain and simple – people. When it comes to people, there was no support from our team members in Belarus for this war. Let me explain more…

For those who have never been, Minsk is a wonderful city – and I know this due to personal experience, because of the many visits myself and my team have made. Much of it was destroyed during World War 2, so most of it is relatively new, but there are still some pockets of buildings, architecture, and culture that survived.  

As you can imagine as an ex-Soviet state there are lots of Russian influences: the main boulevard running through Minsk is wide and straight with buildings on either side that are not allowed to go over a certain height. Interesting fact: that building height is exactly half the road width! There is an amazing red church, an octopus ‘spaceship looking’ library, a huge opera house, and, like many other countries in the region including Ukraine, it has an amazing set of universities, many of which create exceptionally skilled engineers.

I remember my first visit to Belarus shortly after starting at Dotdigital in 2014 when I made a point of having one-to-ones with all of the team members in a nearby cafe and realized quite quickly that their dedication and skills were a great asset to Dotdigital. The team was kind enough to show me around Minsk, and I learned a lot about their culture, values, and independent pride.    

With the Belarusian government elections in 2020, things started to change rapidly. The election was marred by claims of widespread electoral fraud. Numerous countries refused to accept the result of the election, as did the European Union which imposed sanctions on Belarusian officials deemed to be responsible for the fraud itself, as well as subsequent violence and repression of protests.

In 2021, the Belarusian military forcefully landed a flight that was transiting Belarus airspace in order to imprison a protestor. This soon meant that our teams could no longer visit our team members in Minsk by air (an EU-led no-fly zone across all of Belarus came into effect) nor could our colleagues come to visit our head office.

When COVID struck we all learned to work remotely better than ever before which enabled our operations to continue. However, with Russia’s attack on Ukraine at the start of 2022, some of which came from the Belarusian border, it became apparent that keeping our Belarus Engineering hub going longer term was becoming more difficult. Further sanctions by western governments meant that even paying our team was becoming more challenging.

We, therefore, took the decision early in 2022 to offer a relocation scheme for our team in Belarus to join our Engineering hub in Poland.   

I am very pleased to say that with the scheme we have successfully relocated 65% (11) of our Belarusian team to Poland, enabling them to continue working for Dotdigital. Thanks to the Polish Government through the Polish Business Harbour scheme we were able to get visas for our team and with the help of our superstar Polish team our Belarusian team members were welcomed with open arms.

As I mentioned at the start of this, it is a sad day for Dotdigital as 5 of our team are unable to make the relocation work. They will always be a big part of our Dotfamily; many had long tenure but made the choice which was right for them, to not relocate.

We want to thank all of the team who are continuing with us and all those who have dedicated much time to building our fantastic products, websites, and more.  I hope to be able to see Minsk again one day but more importantly, I hope to once again see peace in Ukraine.

And while those strategies will differ by industry, sophistication, segment, and more – responsible marketers have long understood the value of a direct relationship with their customers, and email has long been the cornerstone of direct customer engagement.

Apple’s recent announcements may seem to impact that direct customer engagement, or at least shake things up. But digging deeper, there is much to celebrate as responsible marketers are rewarded for valuing personal data and building customer trust. What’s more, the announcement is a preview of features set to be released in September 2021. We have time to get ready for any big changes.

What has Apple done?

The iOS 15 update brings with it a range of new privacy features, but there are two which will have a direct impact on marketers, and email marketers in particular. These are:

• Mail Privacy Protection provides anonymity to recipients receiving emails on iOS devices by preventing accurate tracking.
• Hide My Email provides recipients the ability to get emails without sharing their real email address with senders.

Why did they do it?

Privacy is important. We all know this. As consumers, we expect this, so we should expect this as marketers too.

In reality, we’ve seen this coming for a long time. Data protection acts around the world have had a big impact on consumers’ understanding of data and their privacy rights.

While they don’t always understand what happens to their data after they hand over their permissions, it’s a brand’s responsibility to keep them in control and informed. Apple’s update is an opportunity for brands to build trust among its users. It’s helping to increase people’s awareness of data and privacy which, while initially troubling for marketers, will yield better results in the future, driving innovation and stronger customer relationships in the future.

What does it mean for you?

We’re yet to know exactly what the impact will be. However, a well-educated guess implies that short term and from a functional perspective some key data points will be impacted for those recipients you send to using iOS15:

• You will not be able to correctly track what time an email was opened
• Location of email opens will be less accurate
• The number of opens will not be an accurate measure of success

But this is nothing to worry about. There has been a flurry of conversations among marketers about the merits of open rates since the announcement. At Dotdigital, this is nothing new. In essence, open rates are a vanity metric. Recipients flicking through their inbox may count as opens when in actuality they haven’t engaged and may have barely even looked at your email. It offers no insight into whether users are engaging with your marketing.

Open rates will still exist in some capacity, and when combined with clicks, purchase information, account log-ins, and replies this will all add up to a more comprehensive view of customer engagement.

More reliable customer engagement

Over the years, marketers have used different engagement metrics to measure the success of their email marketing. Opens, clicks, complaints, inactivity, and purchases are all available to help paint a picture of how emails are performing. Altogether, these metrics can be used to devise a strategy to maximize return and ensure recipients who want to continue to hear from your brand.

Using this holistic approach to measuring customer engagement ensures your customer privacy is respected, while still providing you with the ability to measure the impact of your email marketing.

Consumers do not want personalization at the sake of their privacy.

Consumers want brands to both earn and maintain their trust, that precious direct relationship. Responsible marketers focused on adding value for their consumers and revenue for their companies have long seen this coming and will continue to lean on technology providers able to provide personalization.

What can you do?

So, how can you be ready for the changes? Or, better yet, how can you use these updates to your advantage to build better, stronger relationships with your customers?

Be open, honest, and transparent

This update is an opportunity. Responsible marketers know the importance of honest, transparent practices. To build a loyal customer base, marketers have to be explicit about how they plan to use customer data. This helps build trust, and the more a customer trusts you, the more time and money they’ll invest in your brand.

When Apple’s update comes into effect, you can explain the benefits of a tailored, personalized experience as you collect consent. Shoppers will be more willing to share their data when you adopt an open and honest approach because they trust you to act responsibly with it.

Adjust your success metrics

Open rates aren’t the be-all and end-all. By adjusting your success metrics to consider clicks, conversions, and ROI you will get a better understanding of customer engagement.

As it requires active engagement with your marketing, these metrics offer more insight than most. You can learn more about what makes email subscribers sit up and pay attention than just looking at open rates alone.

Focus on zero-party data

Zero-party data, as defined by Forrester, refers to explicit data a customer intentionally and proactively shares with you. This is how you should be collecting the bulk of your data. Customers can then choose to tell you what they want you to know.

As well as collecting preferences, you should be asking customers to enrich their own data. Overall, this will help you build a stronger one-to-one relationship with your audience, and give you more reliable and valuable data to base your personalization on.

How will Dotdigital help you through?

At Dotdigital, we’re strong advocates of responsible marketing. As a result, we’ve anticipated the needs of our clients and have built a platform full of the tools to help you engage customers efficiently while building trust.

Consent insight

In anticipation of the introduction of GDPR in 2018, we released a whole host of updates to empower marketers and shoppers to have better control of their data.

Consent insight allows marketers to act responsibly when it comes to managing their contact database. It records all the information you need about a contact’s consent including the date and time they signed up to receive your marketing.

Similarly, to enable marketers to process ‘Right to be Forgotten’ requests, we’ve made it simple to delete contact data with ease.

With the approaching update to Apple’s privacy features, consent insight will be able to store the different consent you hold on every customer. Ultimately this will make it easier to segment, target, and personalize your marketing.

Marketing preferences

You can create an unlimited number of marketing preferences giving you endless opportunities to enrich your customer data. Using surveys, forms, and preference centers, you can easily and regularly collect explicit data from your contacts.

By encouraging shoppers to share as much information as possible with you, they’ll be able to craft their own customized journey. The explicit data they hand over to you can be used to create relevant and targeted segments.

Double opt-in

Double opt-in is an automated confirmation email which asks to confirm that they want to receive your marketing. This ensures that you database is full of engaged contacts.

With the changes about to come into effect with the iOS 15 update, having an automated double opt-in process will ensure subscribers are fully informed about what they’re signing up to receive.

Live chat

Live chat is a vital channel to enforce the connection between you and your customers. As a channel, it promotes two-way conversations that can be used to form stronger connections with your audience. Also, like zero-party data, customers have made the first move, reaching out to you, meaning that they’re in control of the relationship.

SMS

SMS is a marketing channel that has never relied on opens to measure success, and with read rates of 98%, its success is undeniable.

In light of the iOS 15 update, brands should be adding SMS to their marketing mix as a necessity. With country-specific templates, we’ve set you up for success. All the right opt-outs for each region are included to ensure you’re able to get your SMS campaigns up and running quickly and responsibly.

iOS 15: game-changer or opportunity in disguise?

Dotdigital, like Apple, believes that privacy is key for consumer confidence. As such, it’s embedded in our culture of long-term growth, alongside security, sustainability, and trust.

While these changes to customer privacy feel like they’re going to make our lives more difficult, it’s important to see what opportunities lie ahead of us. Clean data, fully informed consent, and additional marketing channels are just some benefits this update will bring.

As we learn more about these changes and what they’ll mean for the many email marketers who work with Dotdigital, we’ll be keeping you up-to-date throughout.

What does being carbon neutral mean?

Why is it important to be carbon neutral?

How did we do it?

Defining our goal

Measuring our impact

Setting our targets

What’s next?

The Dotdigital platform is the preferred cross-channel solution for some of the biggest ecommerce brands in the world. And with email at our core, we empower merchants to navigate their business growth, helping them drive revenue through new and repeat orders, plus retain their customers at scale. Our offering has always stood out because of our advanced commerce capabilities coupled with our expert people power.

Being recognized in the Shopify Plus Certified App Program is a momentous leap forward in our relationship with Shopify Plus – an enterprise ecommerce platform that’s cost-effective, secure, flexible and easy to use, and with a valued community of merchants. Its certified apps are hand-selected for their quality and ability to meet complex merchant needs. Dotdigital, along with all the other certified apps, were formally reviewed by the Shopify App Review Team to ensure it met advanced requirements in performance, security, privacy, and technical support.

Shopify Plus in Dotdigital

Dotdigital is sophisticated and trusted, catering to the needs of ambitious ecommerce marketers. We have the most complete cross-channel marketing automation integration, designed with merchants in mind.

Working together means we can empower brands to automate their customer engagement at scale.

Your marketing team can manage the entire customer lifecycle from one platform, from acquisition to retention and re-activation. The integration helps you put your store data to work. What’s more, our scalable automation infrastructure makes orchestrating complex marketing programs easy, ideal for growing customer revenues and value. And because speed and ease of use are our strong points, not to mention dedicated professional service and deliverability experts, Shopify Plus merchants are always in the best digital and physical hands.

Dotdigital for Shopify Plus helps you deliver meaningful marketing messages to more shoppers, inspiring customer loyalty that will last. Here are just some of our integration capabilities:

• Integrates with Shopify, Shopify Plus, and Shopify Flow
• Listed on Shopify’s App store and Shopify Plus’ certified plus partner collection
• Easy to install, and fast to get up and running using our installation and training videos
• Ecommerce essentials: sync customer, order, cart, product catalog data, and more
• Acquire more customers with complementary tools such as pages and forms
• Automate cross-channel lifecycle campaigns based on customer behavior: Win back lapsed shoppers with smart abandoned cart and browse campaigns, or keep customers engaged with alerts across email, SMS, social, and more
• Turn store-based events into quick-win marketing campaigns
• Improve CLV and ROI with AI-driven product recommendations
• Identify valuable customer segments with RFM persona modelling in our dedicated Commerce Intelligence dashboards
• Action next-best steps: persona movement reporting shows you exactly which customers are lapsing and which are graduating to new levels of loyalty
• Stay close to your customers with channels like SMS and live chat, all available in Dotdigital
• 24/7 support from our global, world-class team

“The Shopify Plus Certified App program is designed to meet the advanced requirements of the world’s fastest growing brands,” said Loren Padelford, GM at Shopify Plus. “We’re happy to welcome Dotdigital to the program, bringing their insight and experience in omnichannel marketing to the Plus merchant community.”

We’re truly proud to have been recognized as a best-of-breed partner by Shopify Plus. Being certified brings with it new advantages for our existing customers, equipping them with what they need to drive more value from their commerce.  We now have access to a dedicated developer success team, meaning we’re able to find solutions to our customers’ complex problems quicker. Moreover, we get a full understanding of upcoming product updates, so we can work these into the integration at lightning speed.

Ultimately, merchants can be assured that not only are they choosing the right marketing tools for their Shopify store, but that their brand growth is futureproofed with Dotdigital.

Steve Shaw, Dotdigital CTO

Just as email marketing became marketing automation, today’s forward-thinking marketer is increasingly seeking an omnichannel marketing solution. This acquisition enables faster product innovation to better meet the needs of future marketers, extending our proposition to include mobile messaging comprising of SMS, social media channels and live chat tools.

COMAPI is already a successful brand with strong growth and revenues within the CPaaS market and, with Dotdigital’s full support, will continue to work directly with its customers, which include Gap, eBay, TSB, British Airways, Carphone Warehouse and Collect Plus. Dotdigital and COMAPI already have numerous shared clients which include Superdry, Hayes Recruitment, Daisy Group and betting giant Ladbrokes.

“By adding COMAPI to our business, Dotdigital is executing its vision to be an omnichannel marketing automation platform,” said Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital group.

“COMAPI has built an impressive platform which, integrated with our software, will allow our customers access to the next generation of consumer engagement marketing technology, aiding retention and boosting our competitive advantage in securing new customers. We are pleased to welcome the COMAPI team and look forward to supporting their business plan and introducing their technology to our global customers.”

COMAPI’s Managing Director Paul Putman, who was involved in the deal, commented on how the merger will have a positive impact on the CPaaS market:

“We are all excited by the opportunity the acquisition represents. It enables COMAPI to accelerate its plan and take advantage of the rapid growth in the CPaaS and conversational commerce market. I also believe that with this acquisition, the Dotdigital group of companies will be the obvious technology providers of choice to any business or software platform that needs to communicate with consumers over digital, social and mobile channels.”

COMAPI has been supported by various funders which has helped it to develop and grow over the last 16+ years. Technology Venture Partners LLP’s Nick Simmonds commented on how the news marks a successful exit for COMAPI’s previous funders:

“It has been a pleasure working with Paul Putman and the team at COMAPI and we are delighted with the way in which the company has developed into a technology leader in the conversational messaging market space. We wish the company every success for the future.”

We were already excited about the future, and we are even more so with today’s news. Please join me in welcoming the COMAPI team into the Dotfamily.

For more information about the omnichannel technology, visit www.comapi.com.

Coming from a background of IT leadership, I’m incredibly fortunate to have seen 15 years of change. It’s something you must love in IT and interestingly it has been part of my standard interview qualifying questions for IT staff for many years. For those outside the IT team looking in at their IT colleagues, there is however, a myth of them being completely adverse to change and causing friction between many a CMO and CIO.

In my experience, I’ve generally found it comes down to a single root cause. If you break down, to the simplest of explanations, IT systems are made up of billions of 1’s and 0’s.  If even one of those 1’s or 0’s are not in alignment, it could behave in a different way from designed, not work at all, or potentially take down a load of other stuff which is critical to the operation of the business. Understanding this will ultimately help explain why CIOs and their IT teams need time, effort and concentration when working with you to achieve your marketing tech solutions. Not understanding this will likely lead to a lot of frustration, swearing and friction on why something just can’t be done today.

I’m now working as a CTO but in this blog I will draw upon my experience when I first arrived as a CIO (although much of this advice applies to both roles). So for this blog I asked myself this; what really made a difference to the success of an email marketing project when the CMO came to me as CIO?

1. Help the CIO understand why the marketing solution is needed

You need to explain how it fits into what the business strategy or goals are and what the success metrics look like.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘why are you questioning me about my marketing stuff? It’s not up to you to decide whether it goes ahead…” Indeed, the CIO is not there to ‘check your work’.  The reason why this is important is it can enable a good start to the collaboration and buy-in of why this project is important to the business and how much time and effort can ultimately be assigned to make sure there is a good return on investment (ROI). Also looking holistically, it will enable the linking of the top level goals of the CMO and CIO’s objectives. In my first paragraph I talked about a set of numbers, IT folk are good with numbers, that’s our business, so demonstrating this can really aid buy-in. Any business would be mad to put a marketing solution in place without taking into account all the costs to implement and operate it.  Your IT colleagues can assist the design, implementation and operational costs; however they will need your leadership…

2. Keep ownership of that project

CIOs and their IT team are not the other side of a wall waiting to catch projects generated from their CMO.

Any projects have to be collaborative and for me, the best projects have been led by the business area that has ownership.  Therefore the CMO and their marketing team should keep ownership of the email marketing project at all times, whilst including the CIO as a key project team member. Larger IT teams will have business analysts (BA) and having them involved at the early stages of the project can really help map out the flow and requirements of what you’re trying to achieve. Putting in the ground work early with collaborative workshops will really help nut out the key information.

Again coming back to the 1’s and 0’s, the email marketing system won’t work to how it was designed if you haven’t implemented it the way you need it! Having IT involved from ‘cradle to grave’ ultimately pays off – there’s nothing worse for a CIO than having to get involved in a project halfway through its design or implementation. Even worse is a CMO being stuck with a system that doesn’t do what they wanted or is inflexible to change. Thinking forward, especially to multichannel, and how your current CRM, ERP or ecommerce systems are collating data is key to how you’re going to market in the future. Therefore being able to extract this data and integrate it into your ESP is going to be important for your CIO to get his head around.

3. The best IT systems in the world K.I.S.S…

…Keep It Stupidly Simple.

Building complexity in your business and marketing processes may ultimately have an adverse effect on your email marketing technology. Oddly, I have spent most of my career trying to implement simple systems that IT don’t need to babysit in live operations. Low administrative overhead is key to a good ROI and helping demonstrate this to CIOs will help. IT don’t want to look after the CMOs technology systems, they would much rather be working on the next project to solve the next problem. Pragmatism is important.

In a previous role, I once had to put a halt on a multi-million pound access control project, as the right solution, in my view, was actually ‘a man, a piece of rope and a some good common sense’ – but being serious, complexity should be rooted out where it is not adding value. Computers are not there to fix all problems and it’s important to know the problem you’re trying to solve, not the solution you want to put in to solve some problems you have.

The Cloud

No blog would be complete these days without the word Cloud, but this is where Cloud computing can really help. Here at dotmailer, we are a cloud-based solution for email marketers. Our mission is to build our Software As A Service (SAAS) platform to play well with others. Our service can give you sophisticated, complex marketing capabilities without the pain of on premise infrastructure and can still enable integration with your internal IT systems. Knowing that your email marketing solution has the ability to connect to other systems (e.g. Salesforce, Magento, Dynamics) out of the box and your own custom systems using our API, is key information a CIO will want to know and having this to hand will help your project. It’s also good to know that dotmailer can provide a Custom Integrations service to help with connecting up your systems, which can really help your CIO if they are constrained by their own internal BA and development resources.

4. IT strategy and policy is important and may impact your solution.

They’re usually there to protect your business and so these need to be factored in.

Your CIO is usually going to have a huge amount of responsibility and accountability in data protection and its security.  These things do matter and have to be factored in, especially when you’re storing personal data. The CIO will want to know that these areas are being catered for in your email marketing project, so it’s worth making sure you understand what policies and practises are in place in your business. Many best practises should be embraced as ultimately these (plus country specific legislation on data protection) have been implemented for a very good reason and if they’re executed well they will help you gain a better ROI.

Understanding the IT strategy and roadmap will also play an important part of any email marketing project. A lot of the data you need will likely lie within business critical systems and if these are undergoing a major overhaul in the future there may be reluctance from your CIO to invest in new integrations to new technology. The trick here will be to work with your CIO on creating flexibility within the integrations so that they can be multipurpose as your business’ systems change, adapt, or if you decide to change ESP. Talking in this sort of language will hit home with your CIO as it will make that investment feel more worthwhile, with a better ROI, than a short term piece of development that may be thrown away. Understanding the technology roadmap and any periods where changes are frozen, will be useful when planning out your email marketing project, so these should be jotted down in the project plan.

5. GIGO (Garbage In = Garbage Out)

This is an age old CIO’s term, but it still stands true.

Having a massive list of your entire customer base that you email regularly is ‘old world’. You need a smaller list of your engaged customers, which you are ideally targeting based on the raft of good data you have on them. This data is ever growing and offloading this heavy duty processing to an email marketing provider such as dotmailer, will be good news for your CIO. This will mean they’ll no longer need to resource a database administrator to optimize/extract segments of your customer every time a new question is raised.

The world of ‘Big Data’ is challenging CIOs, especially with the Internet of Things around the corner. Storing data is not really the problem as storage is cheap, however being able to analyze larges volumes in real time is a headache they don’t want! Collecting and storing valuable customer insight data is incredibly important for targeted sends to your customers. Integrating this data to your ESP will enable this to happen. CIOs will want to see flexible integration capabilities from your ESP with good documentation on how they can create integrations using their own internal resource. There’ll be some acronyms that will pop up which you cannot get away from, so it’s good to start brushing up on them.

I hope you enjoyed tips 1-5, keep an eye out for part 2 for more ways to keep your IT happy, on board and keen to help with your marketing projects.

I’m now working as a CTO but I in this blog I will draw upon my experience when I first arrived as a CIO (although much of this advice applies to both roles). So for this blog I asked myself this; what really made a difference to the success of an email marketing project when the CMO came to me as CIO.

6. Acronym soup

You will find these all over the place but if you want to know some then make sure you know these three. I won’t go in to detail as Wikipedia can do that but I will explain why they’ll be useful for your CIO!

API (Application Programming Interface). When it comes to ESPs these will be one of the CIOs favorite things and normally helps answers the question of ‘how can my system integrate with yours’. Many CIOs know the true cost of software development, its big, and tends to move towards a more cost effective approach of integrating the best of breed systems together to meet the business needs. Therefore how well you’re ESP plays with other software, by communicating in a common language over the internet, will be high on their list of things to check in any due diligence process.

SLA (Service Level Agreement), put simplistically – what can you expect for your money. It may relate to the support or availability of an email marketing solution you put in place. These agreements normally have a number of elements however your CIO will likely ask to see one (or the terms and conditions with them in) to make sure they know how the technology and service is going to support your needs. Pre-empting the CIO asking to see one is only going to help the collaboration!

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a long standing acronym however incredibly important in the digital marketing space. Your CIO will know that a high level of development expertise from his team may be required to really optimize the look of your messages. Again this is where dotmailer can help. We can manage your campaigns and HTML templates for you as part of our professional services, making this a resource your CIO may not need to find, which will be music to their ears.

7. The pain of delivering emails taken away

At a technical level any CIO who has had the experience of trying to send large quantities of marketing mail from their internal IT infrastructure will know that a whole new world of pain exists trying to deliver to worldwide Internet Service Providers with their varying policies in how fast they accept email and what is let through. Doing it in-house will quickly lead to blacklisting if you don’t know what you’re doing. This will significantly affect your ROI. Here at dotmailer we have many years of experience with this art and work with some of the thought leaders in the digital marketing space to help make sure our email delivery to the ISPs is managed well for our customers. This isn’t a headache your CIO wants, so make sure you sell him the benefit of this if you are looking to go with a cloud-based ESP.

8. More numbers!

Communicating your email marketing plan as part of the process will really help the CIOs understand the technology requirements. Amount of active contacts, the subsidiary data on these, what the marketing program looks like, predicated send volumes, the types of sends, their frequency and where the originating data comes from are all good bits of information to have up your sleeve or as part of the requirements gathering stage of the project.

9. Where’s my data?

This is an extremely important question and again one that your CIO is definitely going to be asking.

The tip here will be to have this information to hand with your prospective email marketing technology. Where the data is physically stored has an impact on what legislation it is governed by and how much granular control your business will have over its security. So it’ll be important to know this, especially if you’re using a cloud-based ESP. The CIO will also be thinking ahead about how to get data ‘in and out’ in the event that you need to change technologies in the future, so again the API acronym is a good saviour, as it will help reassure that the system is flexible to work with!

10. Packaging it up into a project

Coming back to where I first began this blog, those lovely 1’s and 0’s. Any of your email marketing technology solution changes should be run as projects. The devil is in the detail and managing this detail will ultimately have an impact on its success and ROI you get. Many of the most famous project management frameworks used globally have been born out of the need to increase the success rate of technology related projects (PRINCE2 to name a biggie!).

IT projects do fail and normally it’s where a level of detail hasn’t been taken into account, scope has crept or collaboration/communication has fallen down. Managing the actions and risks of the project will enable a CIO and their team to be involved and concentrate their involvement in manageable tasks with clear deadlines. It doesn’t need death by GAANT chart, but clear objectives, an end point, and a series of tasks with someone project managing who is motivated to see it through. If the IT resource is content, ultimately the people who get it are those who ‘shout loudest’ or those ‘who are best prepared’. Be well prepared and the CIO you’re working with will ultimately have to work with you and follow your lead.

I hope these tips are useful when engaging your CIO.

The most successful businesses will have a strong CIO – CMO relationship. So to make sure both ends are happy, communication is key. Using an email marketing platform such as dotmailer could be a huge help in taking a large part of work away from IT, leaving them more freed up for new projects.