For example, our algorithms will be able to determine without any input from you that someone who has bought a tent and a sleeping bag is probably going camping. It will map that user journey against other similar user journeys and start to recommend products that are related to that path. As a marketer who knows their products, you could probably do this manually, but you couldn’t scale it.

Dotdigital allows you to simply drag-and-drop a block into place to enable this personalized recommendation for thousands of customers. In this blog, we chat with principle product manager Ian Pollard and product data scientist Sam Crawley to talk us though a recent innovation: product recommendation affinity scores, which are now available for you in Dotdigital.

Who are affinity scores for?

Ian: Affinity scores are for curious marketers and merchants who want to understand a lot more about their customers. They uncover what kind of discrete customer/product relationships there are and also what are the strength of those.

We built our AI-powered product recommendations to allow merchants to create hyper-personalization and one-to-one content for their customers. All of the heavy data work is handled by the machine learning. The experience for our users is pretty much drag and drop. Drop this block into a marketing campaign – job done! What we then learned from our users is that they are incredibly curious and they want to understand what the AI is doing. That’s where affinity scores come into it, as they allow marketers to explore customers and the relationships they have with products; and visualize what AI says is a good fit. Excitingly, those same affinity scores will enable features coming up to power things like affinity-based auto-segments to find best contacts for a particular set of products. This would essentially automate segmentation.

Where did the need for affinity scores arise from?

Ian:  AI traditionally is a black box. It’s only natural marketers then ask us: “How can I understand it?” and “What’s the AI doing?”. We wanted to enable that and open the black box up.

AIs are incredibly powerful and perform increasing functions within all aspects of business. It’s important to establish trust with the users of these AIs and one of the ways we do that is by visualizing the output for people – essentially letting people see what the algorithm sees.

Sam: It’s also important to note that the affinity scores have always been there, we just haven’t been surfacing them. So it’s not so much the need for affinity scores that is new, but the need to show them to our users and for them to make a judgment on how well a recommendation might perform.

How do they work?

Sam: As mentioned, affinity scores are not new, they are a by-product of our personalized recommendation algorithm, so the best place to start to explain them is there! When we run our personalized recommendations, we create a great big sudoku-style matrix between all contacts and all products. Like a sudoku, we prefill some of the squares with numbers we know, a contact’s preference score for each product they have ordered. This still leaves us with a huge amount of missing values in our ‘sudoku’! We tell the algorithm the rules and essentially let the algorithm attempt to solve the puzzle by filling in the missing numbers. These missing numbers are our predicted affinity scores, and for every contact we take the products with the top 10 affinity scores and serve them as recommendations for that contact.

We have two AI-powered product recommendation types in Dotdigital – lookalikes and best next. Lookalikes intake content-based analysis of the products themselves whereas best next examines similar shopper patterns. The affinity score will be unique to both the customer and recommendation type. The numbers indicate the level of confidence we have that the customer will have a preference for that product.

Were there any challenges that came up whilst developing affinity scores?

Sam: Well, trying to speak the same language as a computer is one! It’s a challenge we knew going in but the numbers spat out by our algorithm are meaningless on their own. The numbers it provides us with in the raw form are not percentages, just numbers without a hard-scale. So the main challenge is converting that number to a human readable format – or a percentage. We do that by reviewing what the highest possible confidence score is in the matrix and treat this as our 100% confidence, then scale every other number.

Could you explain the different tiers of score of what this would mean for an ecommerce marketer?

Ian: Any level of affinity you see in your account will be interesting. The higher the affinity score, the higher the confidence level. What that means in terms of outcomes for marketers, by using measures such as email click-throughs, length of web sessions, number of page views and ultimately the number of conversions, the higher the score, the more confident we are these would increase. Of course, the more orders the algorithm has to review from your account data, the more confident it will be in its predictions. Newer users or users who have only recently started syncing order data may see lower levels of confidence, but the algorithm is still picking up on data patterns and making informed predictions. The more data you feed it, the more likely you are to see scores in the higher brackets, but don’t be disheartened if you don’t see these scores at first.

Sam: You’re going to be seeing, at most, ten of these scores for product recommendations for a contact, and hopefully you’ll be seeing some or all of those in the top tiers. If you see a lot of them in the bottom two tiers, it could just mean there isn’t enough data for this particular contact to make a confident recommendation. The ‘cold-start’ problem is a known issue, (and one we see in real-life!) of what to recommend someone when you have no idea what they prefer. It’s fixed by feeding it more data. You have to remember, affinity scores are different from probability scores, they are confidence scores, so they are dependent on data.

Do you have any advice for ecommerce marketers who are going to use affinity scores?

Ian: If you’re not already using sample-sets of customers, then you should! Just as you might go and look at purchase behaviors like whether they have abandoned carts or gone to pages on your website, you should also, as part of that customer analysis, go and look at the products they are being recommended and what the affinities are for your products. I would then feed this back into your customer personas as part of your general understanding of your customer base.

Do you think AI-capabilities will become increasingly important for marketers?

Sam: Absolutely. The more data you have available, the more confident you can be about any decisions that are being made based on that data. But there’s an added layer of complexity to that. The more data you have, the harder it also is to put it to use. A marketer is just one person, and people, even a team of people, aren’t as good at sifting through large amounts of data as a machine. As we generate more data as a society and more people move online (especially during the pandemic), the need for AI will increase and marketers should start to leverage the capabilities now.

Ian: In addition to the time it will save you, naturally as humans, you start with a theory and you proceed. One of the issues with that is that your experience, the sum total of everything you know and everything you’re trying to do as a first step is potentially leading to a linear outcome. AI doesn’t come with your biases or prejudices, or expectations of what should happen. If there are patterns, it will find them, regardless of whether or not you think they should be there. It’s going to come out with something in some ways, more creative ideas that perhaps wouldn’t of occurred to you. Not just that, but it can do it at scale.

What does an ecommerce marketer need to start using affinity scores?

Ian: Simple, if you’re a customer, get in contact with your account manager. If you’re not and you’d like to learn more about our ecommerce offerings in general, get in touch and we’ll happily talk you through what we can do to help.

But that’s not even the full story. Because click-through rates are up too, by an average of 93%. What we can gleam from this is that people are even engaging with online campaigns more than they did last year – a lot more!

But why is this? 2020 and all the unique challenges it brought also kept people more in their homes around the world. But people are resourceful and adaptable. They quickly substituted the normalcy of their old lives with virtual connection. From getting grandma Wi-Fi and an iPad to Zooming into remote meetings, online has become the norm, none more so than online shopping. It therefore makes sense that customers are engaging more than ever with the marketing campaigns in their inboxes.

But with that, 2020 has introduced a brand new problem for marketers. And in fact, it’s two-fold. The first is how to keep this engagement up. And the second, is how to compete. You see, clicks and opens aren’t the only thing that are up. So are sends. We’ve seen brands step up to the increase in online engagement and they are sending more than ever. The problem is, as a marketer, you aren’t the only one sending more – most likely, so are your competitors. As a result, customers are finding it harder and harder to differentiate between brands. To keep engaging and winning, marketers are going to have to find some ways to create out-of-the-box campaigns. Lucky for you, we have just the solution.

When we found this out, we wanted to take a look at what our top performers were doing with their abandoned cart campaigns, to provide you with some actionable insight. There were so many amazing customer journey experiences we came across with marketers using Dotdigital to recover the revenue they would otherwise lose. We analyzed a multitude to surface insights such as: what time of day is optimal to send an abandoned cart campaign, what emotions perform best in your content, and whether there are any key differences across industries to be aware of.

We also took a deeper dive and looked at the abandoned cart campaigns of Virgin Experience Day, Toolstop, and Miss Amara in more detail. All three show unique, striking, and highly successful abandoned cart campaigns. It really is worth taking a look!

With Black Friday around the corner signaling the kick-off of the holiday season, as marketers, we spend a lot of time driving people to our sites. But often it’s the journey after that touch-point that results in a sale. Whether you want to optimize your abandoned cart campaigns, or set one up from scratch, the abandoned cart report we’ve compiled will help you recover more revenue than ever.

Download it here, and start recovering more revenue!

B2B marketing personalization

Understand the value of product recommendations

dotdigital offers different categories of product recommendations. Could you give an overview of the differences between them?

Mark Ritchie: When it comes to product recommendations, most people are familiar with best sellers. They’re also perhaps familiar with most-viewed which is a good way of surfacing some different products that may not necessarily be best sellers, but they’re beginning to trend on the site. In Dotdigital, we also have trending which is unique as it’s a hybrid between the other two, and custom where you can curate your own recommendations. These four belong to a category known as non-personalized product recommendations, although this name can be misleading, as they are static lists but they are lists you can filter on.

Nearly all of our clients know and love our audience segment builder. They understand the power it gives them and they understand how granular they can get. One of the nicest aspects of the recommendation builder is that it uses that same technology as our audience segment builder, it just focuses on a different data set. So when we’re talking about non-personalized recommendations, they’re not going to be completely unique to every individual, but you can still use that builder to narrow the results down to show a specific set of products.

I love coffee, so let’s say I now sell coffee, along with makers and accessories. If I use the static best-sellers list, I would have a mixed bag of products. I would have some beans, I would have some accessories and maybe I’d have a single-serve coffee maker included. It’s just a list of products and if I use that list and insert it into a campaign, I’m just hoping it catches the recipient’s eye. However, if I use the builder and add a bit more logic to the filter, I’m now customizing that recommendation to meet my segment’s demand. This means I can build a best-seller list just for single-serve coffee makers, or let’s say the segment I’m targeting is looking at people who have purchased espresso beans in the last 90 days — I can narrow my results down on that best-seller or most-viewed list to match that criteria too.

We also have personalized product recommendations and predictive product recommendations that use machine learning, so they change dynamically based on data stored against individual contacts. In these categories, we have also-bought, best-next, and lookalikes.

Does this mean some product recommendation types are better than others?

Ian Pollard: Each recommendation type has a different role in the marketing mix. Custom, best-sellers, most-viewed, and trending are great product recommendations, but they are going to amplify the most visible trends, which are things you’re probably already aware of. Bestsellers are your best sellers for a reason. But as Mark mentions, every recommendation type has advanced filtering rules. This means if you did want to amplify a particular brand or subset of products, you can create recommendations that give you exactly that kind of coverage.

On the machine learning side, the personalized and AI-powered predictive product recommendations are going to find more nuanced relationships between customers and products that you perhaps aren’t aware of and reveal implicit trends in the data that aren’t as obvious. That’s where machine learning is able to come in and shine some new light on customer-product relationships.

We give you a full toolkit so you can deploy these recommendations in their entirety because they’re not necessarily meant to be used in isolation. They form a menu of recommendations that give you full coverage, for your BAU emails, your post-purchase emails, your re-engagement emails, your abandoned cart emails — each of these is a different canvas for building different kinds of product recommendations. By giving you such a large selection and all the power of the recommendation builder, you get full coverage for revenue uplift.

What kind of businesses use product recommendations, and what are they looking to achieve with them?

Mark Ritchie: A common question we hear around product recommendations is how to fine-tune strategy for different customer types and products. I’ve seen it across a diverse set of industries, from apparel, food, and beverage, skin and beauty products, to care services and more. Some clients have a very simple setup. They want to market their best sellers or most-viewed products to make product discovery quicker, which in turn will drive more sales and revenue. Others have a more sophisticated set-up, utilizing our predictive recommendations.

Earlier in the week, I came across a client in the apparel industry who we assisted in setting up a ‘complete the look’ post-purchase email. They were using the predictive recommendations to say, “here’s what you’ve bought, but did you know, you could buy this shirt and these pants to complete the entire look of what you’ve purchased?”. Of course, this is just one example of taking it to the next level using our product recommendations tool. At its core, it really allows you to market to shoppers based on their natural, instinctive behavior and show them the things that are relevant to them.

The way that a lot of clients were doing this before was just taking a guess. They had some data and bits of pieces from web behavior tracking or things they stored in data fields and they were making the best of what they had. But with the product recommendation tool, specifically with the predictive stuff, you really get a sense of what your customers want to see, and you’re able to market to them much more efficiently.

Ian Pollard: Because the AI-powered recommendations find much more discrete product relationships, the way I like to think about this is: If you were able to go through as a marketer and look at each contact and their order history, you could figure out what they like. You understand your products, and you could probably create micro-segments that have very high conversion rates. But you simply can’t do that at scale.

AI recommendations can surface those products that are a much tighter fit. It does this in two ways: One, by looking at lookalike products, so if someone has a certain affinity for certain brands or types of products, the machine learning looks for similar products that they have bought previously. The other way we surface is through best-next. That takes a more considered view of the customer journey. It looks at people with similar purchase histories and predicts the next product in that journey. If someone buys a tent, it’s able to suggest camping stoves, chairs, sleeping bags, and other things that other similar shoppers have purchased. As a marketer, if you had infinite time, you could build these. But AI gives you the ability to build that capability for very low effort, and much higher return.

Can B2B brands use product recommendations?

Ian Pollard: Absolutely. With our latest release, we became even stronger in our support for B2B brands. There’s nothing particular about B2B commerce that stops you from using the full power of Dotdigital product recommendations – the main difference is that you would expect there to be multiple product catalogs that have different prices for different types of businesses, and that’s absolutely fine. We support as many product catalogs as you like. So when you choose to create a product recommendation you would create it against a particular catalog which would therefore bring in all the appropriate product details and pricing for a B2B marketer. We’ve also recently released some additional functionality to our Magento 2 connector to capture specialized B2B data too.

Are there typical stumbling blocks that brands often come up against when looking to set up product recommendations?

Mark Ritchie: Product recommendations rely on data – that is accurate and contains everything required for the recommendation builder to display correctly, or at all. One of the challenges with ecommerce is that data evolves over time. When a story is passed down from person to person it changes a bit. This is why historical data typically degrades.

A product name or even SKU can change multiple times. For some product recommendation types, we have to marry different sets of data together and the most trivial difference can affect the outcome. Let’s say you have an order collection (which is all your orders) and you have a catalog collection (which is all your products) and you know your best seller line is pinot noir. In your order collection, it’s listed as pinot noir. But in your catalog, it’s just listed as pinot. Even though you know these are the same, the AI doesn’t know because it’s acting on the data. Fortunately, we get it. We understand the complexities of data and the challenges that bring to many companies.

Your data may not be in a perfect state, but we’ll help you get it there. Firstly, we have connectors for an array of ecommerce platforms that most of our customers are already using. All the required information that Dotdigital needs to power the product recommendations is already brought in with those, in the required format.

Ian and his team have also done a lot to minimize data errors. They have looked at matching other things like SKUs so the model knows these are the same items. They have also created automated tools that let people know where the data might be mismatched.

My team is also here to conduct data audits for customers, where we look at the structure of your catalog and order data and piece together what adjustments need to be made. You just need to reach out to your account manager to get that service from us.

Finally, we’re currently looking at building our product recommendations for customers to get the ball rolling and demonstrate the true value and power of product recommendations. We want to do this because we know that once people have the core elements there, they take it to the next level. We try to provide as much of a base for people to work with so they can build on it because this tool is extremely powerful. If you’re not using it, then you’re losing out on potential revenue.

Ian Pollard: Once you have the data sorted, the first step would be to make sure you’re using our ROI tracking so you can track the total revenue attributed to that product recommendation. You get some nice over-time reporting too. You need to be able to measure the effectiveness of what you’ve built and if it isn’t giving you the return you want, or the return dips, you can then go in and adjust the rules to re-optimize the recommendation.

Secondly, a little bit of forethought is needed by a customer to think about global rules – these are general rules that should apply to all of your recommendations. These might be as simple as a minimum price for a product that you want to recommend, or certain types of products like gift certificates that you never want to recommend. You can set these up at the catalog level and any new or existing recommendations that use that catalog will inherit those global rules. That can be a big time saver, as you don’t want to duplicate that time and time again.

Our product recommendations are also cross-channel. You only have to create them once but then they can be used in an email, on a landing page, or it can be deployed on your website as well. There are a lot of recommendations right now and we’re working on more. It’s going to be different for each company where the best place to use those recommendations is. Considering them all and their multichannel reach in your strategy will put you in great stead, and our team is on hand should you need anything.

What can customers expect after implementing product recommendations in their campaigns?

Ian Pollard: There are examples I’ve seen of customers reporting the average web session length increasing by as much as 50% for email clicks on our AI-powered recommendations vs. other email links. That tells me that machine learning is working; it’s able to find these discrete customer/product relationships, and they are definitely engaging.

Mark Ritchie: We hope customers are also going to see how easy it is to use and how much time they’ll save using it. If they use it strategically and users take advantage of how powerful that recommendation builder can be, they will see an increase in statistics across the board. From engagements in campaigns to the average order value, conversions, repeat purchases, ROI, brand awareness, the list goes on and on…

How you get started

If you’re a dotdigital customer, simply contact your account manager. Or, if you’d like to find out more about Dotdigital, request a demo here.

Are you a Dotdigital customer using Magento? We are offering product recommendation set-up completely free of charge for a select group of customers. Click below to register your interest and learn more.

Paul Olohan (PO): We don’t operate in a vacuum. In the MarTech space, we’re playing with 8000+ other companies, so working well with others is vital. We can’t operate alone, nor would we want to as there’s certainly no ‘one tool to rule them all’. Everyone wants to use different tools as they solve different problems.

What we do is ensure that the data between these systems flows. Engagement signals that we generate need to flow somewhere. Event signals happening in other systems also need to flow and trigger event orchestration in other systems, or events that happen in Dotdigital.

Sometimes we’re a data hub and source of truth, but very often we’re also a bespoke part of a bigger ecosystem. That’s certainly the case with a partner such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, a system that is considered the source of truth for so many businesses. We feed into Dynamics to work with the information stored there, but we also provide information for it too, such as all the engagement signals we collect. These can be signals such as emails opens and click-throughs, or information collected from landing pages or web behavior tracking, and more.

CRM systems will not have insight into these so it’s crucial to be able to distill that information down and pass that back. Dynamics can then generate its own events and users can decide certain journeys they want their customers to go down. They can then pass that data back to dotdigital to actually execute those journeys. As you can imagine, there’s lots of interest and opportunity when you combine these different tools together.

Pamela Zoni (PZ): As a product manager, I interview customers regularly, and it’s evident that different customers have different levels of maturity. Having different integrations allows them to choose what’s right for them. They might, for instance, start with Zapier to see how they can utilize data in different platforms to then eventually move on and utilize our integration with Dynamics.

Every company uses a different tech stack. The more we’re able to connect and interact with different systems, the better we serve our customers by allowing them to leverage the power of these tools.

Could you provide an example of how we put this principle of collaboration into practice?

PZ: All the integrations we have in dotdigital are the testament of our commitment to “playing nice with others”. We see many customers using multiple integrations and taking full advantage of the power of different systems. It’s very common to see our customers integrating our platform with Dynamics 365 and Magento at the same time, or start with one integration before moving onto the other.

When it comes to data orchestration, we’re there with our customers through a journey. They might come to us with low requirements, but as they grow and have more revenue opportunities, they require more, so we help them. What was once initially a manual import of data becomes an integration, and then a second integration. It’s all about helping them to achieve — to leverage the data that they own in different systems and bring it all together for enhanced performance from their marketing team, and higher revenue as a result.

With the pandemic, we’ve seen many customers trying to do more with less. Some have staff on furlough or are trying to balance all the responsibilities that come with working from home. This has been the time to make time to save time — to utilize our integration and go that step further and start using workflow applications. Workflow applications allow you to go fast where you need to and take away all the sunk time and errors that come with manual work. These allow users to automate business processes across multiple tools, offering compelling productivity gains, such as speed-of-delivery.

dotdigital already offered workflow applications with a connector for Zapier but we wanted to offer more. That’s why we decided to build a connector for Microsoft Power Automate (and the Power Platform). Microsoft Power Automate is the workflow automation app in Microsoft’s Power Platform.

For customers familiar with Dynamics 365, you’ll see a prompt to switch to Power Automate (if you haven’t done so already) in your ‘workflows’ section. It will allow you to not only utilize triggers and activities in Dynamics, but also utilize triggers and activities in a huge ecosystem of other applications such as Outlook, GoToWebinar, or whatever other tools you use.

With the Power Automate Dotdigital connector, you’ll be able to leverage these triggers and actions to send email campaigns, enroll customers and prospects into automations, or send an SMS. Our connector works with Power Apps and Azure Logic Apps too which means no matter your level of tech maturity, there’s a solution for you.

PO: You need the tools to connect but it also comes down to how we as a business collaborate. In our own partner network, we collaborate with our partners using our tools so they can provide solutions to their customers. Maintaining the quality of our partnership with Microsoft has been crucial in delivering value to our customers.

We leverage the strength of this relationship and the strength of the support we can offer from our people alongside our APIs to solve problems that aren’t available out-of-the-box solutions right now. We know we’ll never be able to offer everything off-the-shelf because the diversity of problems modern marketers face today are too diverse. But there’s greater value to the out-of-the-box tools if they can connect with others, and even better still if there are people who can connect them and work with them.

Our teams here at dotdigital are always solving problems by using both our tools and by connecting with other systems. This kind of collaboration breeds innovation.

What is the difference between Dotdigital’s integration with Dynamics, and the Dotdigital connector for the Power Platform?

PZ: Our integration with Dynamics is two-way and therefore allows you to keep data constantly synced. It’s suited for heavy lifting jobs such as large sends or updating multiple contacts in one go. It’s a solid integration that allows you to move data seamlessly between systems.

The new custom connector for Power Automate (and the Power Platform) is a one-way only integration which allows you to run one-to-one jobs making it very suited for tasks that require real-time updates, for example when a contact is created in a system, you could enroll them in an automation program. It doesn’t replace the integration, but it does provide additional functionality. It both complements our core Dynamics integration, while also being available for everyone to use.

What kind of industries use dotdigital’s Dynamics solutions?

PO: Dynamics is a great tool to help businesses manage their relationships. For the marketer, we made it work with Dynamics but not in Dynamics. This is because marketers like to use tools they’re familiar with and get the job done quickly. This means no matter your job role, your function, your goals, or the vertical you work in, you have the tools to suit you and do the job the best way for you.

PZ: I think that’s why we see customers using our Dynamics solutions in a huge range of industries such as education and training, charity or non-profit (such as membership) sectors, software and computer services, property, finance, retail, manufacturing and so many more. We have partners that work across a wide range of these to make sure we’re getting the relevant feedback for them too.

In the Dynamics space, you also see a lot of customers wearing both B2B and B2C hats. Even customers who have a mostly B2B model will often have a way to sell to and communicate directly with their consumers. Our solution and functionality supports both of these worlds. Customers have diverse needs and we can simplify and serve those.

Are there other ways dotdigital is making life easier for customers who are facing unprecedented challenges?

PO: A lot of sectors needed to quickly find new ways of working and we worked quickly to help them. We’re already solving some problems with great solutions and I expect to see many more uncovered as time goes on as, unfortunately, I do not see this going away anytime soon.

At the start of the crisis, we provided accounts for our customers to be able to communicate and track those communications, quickly and easily with their own employees. This included being able to use pages and forms as well as rapidly send SMS in order to reach their employees quickly.

We also provided a number of creative templates for our customers to use. It’s really reflective of how we operate as a business in that we adapted quickly to the needs of our customers.

We work this way constantly with our integrations from day-to-day, but it was even more crucial to be responsive to the COVID-19 situation because problems appeared for so many overnight.

PZ: In terms of how we make life easier specifically to the connector, we’re building out Power Automate flow templates so people so can immediately see the value of the connector and also inspire them. We’re also always here to collaborate with our customers and come up with solutions to their unique challenges. Whether you’re a customer or want to find out more, I encourage you to get in touch!

How can I find out more about dotdigital’s connector?

PZ: Take a look at our Dynamics demo here, or if you’re a customer, get in touch with your account manager today. You can also sign up to receive more information about our product updates as they happen by managing your email preferences.

The truth is, whether you’re B2C or B2B, SMS improves stats across the board – from lead generation and conversion times to improving ROI and reducing churn. But the great news is, if some B2B businesses haven’t yet caught on, SMS is the perfect channel for them. Your campaigns are going to stand out and resonate with your buyers more than ever. And that’s not the only reason why SMS is such a good fit for B2B…

Changing B2B expectations

Perhaps it’s that millennials are in full swing in the workforce these days, even at senior position levels. Perhaps the silicon valley, hoody-and-sneakers work-life has permeated its way through even the most formal institutions. Or maybe… it’s just that we’ve realized that our business buyers aren’t just anonymous faces of business, but that they are people. Because business today is personal.

These are exceptional times, so forgive me for pointing out the obvious that our work and personal lives have never been more intertwined. But even before this global crisis, this was already the case. The advent of personal devices such as pagers, laptops, and eventually smartphones, have brought more and more of our work into our homes. At the same time, B2C marketers have elevated their game so much, that expectations from B2B buyers have also risen, with increasing expectations of personalization in B2B communications. And what’s more personal than a phone?

Sure. You could reach out with a call. But there are a few problems with this tactic. Firstly, you can’t scale phone calls the same way you can emails or SMS, nor would you want to! Phone calls are disruptive. You are already reaching into someone’s personal bubble; the least you can do is reach out in a way that gives them the time and space to respond.

After all, At&T reports that 85% of mobile device users prefer a text from businesses over a phone call or email. Sure, they haven’t specified B2B or B2C in this statistic, but what they’ve said is clear. People prefer getting SMS from businesses. And while you need to bear in mind all the decision-makers in your marketing and pitch, at the end of the day, your buyers are simply made up of individual people. And in that room where those people decide on whether to choose your business, it sure helps to have an evangelist on your side. SMS is the perfect channel to achieve this.

Here’s how:

Data capture and lead generation

As with any of these use cases, remember to keep in mind the kind of consent your company operates under when sending any communication, whether it’s SMS or email. For lead generation, this is particularly pertinent. You are probably going to capture your B2B buyer’s info from some top-funnel collateral or something akin to a webinar sign-up. (If you haven’t already put in a phone number capture field at this point, you’ll probably want to at the end of this article!) No matter where you capture data, we recommend being transparent at the point of signing up about what you intend to send, via what channels, and how often. Always promote valuable content to your prospects (that means valuable to them, not just your business!) because then your signposting will always sound like an attractive offering to sign up to.

You could also consider a text-to-join campaign, where a prospect can use a keyword to enroll themselves in receiving SMS. This could be, for example, top tips related to their industry vertical and aligned with your business’ expertise. A good thing about a text-to-join campaign is that it can exist offline as well as online, with easy instructions on how to join on printed collateral, billboards, business cards flyers, and more. Or a rep could simply mention it during a networking session. Make the content valuable enough and text-to-join is so easy to enroll in, that you could see an organic explosion of sign-ups from people in the business community who want to hear what you’ve got to say.

Convert leads faster

Alerts, reminders, and notifications aren’t just for letting you know a parcel has shipped or telling you about a dentist appointment. Businesses use them too to alert their prospects about new content they have released, relevant to the prospects’ interests of course. This means less time waiting for warm leads to graduate to hot, hoping they stumble across high-intent content from you or compete with their other time-pressing work emails.

A lot of people read on their phones on their commute… or well, they did! Perhaps for the time being you’re more likely to catch them on the sofa than the tube, but ultimately, with 98% read rates in SMS, the point is, you can catch them! You can even embed a tracked link in the SMS to make it even easier for the contact and easier for you to track ROI. Just make sure your content is mobile-friendly before doing this.

Data capture

Are you missing information from a prospect that is blocking your progress in their route to a sale? Maybe you are missing information to generate a quote. Maybe you’ve sent a quote and are not sure if they’ve seen it or are happy with it. A timely SMS can quickly gather the information you need to nudge buyers further down the line and also operate as a great ‘check-in’ without being too pushy.

Eliminate no-shows

Whether it’s an in-person meeting, a phone call, a webinar, or a Zoom meeting, sending your customers and prospects helpful appointment reminders via SMS will increase attendance. You’ll probably get thanks for it, too. Plus, if they can’t make it for any reason, consider adding functionality for them to reply, making rescheduling that much easier, and decreasing the chance of a no-show.

Improve ROI

Using SMS in conjunction with an email campaign can see a 30% lift in email open rates (CTIA). If you have a big company announcement or a feature update to shout about, using a joint email and SMS approach will see a much bigger return on investment. But be selective here. Use segmentation in your contact lists to make sure what you’re sharing is relevant to your audience. The last thing you want is for the prospect or customer to associate your brand with spam.

Reduce churn

Don’t forget about your existing customers! After all, we all know how much more expensive it is to gain a new customer rather than retain an existing one. Reduce churn by reaching out to your customer base and offering them some extra value in the form of useful collateral, industry news, or top tips. Align these with your own offering and you’ll also likely see an increase in one-off or monthly reoccurring revenue, making it just as much value for your business as it is for your customers.

Surveys and polls

Finally, using our auto-responder functionality in Dotdigital makes it easy to conduct surveys and polls for valuable customer feedback, enabling you to change tack and become more successful. You may even want to do a competition to say thank you to your customer base, or warm up some of your colder leads. Contact us today to learn more about how to set this up.

We’ve got lots of resources to help you streamline the B2B customer lifecycle, plus more insight on SMS marketing.

1. Pay attention to your ecommerce reporting

As the news and tele ads keep reminding us, these are strange times. This means your customers are acting in strange ways. Heck, we all are. Don’t assume anything at the moment. Keep an eye on your reporting dashboards to pay attention to how your customers are reacting right now. As lockdown begins to lift can you see any changes in their behavior? Brands that have unified their ecommerce and omnichannel marketing platforms are seeing the benefit now, more than ever.

Ecommerce integrations allow you to deep-dive into everything from click-through rates to return on investment. It means you can see how engagement has changed to figure out what your next move will be. Things are going to be different for a while, so it’s best to adapt now rather than try to wait anything out.

2. Empathize with your customers

Everyone is craving a bit of honest and human interaction at the moment. That’s why ecommerce brands that are using empathy in their campaigns are seeing success. Think about your customers’ needs before hitting send on your usual campaign – can it be tailored to better address the current situation? We don’t mean addressing the elephant in the room on the top of every email or SMS, but be mindful of how your products and services have changed to your prospects and customers these past few months. Will this campaign resonate right now? Will something else work better?

Personalization really comes in handy here. Whether you’re tailoring the message to different personas, or pulling in dynamic content that is relevant to the recipient, brands that personalize show they care, and customers are really responding to this.

3. Use live chat on your ecommerce site 

If you don’t already have live chat on your ecommerce site, now is the time to consider it. Many people who have been casual online shoppers are turning to ecommerce to get the fix they normally would from a brick-and-mortar store. Only without live chat, they just aren’t getting the same care and attention that they would from the in-store experience. Sure, stores are reopening, but with extremely limited capacities. This is not the mention the fact that many consumer’s shopping habits may have changed for good. So, it’ll be even more important to adapt for the future. Live chat enables you to staff your online store with shop assistants ready to engage, support, convert, and even upsell.

4. Leverage product recommendations

There’s a reason why we’re seeing so many familiar smiling black ticks on cardboard packaging our streets curbs at the moment. Amazon built its empire with the bolstering assistance of product recommendations, and there’s no reason why you can’t either. Now is the perfect time. Shine a light on your product and service offerings that consumers might not even know you have. Offer your ecommerce customers AI-backed recommendations, on everything from ‘most popular’, to ‘best-next’, and ‘also bought’.

5. Consider new channels to reach your customers

Email is a great and effective channel for eccomerce stores to reach customers and prospects. But it’s not the only one, and other channels often have lower competition for your customers’ attention. SMS for instance has unbeatable read through rates, and brands love the ROI they see from using it. If you have an app, now might also be the time to work push notifications into your omnichannel marketing strategy. Screen time for phones has never been higher. This is an opportunity to reach customers in new ways.

Have a unique ecommerce problem you are looking to solve? If you’re a customer, reach out to your account manager who will be happy to discuss potential solutions. And if you’re here to learn more about Dotdigital, get in touch for a demo customized to your needs.

Know which metric to measure and what action to take

It’s not just big pivots, but fine-tunes that will help to win the race

How you can drive growth in CRM

1. Data unite! 

A lot of us are bringing together two worlds of work and home at the moment. I don’t know about you, but I have found, with delight, that my commute is a bit more efficient and my lunch break, a bit more cost-effective. Turns out bringing your data together from your CRM and your cross-channel marketing automation platform is a bit of a hack too. Why on earth would you keep them separate? Save time from switching between the two and deploy from one place. Not only that, but you can identify trends and act on them all from one platform.

2. Leverage data for personalization

Another advantage of bringing together data is the ability to leverage information you have about customers or leads, and use these in your engagement campaigns. For instance, universities that use our integration to send messaging to their students personalize it based on the courses that they are enrolled in. B2B models enter their leads into certain programs based on their lead score, and not-for-profits thank their donors with an SMS with more information about what their money will go towards helping.

3. If you’re running webinars make sure you make the most of them

Webinars are everywhere at the moment. That’s no criticism, we’re doing them too! But ask yourselves, why are you doing them? It’s important to be keep your aims in mind from the start. Are you running them for lead generation? Then what are you doing with those leads? Or are you running them to bring extra value to loyal customers. Whatever your aim, can your integration pop your webinar attendees into a address book where they can be enrolled into a program suited to their needs?

4. New content on your website?

Another strategy we’re seeing a lot of from brands at the moment is the generation of lots of new content. Brilliant – we love content! It truly is king. But as with webinars, its important to keep the aims of the content in mind when creating and when rolling out. Consider using your CRM integration to trigger an SMS when you have new content on your site to alert those who are interested and move them further down the funnel quicker.

5. Win back what’s lost

No one likes churn, but it happens. Fortunately, you can even leverage your CRM integration when the worst occurs by triggering action the moment a contact record is deleted. Win back just got easier!

Fresh updates are coming to the Dynamics integration and connector. Sign up to the platform release to learn more.