Melody King
We’re deepening our integration with Dotdigital to unlock even more flexibility, efficiencies, and opportunities for customisation.
Hi, my name is Melody. I’m a Senior Product Owner on the team working on enhancing our integration with Dotdigital. In this blog, I’ll give a quick overview of what Dotdigital is and how it powers your work. I’ll then share our approach to this project, and how we’re working in a way that balances large, long-term projects with quicker wins along the way that will unlock value for you and your teams. Plus, you’ll get the inside scoop on the new functionality that will be coming your way — including one piece that’s already live in your system.
What is Dotdigital?
Dotdigital is the digital marketing software that’s a core part of your Spektrix solution. It’s the tool you use to build, send, and automate mass emails. Dotdigital is included in every Spektrix subscription – if you have Spektrix, you have access to Dotdigital.
Dotdigital and Spektrix work together through a closely woven, two-way integration, which enables you to do things like segment communications based on any data stored in Spektrix. Our Product and Engineering team are currently working on a project to enhance this connection, unlocking a host of features that will empower you with even more flexibility and opportunities for customisation in your communications.
Members of the Spektrix Engineering team working on Dotdigital improvements.
Why are we deepening the connection between Spektrix and Dotdigital?
We know how integral communications tools are to building strong relationships with your audience members. Communications tools also provide an important source of data that helps you understand your customers’ interests and priorities.
That’s why we’re exploring how to bring you more from the relationship between Spektrix and Dotdigital. With opportunities to create communications that are even more personalised and relevant, you can increase impact. Plus, some of the opportunities that we’re exploring will make it easier and faster for your team to use automation in Dotdigital, saving time and effort. It’s a win-win for you and for your customers.
There’s an enormous amount of functionality that we can unlock by deepening our connection with Dotdigital. A big part of this project has involved exploring the possible opportunities and prioritising them based on how useful they will be to our users and how long they will take to deliver. We’ve chosen an approach that balances long term, sophisticated improvements, which require more time but bring you some really incredible features, with shorter term improvements that allow us to deliver value to your team as we work.
What’s the team working on now?
We’ve identified a key opportunity that we’ve begun work on: synching purchase level data. Purchase level data includes details about event bookings, donations, or membership purchases made by customers. To make this possible, we need to create an adaptor that essentially allows the Spektrix system and Dotdigital to speak to each other in new ways. Forming these new pathways allows for more flexibility in the kind of information that can flow between Spektrix and Dotdigital.
The team enjoying an away day.
What synching purchase level data will unlock
Currently, the ability to include order information in communications to your customers is limited to event specific details and only available in pre- and post-show emails. But once the relevant purchase level data is synched between Spektrix and Dotdigital, you’ll be able to send communications that are personalised with information that’s specific to your customers’ activities.
For example, you’ll be able to send a thank you email to a donor that populates with the specific fund they’ve donated to and the amount that they’ve donated. You’ll also be able to send multiple pre-show reminders to customers with specific details about the date and time of their show and their seat number.
Additionally, we’re exploring how we can best use Dotdigital to level up e-ticketing. Synching purchase level data between Dotdigital and Spektrix could offer the ability to send enhanced pre-show emails with more specific event data and QR code e-tickets. It would also mean you could send these e-tickets multiple times, making it easier for your customers to find their tickets closer to events.
We’re looking into the possibility of sending transactional emails through Dotdigital, which would allow you to send service emails regardless of contact preference, and could potentially offer a full alternative to our current e-ticketing approach. As always, we’re working closely with users to make sure we understand what features will provide the most value to you.
These features will require some upfront technical setup work for you and your team. We’ve spoken to many users about their level of comfort and confidence with the increased technical aspects of setting up these exciting features, and we’ve received feedback that, while some of the work was intimidating at first, ultimately it was achievable and the new functionality was well worth the initial learning investment.
More exciting functionality coming soon
As we’ve discussed, synching order level data is a technically complex piece of work that’s going to take time to complete. It’s important to us that, while we work towards that big goal, we have improvements that we will deliver to you along the way. We’re excited that there are multiple pieces of additional functionality that we will deliver to you as we work on this project, including the ability to sync event and instance data to Dotdigital. This will unlock additional content which can be used within marketing emails, and it will enable basket abandonment emails.
Already delivering value to you: Calculated metrics
The team has already released an exciting improvement to our Dotdigital integration. You’re now able to sync a number of Spektrix calculated customer metrics to Dotdigital as Contact Data Fields.
Credit Balance Calculated Metric in action.
Calculated metrics are nuggets of information about your customers that Spektrix automatically calculates. You might be used to seeing calculated metrics like Credit Balance, Weeks until Next Visit and Never Booked in your reports. This data can now be used to further personalise your email content with your customers. They can also be used as part of Programs, making it even easier to segment your audiences and send more targeted and impactful communications based on booking information. You can learn more about these metrics in this Support Centre article.
On the horizon: Auto-syncing customer attributes
Customer attributes are a customisable way for you to store additional information against contacts within your Spektrix system. We would love to see more users getting the value of synced customer attributes in Dotdigital. The current process of syncing customer attributes between Dotdigital and Spektrix requires a manual process, adding extra time and room for human error.
This update will remove a barrier to entry, making it so that when you create customer attributes in Spektrix, with just one click, those same fields will be automatically created in Dotdigital. On top of that, we’re building error checking and validation into the process, so you can be confident your information is accurate. If errors do arise, the new system makes them much easier to locate and fix.
We’re excited to deliver the ability to auto-synch customer attributes between Spektrix and Dotdigital because it will save your teams lots of time, and will make delivering personalised communications to your customers faster and easier than ever.
Melody King (she/they) is a Senior Product Owner at Spektrix