Fresh Relevance joined the Dotdigital Group back in September last year. With the steadfast progress made, I would like to bring you an update on what we’ve been up to and what’s coming up next.
Having worked together for years as partners with an expanding joint customer base and an increasing number of brands adopting our integration, we decided to bring the businesses together. We set out to jointly serve marketers and ecommerce professionals around the world with our cross-channel personalization and marketing automation capabilities, all from under one roof.
Fast-forward eight months (time flies) and our mission remains unwavering; to democratize the ease with which brands deliver customer experiences (CX) that exceed expectations. The way brands deploy personalized experiences across a multitude of channels needs to scale too.
Why it matters: CX quality continues to fall
By all accounts, macroeconomic conditions show no signs of letting up, whilst consumer expectations continue to increase. Despite this, Forrester reports that CX quality has fallen for a second consecutive year. Its Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) looks at three criteria: ease, effectiveness, and emotion. 2023 data from the US showed that the majority of brands struggled to deliver across all three areas, with just 6% of brands reporting a significant increase in CX quality.
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course (or we wouldn’t be here). A robust personalization strategy can help brands deliver on all three areas identified. Personalized messages will feel, well, more personable, and so speak to the emotional needs of consumers. Personalization delivers on ease and effectiveness too. Done right, and by utilizing the right data at the right time, brands can design experiences showing consumers products that are relevant to their tastes and preferences, in turn making it easier for them to make a purchase.
The truth is, personalization can be hard or everyone would be personalizing their website and marketing communications. Back to the case in point then, by bringing Fresh Relevance and Dotdigital businesses together we can offer an integrated marketing solution under one roof. This helps lift the lid on customer intent, de-anonymize website visitors, and execute on personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns with ease – at every point in the customer journey.
What’s new
We may be talking about all-in-one but that doesn’t mean one-size-always-fits-all. We are continuing to develop the Fresh Relevance platform and it will still be available as a standalone enterprise offering.
Earlier this year we made a host of design and usability improvements to the Fresh Relevance platform, particularly the Site Editor and SmartBlock Coupons. We also made it easier to find and configure existing content – so teams can keep on top of the personalized experiences they create and ensure every last one continues to be as impactful as the next.
As our now integrated Product and Technology team continues to work on Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance platforms, our next product release is right around the corner and brings more improvements.
- The Fresh Relevance knowledge base is set to relaunch with improved help documentation, helping customers get answers fast.
- For customers who prefer help from a friendly human, they will be able to access live chat in-app where you’ll be able to speak to a member of our award-winning support team.
- The coming weeks will also see brand and in-app updates to more closely align Fresh Relevance with the Dotdigital look and feel, plus Dotdigital usability standards.
Investing in the future
As our Ecommerce trends report highlights, with sweeping and impending changes in the industry (think: cookies) and increasing consumer concern surrounding the trustworthiness of content on social, an overdue rebound to more traditional marketing channels is in flux. The most popular channel for receiving promotional messages as voted by consumers was email (35%), closely followed by brand websites (32%). And whilst some marketers are still spending half of their budget on tactics that require third-party cookies, this is set to diminish as more browsers (notably Google) continue their deprecation this year.
Dotdigital and Fresh Relevance are not reliant on third-party cookies. What’s more, we’re currently working on a single super-script that will work cross-platform, be easy to test, and will generally simplify the tracking of web sessions, carts, last browsed products, and more. The sooner brands can collect meaningful customer data transparently and through legitimate methods, the sooner they can deliver the CX that consumers expect from day one. The future is bright, and we look forward to taking our next steps together.
About Dotdigital
Dotdigital acquired Fresh Relevance in September 2023 with a mission to help more brands deliver customer experiences that exceed expectations.
Dotdigital’s all-in-one customer experience and data platform (CXDP) combines the power of automation and AI to help businesses deliver personalized customer experiences at scale across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, push, social, ads, and more.
Headquartered in London and established in 1999, Dotdigital is focused on building trusted, connected, and future-proofed solutions that empower customer-obsessed businesses. Dotdigital serves 4,000+ customers across 150+ countries around the world and has offices in London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Cape Town, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore.
