The good news is that prompting is a skill you can pick up fast. It’s less about finding a magic phrase and more about giving clear, specific direction, the same way you’d brief a new team member on a task.

This post covers the habits that make any agent prompt more reliable, then shows how they play out in two agents built into Dotdigital: Segment Agent and Content Agent.

Why prompting matters

An AI agent isn’t a mind reader. It only has two things to work with: the instructions built into it and whatever you type. If your prompt is vague, the agent has to guess what you mean, and a guess is only ever going to be a guess.

This matters more with AI agents than with a general chatbot. A chatbot will go along with almost any request. An agent usually has one job, like building a segment or drafting an email, and it works best when you ask for things specific to that task. Ask it to go outside that lane, and you’ll get a workaround at best, or nothing useful at worst.

Five habits that make any prompt more reliable

1. Say exactly what you mean

A vague request forces the agent to fill in the gaps, and it won’t fill them in the way you would. “Find my best customers” means five different things depending on the day. “Contacts who’ve bought more than three times in the last 90 days” means one thing. Give the agent conditions, values, and dates it can act on, not ideas it has to interpret.

2. Build it in steps 

You don’t need the perfect prompt on the first try. Get one part right, check it, then add the next. Most agents are built for back-and-forth conversation, and a series of small, correct steps beats one long prompt trying to do everything at once.

3. Use your real field and list names, not general terms 

If your data has a field called “Loyalty tier” or a list called “VIP customers,” say that, not “important customers.” Agents built to work in your marketing platform are designed to match what you type to your account data, but they can only match what’s there. The closer your wording is to your real fields, the less room there is for a wrong guess.

4. Check the output before you use it

An agent can build something fast, but fast isn’t the same as correct. Read through the logic, the copy, or the rule it’s generated before you rely on it. Treat it like a first draft from a new team member: useful, but yours to sign off on.

5. Ask it to explain itself

If a result looks complicated or you’re not sure it did what you asked, ask the agent to summarize what it built or walk you through its reasoning. It takes ten seconds and catches a wrong assumption before it goes anywhere near production.

What does this look like inside Dotdigital

Dotdigital has two agents where these habits make a real difference. Segment Agent helps you build and edit audience segments, and Content Agent helps you draft and check email copy inside your email builder. Here’s what applying these habits looks like in each.

Segment Agent

Segment Agent builds and edits segments from a plain-language request and can summarize the logic in a segment you already have. It’s designed to match field and list names to your account data even if your wording is a little off. For best results, be specific and build your segment gradually rather than describing a complex segment in one go.

Start simple:

• Create a segment of contacts subscribed to email
• Build a segment of contacts whose country is the UK and who are subscribed to email

Then refine with follow-ups:

• Also include contacts subscribed to SMS
• Exclude contacts who purchased from any catalog in the last 30 days
• Limit this segment to contacts in the VIP list

Once it’s built, check your work:

• Summarize this segment.
• What rules are being used in this segment?

Worth knowing: Segment Agent is a doer, not a brainstormer. It won’t suggest ideas or scan your data to surface new segments, and it won’t tell you how many contacts match until the segment runs. But bring it a clear idea, and it’ll bring it to life and build it fast.

Content Agent

Content Agent lives inside our email builder and helps with the copy itself: brainstorming angles, drafting a first version, tweaking tone or length, checking a draft before you send, adding personalization, and generating or editing images. Nothing it produces goes into your campaign until you’ve reviewed and approved it.

The same habits apply. Start specific:

• Brainstorm ideas for a “we miss you” email after 90 days of inactivity
• Draft a paragraph explaining the benefit of signing up

Refine rather than starting over:

• Change the tone of the email to be friendly but not overly familiar
• Shorten this paragraph to two sentences

And use it to check your own work, not just generate new copy:

• Check my email copy against my brand voice
• Check whether this paragraph is too salesy for our brand voice

For the best results, set up your brand voice details in your Dotdigital account first. The more Content Agent knows about how your brand sounds, the less editing you’ll do later.

Start small, then build the habit

Treat AI agents like a new team member. Give them specific tasks, clear direction, and simple, step-by-step explanations, then check in before moving on.

Pick one prompt from this list and try it for yourself. These habits become second nature fast, and that’s how prompt writing goes from something that slows you down to something that helps you get through your to-do list faster.

Learn more:

• Segment Agent overview
• Use Segment Agent to build and edit segments
• Content agent overview | Dotdigital Marketing Help Centre
• Content agent prompt guide | Dotdigital Marketing Help Centre

G2’s Summer 2026 rankings are out, and Dotdigital landed Leader status in 13 product categories. Getting recognized in one category is an achievement. Getting recognized in 13 shows how broad the platform is and how differently marketers use it in their day-to-day.

What does a G2 Leader status mean?

G2’s rankings are based entirely on real customer reviews. Every single one gets verified by G2, so you know it’s from a real Dotdigital user, and not just what a vendor says about itself.

Two things drive the G2 rankings: 

1. Customer satisfaction scores drawn from reviews
2. Market presence, which factors in review volume, reach, and engagement

G2 plots every vendor on a grid using those two scores. Leaders sit in the top right, which means they score high on both. You can’t buy your way in or coast on brand recognition alone. Here’s how that looks for categories like marketing automation:

Which categories does Dotdigital rank as a G2 Leader?

G2 reviewers choose categories based on how they use the platform every day. These 13 categories cover the full customer engagement lifecycle, from acquisition and messaging through to data, personalization, and analytics.

1. Email marketing
2. Marketing automation
3. Personalization
4. Customer data platform (CDP)
5. Email deliverability
6. Communication platform as a service (CPaaS)
7. SMS marketing
8. Mobile marketing
9. Customer journey analytics
10. Email template builder
11. Landing page builders
12. Personalization engines
13. Transactional email

Why Dotdigital is a leader across 13 categories

More than 1,200 customers have left Dotdigital reviews on G2, averaging 4.4/5. Across those reviews, four themes keep coming up:

• Smart automation that saves time
• Accessible segmentation
• Connected cross-channel marketing
• Support from real people

Smart automation that saves time

Reviewers keep mentioning how much manual work the platform takes off their plate. You can map out multi-step journeys with triggers, timing rules, and decision points, so cart recovery emails, post-purchase flows, and win-back campaigns run themselves.

It’s how Scott, a Communications Partner, keeps ongoing communications running on their own, with journeys built on triggers, timing rules, and decision points.

Accessible segmentation

You don’t need a data team or a single line of code to build precise segments. Slice your audience by purchase behavior, engagement, demographics, or custom data fields in a few clicks. And with Segment Agent, you can now describe the audience you need in your own words and let AI build it.

It’s what Alo, a Digital Marketing Specialist, uses to build precise segments in a few clicks, with no code needed.

Connected cross-channel marketing

Email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile push, web, and ads all run from one platform, with over 200 integrations feeding in your customer and order data. That’s why reviewers talk about managing everything in one place instead of juggling tools.

Brian, a VP of Digital, has run cross-channel marketing this way for years, backed by the platform’s AI and hands-on support teams.

Support from real people

Help is on hand around the clock, with 24/7 live chat, dedicated onboarding, and your own customer success manager. It’s the theme reviewers get most enthusiastic about, and the one that’s hardest for any platform to fake.

Ben’s seen all of it, seven years and two organizations’ worth, from onboarding through to building full customer journeys.

Dotdigital named one of the best customer data platforms by G2

Our G2 recognition goes further than Leader status. G2 included Dotdigital in its roundup of the 9 best customer data platforms, alongside other platforms like Salesforce, Bloomreach, and Klaviyo.

G2 highlighted Dotdigital as best for accessible marketing automation, calling out our email, SMS, and lifecycle campaign automation as standout strengths. The list was built on real user reviews, with platforms selected based on customer data unification, segmentation, activation, analytics, usability, and integrations.

In G2’s words, Dotdigital is a strong fit for mid-market teams who want their marketers to manage automation without leaning on technical specialists for every campaign. That sits nicely alongside our 13 G2 Leader categories and reflects how customers are using Dotdigital to bring their data and marketing activity together in one place.

Read the full G2 list of the best customer data platforms.

How to use G2 when you’re choosing a marketing platform

Evaluating marketing platforms isn’t easy. There’s a lot to weigh up, and it doesn’t help that many vendors will tell you what you want to hear. Independent platforms, like G2, give you real, verified customer insights from people who use the platform every day.

Here’s how to get the most out of it during your research:

Count the Leader categories

Every G2 category is a separate contest with its own reviews and rankings. A vendor can be brilliant at email, and average at everything else, and the category view shows you that. So instead of asking “Is this platform good?” check whether it leads in the specific categories your team uses or needs. If you need email, SMS, and automation, look for Leader status in all three rather than a single overall badge.

Look past the star rating

Two platforms can both sit at 4.4 stars for completely different reasons. The detail is in G2’s satisfaction scores, where reviewers rate things like ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support as separate questions. Decide which of those matters most to your team before you compare.

Check how recent the reviews are

Marketing platforms change fast. A vendor coasting on praise from three years ago may be a different product now. Filter reviews to the last 6 to 12 months and see whether the same strengths keep coming up. Consistent recent praise for the same things is a much stronger signal than a high all-time average.

Compare vendors within the same category

It’s hard to compare platforms from their own websites because everyone describes themselves differently. G2’s category grid fixes that by scoring direct competitors on the same criteria and plotting them side by side. Pick the category that matches your use case, shortlist from the grid, then read reviews for each vendor on your list.

Look at who’s leaving the reviews

A review from a 5,000-person enterprise tells you little if you’re a team of four, and the reverse is true, too. G2 shows reviewer job titles and company sizes, so filter for companies that look like yours. Their experience of onboarding, support, and day-to-day use is the closest preview you’ll get of your own.

If you’re a Dotdigital customer and haven’t left a review yet, it genuinely makes a difference.

Head to our G2 profile and share your experience. It takes less time than you’d think.

So when you put me in charge of building a loyalty product, expect a genuinely excessive amount of detail about tier thresholds. Strong opinions about points expiry. And, eventually, the thing I’m here to talk about today: Dotdigital Loyalty, now live for merchants who want their customers to keep coming back for more without adding another piece of tech to their stack.

Here’s the short version, if you’re in a hurry. We built a loyalty platform that lives alongside your marketing campaigns in Dotdigital. No extra supplier to manage. No waiting until the next day for data you need right now. No second login or invoice. But just in case you want the long version…

Here’s what they’re not telling you about loyalty programs

Most loyalty programs aren’t bad because your product isn’t good enough or your brand reputation is on its knees. They’re bad because the loyalty and marketing platforms don’t talk to each other. In other words, the integration between them is not good enough.

Imagine you’ve spent months building a loyalty strategy, setting your tier thresholds, and figuring out the economics of your points. Your customer hits ‘Gold’ tier, which is a genuinely exciting moment after years of patient relationship-building, and it’s finally paying off. In a lot of setups, your email platform finds out about this approximately… whenever the connector feels like syncing. Could be an hour, could be overnight. Could be never if something quietly breaks and nobody notices for three weeks.

By the time your marketing platform knows, the moment’s gone. You sent the tier celebration email a week late, the customer’s already moved on with your competitor, and the whole thing feels a bit limp. This isn’t a hypothetical. I’ve been lucky enough to meet with countless talented marketers, enthusiastic about doing more to boost repeat purchases or increase average order value. But when asked about how their tools connect, the answer is some version of “well, there’s an integration.” There’s always an integration. There’s never quite enough integration for my liking.

So, we set out to fix that

Dotdigital Loyalty was built so that when your customers show their love for you, your marketing already knows and can react. Not eventually. Now. 

A customer earns points; their balance updates in their contact profile immediately. They move up a tier; every automation that should care about that already does. Their points are about to expire; the nudge email can go out without anyone having to build a special flow for it. We didn’t want to create an integration between two products. Instead, we set out to find a solution to today’s customer retention challenge.

I’ll spare you the full feature list (it’s on our website, I promise it’s thorough), but here’s what’s actually in there:

• Decide what’s worth a reward, and reward it. Points for purchases, reviews, sign-ups, birthdays, and giving marketing consent
• Turn your most loyal customers into VIPs. Create up to four tiers, with automatic progression and demotion
• Flexible rewards. Share discounts, free shipping, free products, whatever fits your margins and your brand
• Automate the rewards, not the relationships. Don’t increase your workload; Dotdigital handles that for you since it’s already hooked up to your marketing data

The bit I’m most excited about (and yes, it involves AI)

I know they say you can’t pick a favorite child, but there’s one update in this release I’m genuinely proud of. And it’s not a points multiplier (though Dotdigital Loyalty obviously has that too).

It’s our AI loyalty digest. A regular email written in plain language that tells you how your program is doing. Not a dashboard or a spreadsheet you have to interpret at 8:59 am on Monday. It’s a short, readable summary that says things like: “Points issued were up 34% this week, mostly from a spike in purchases on Tuesday and Wednesday.” This is the kind of thing a colleague would tell you at the coffee machine, if you had a colleague whose entire job was reading your loyalty data so you didn’t have to.

We built this because, whilst most marketers I’ve spoken to care about their analytics, logging in and making sense of a chart takes a kind of intentional effort that a busy week rarely allows for. So we’re bringing those insights straight to you.

It’s not only about your customers. Loyalty programs benefit you, too

When we spoke to marketers about their retention strategies, nobody said: “I wish my customers had more points, and they’re all Platinum tier, and they all get 50% off.” What they actually wanted was to solve some very familiar problems.

We know you want customers to come back and buy again. We know you want to increase average order value without relying on blanket discounting. And when acquisition costs are through the roof, of course, we know you want to recognize and retain your best customers. And they wanted to do all of this without creating even more work for already stretched teams.

That’s exactly what Dotdigital Loyalty is designed to do.

• Boost repeat purchases. Reward the behaviors that matter most, whether that’s a second order, a product review, or joining your VIP tier
• Increase average order value(AOV). Encourage customers to spend a little more to unlock rewards, free shipping, or reach the next tier
• Improve retention. Spot customers whose points are about to expire or whose engagement is dropping, then automatically bring them back with perfectly timed campaigns

And because loyalty data lives natively inside Dotdigital, you can use it everywhere across your marketing. Segment by tier, personalize based on points balance, trigger journeys from loyalty events, and create experiences that feel far less like marketing and much more like a relationship. Which, when you think about it, is what loyalty was supposed to be all along.

Curious about Dotdigital Loyalty?

If you’re a Dotdigital customer already, head straight to your Customer Success Manager, and they can help you get started. We also have an exclusive one-hour-long course for you to get your teeth stuck into. If you’re not a customer, don’t panic. Get in touch, and our experts will show you how awesome it is when loyalty and marketing live in the same place.

Marketers need data that‘s complete, current, and immediately usable. When it’s fragmented, decisions slow down for your marketing team and for your business as a whole. Opportunities pass by, results plateau, and manual data exports create more chaos than clarity.

And when you could outperform your peers by 26% using real-time data, a single, connected data stream is the difference between reacting and staying ahead. It gives marketing, tech, and operations teams a shared, live view of every customer, ready to power the right message at the right time.

Dotdigital connects with your data warehouse so you can quickly turn insight into action. By syncing with platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks, you can start building campaigns using real-time data, so every message lands at the right moment, feels genuinely relevant, and doesn’t require a heavy lift from you or your team.

Connecting your data warehouse to your marketing channels

Data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks give businesses a secure, unified place to store and govern their data. So, when we launched integrations with these platforms, it was a chance to bring marketers the seamless data flow to turn data into unforgettable customer experiences. Combined with Dotdigital, your data stops sitting in storage and starts driving meaningful moments across channels like:

• Email
• SMS
• WhatsApp
• Web
• Push
• Social 

Our integrations leave no gap between knowing and doing. Information in your data warehouse flows straight into Dotdigital to be used in your campaigns, while engagement results from Dotdigital return to your warehouse for deeper insight. Your data keeps moving, your marketing keeps learning, and nothing goes stale.

Reducing friction between marketing and tech teams

Busy marketing teams can’t wait three days for the latest results to be downloaded, then uploaded to your email automation platform. When data feeds directly into Dotdigital, you can:

• Adjust journeys mid‑flow
• Launch segments in minutes
• Deliver hyper‑relevant content based on the latest customer behaviors

At the same time, data and tech teams need precision and control. These integrations help you:

• Meet governance standards
• Keep sensitive data securely housed
• Remove duplicate storage and risky sharing practices

When everyone works from the same single data source, friction between teams disappears. Plans move faster, creativity gets sharper, and everyone’s working toward the same goal with the same information.

The business impact of connected data

Connected data makes your marketing work better:

• Campaigns land because they’re timed and relevant
• Teams stop wasting hours on avoidable data exchanges
• Compliance becomes simpler because the governance sits inside the integration

As marketing execution speeds up, you see a direct impact with quicker campaign launches, higher conversion rates, and engagement that doesn’t plateau six weeks later. 

A customer data platform (CDP) trusted by marketers

One more thing before we share what connected data looks like in action: Dotdigital was recently named a G2 Leader for Customer Data Platforms (CDP) in the Summer 2026 rankings. Every ranking is based on verified reviews from real customers, so you know you’re in good hands.

What this looks like in action

When Dotdigital connects with data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, it starts to change how everyday marketing gets done. With data syncing smoothly in the background, teams can:

Capitalize on sudden spikes in interest

Your data warehouse shows an unexpected surge in sales for a product. Dotdigital then pinpoints customers who’ve shown interest and sends timely promotions without waiting for a data upload.

Personalize product recommendation journeys

Your data warehouse reveals the product categories customers explore most. Dotdigital turns that insight into personalized emails, push messages, and social ads with product recommendations based on what’s trending.

Deliver back‑in‑stock and new‑arrival alerts

When product availability changes in your data warehouse, whether an out‑of‑stock favorite is replenished or a new item lands, Dotdigital instantly sends a customer a personalized alert.

Prevent customer churn in real time

When your data warehouse indicates a premium subscriber is overdue for a repeat purchase, Dotdigital enrolls them into an automated cross-channel retention sequence. Once they buy, that transaction flows back into your data warehouse, closing the loop and keeping their profile up to date. 

Ready to push, pull, and personalize?

Dotdigital’s data warehouse integrations help you avoid compromises, like finding clunky workarounds or having to duplicate data at the expense of accuracy. It’s built for marketers and data teams alike. With one source of truth, you’ll have endless opportunities to turn data into meaningful moments for your customers.

But these tools sit outside your marketing stack, which means they don’t understand your campaigns, your audiences, or your performance data unless you manually feed it in.

That disconnect is exactly what a Model Context Protocol (MCP) is designed to solve.

So, let’s take a look at:

• How an MCP connects AI tools to your marketing stack
• What that means in real workflows
• What you can do with Dotdigital’s MCP server

What is an MCP server?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s a standardized way (a protocol) to provide data and other information (context)to AI (models).

Instead of manually copying in information or uploading files, an MCP connects your marketing systems directly to the AI tools you’re already using, so, the context is there from the start.

This means your preferred AI tool can see what’s happening in your marketing in real time and you can ask it questions about your campaign data, such as: 

“What was my average campaign open rate in Q4?”

Or, get AI to take approved actions like adding a new lead into specific audience segments, or campaigns within your marketing platform.

This is exactly what the Dotdigital MCP server helps marketers to do.

The problem with ‘standalone’ AI tools

ChatGPT, and similar AI tools, are powerful, but on their own they’re missing something important for marketers. They don’t know your context. So, the answers you get are usually quite general, based on broad internet information rather than your actual campaigns.

Many marketers try to work around this by exporting reports, downloading CSVs, and pasting data into prompts to give the AI something to work with. And every time the question changes, you’re back doing the same thing again, re-explaining the context from scratch.

It also doesn’t really fit how marketing teams work day to day. In meetings, or while reviewing performance, you want answers quickly and not a process that involves pulling data, uploading files, and waiting to piece everything together. And even when you do get something useful out of it, you still have to jump back into your marketing platform to take action.

What you end up with is a lot of switching between tools and stitching information together manually.

An MCP removes that friction by connecting your marketing systems directly to your AI tools, so you’re working with live data in a single flow and not a disconnected process.

Why should marketers care?

You don’t need a technical background to start using AI directly with your marketing data. With an MCP in place, you can move from guessing, or manually pulling data, to working with it directly in your AI tool.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Answers at your fingertips: Instead of using AI just for ideas, you can ask questions and get real numbers straight from your marketing data, which is useful for when you’re in a meeting and need clarity quickly

• From insight to action in one conversation: Turn the insights from AI into actions in Dotdigital without leaving your workflow

• Use the AI tool you already prefer: An MCP isn’t tied to one platform. Whether you use ChatGPT, Claude, or something else, it works the same way

• Headache-free: Setup is simple and seamless. Paste the Dotdigital MCP URL into your chosen AI tool and follow the quick authentication prompts

What can you do with Dotdigital’s MCP server?

Get instant answers from real-life data

Ask questions of your Dotdigital email performance data and get answers fast. No need to export data and add it into your AI tools. You can ask questions like:

• What’s the YoY revenue growth from my emails?
• How much did our click-through rate increase in the past six months?
• Are there any anomalies in this week’s email campaign data?

Ask AI to spot trends that help you optimize

When you create hundreds of emails in a year, you don’t want to sift through each email to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Ask your LLM questions about what did well so you double down on your successes, like: 

• Did using emojis in my subject line improve my email open rates?
• What email length has the best impact on click-through rates?
• What did my best performing emails have in common?

Get insights from forms without digging through reports

Forms are a goldmine when it comes to understanding of customer intent, but analyzing them usually takes time. With an MCP, you can simply ask:

• Which volunteering interests were most popular on my form?
• How have form responses changed month by month this year?
• Which forms in my account are getting the most engagement? 

Your AI assistant pulls the data and summarises it for you.

Build and update marketing lists quickly

You can use your prefered LLM to turn queries into actions in Dotdigital, such as:

• Add all satisfied survey responders to a Brand advocates list in Dotdigital
• Add these webinar attendees to our VIP list
• Update the country for alex@domain.com to Germany

Make AI part of your everyday workflow

Marketers spend a lot of time switching between tools just to get answers.

With Dotdigital’s MCP server, your AI tool connects directly to your marketing data. So instead of jumping between platforms, you can ask questions, get context, and act on it in one place.

Connect Dotdigital to your AI tool of choice and start having real conversations with your marketing data.

You’ve used AI to write copy. We know, because we all have. And you’ve felt that specific kind of disappointment when it comes back sounding like every other brand in your inbox. Technically fine but completely forgettable. The kind of copy that could belong to anyone – and so, really, belongs to no one.

That’s not an AI problem, that’s a brand voice problem. Most AI tools are built to generate content that’s fast and functional but they’re not built to sound like you. AI doesn’t know the specific nuances of your brand voice or language preferences. It doesn’t know that your brand is sharp and dry, not warm and fuzzy, or that you’d never say “leverage” or “revolutionize.” 

There’s a better way to use AI

61% of marketers identified good taste and brand point of view as a priority. So, we’ve created Dotdigital’s brand voice to help teams shape a consistent brand style and personality across all their content.

Here’s what makes Dotdigital’s AI brand voice different

1. It learns your brand, not a generic version of one

Feed Dotdigital your brand guidelines or a sample of your existing content, and our in-platform AI engine gets to work understanding your tone, your style, and your boundaries in a deep, structured way, across 10 researched brand voice categories such as:

• Brand identity
• Audience
• Voice and tone
• Language accessibility (jargon or not)
• Do’s and don’ts
• Language and style
• Terminology to use or avoid

If you don’t have a set of brand guidelines ready to go, don’t worry, you can use our free template to create them and then let AI get to work.

2. It keeps your voice consistent across every channel

One of the hidden ways brands erode trust is by sounding different across channels. While websites are carefully crafted to match the brand’s tone, things like emails, landing pages, and social posts can feel disconnected. This mismatch, often caused by different people managing different touchpoints, weakens cohesion, authority, and conversion rates.

Our AI brand voice works across your entire Dotdigital account, so whether you’re sending an email or an SMS – the voice stays consistent. No other platform does this across all these channels in a single account. We checked.

3. It catches the moments you miss

Even the best marketers have off days. You’re rushing and you copy-paste from an old campaign, or perhaps someone new to the team writes something that sounds slightly off but you can’t put your finger on why.

The ‘Check Brand Voice’ option scans your copy for brand voice inconsistencies before anything goes live – and gives you an on-brand rewrite on the spot. Think of it as a second pair of eyes that never gets tired, never has a bad day, and never lets “leverage” slip through unchecked.

The results speak for themselves

Dotdigital customers are already seeing what happens when AI works with your brand and not against it:

• Mountain Warehouse: 15% increase in open rates using AI subject line suggestions
• 4Cabling: 20% increase in revenue from AI product recommendations
• Goodwood: 2x sales increase from AI-generated SMS

Why this drives better results

AI isn’t slowing down, and neither is your workload. The marketers who win won’t be the ones who use the most AI – they’ll be the ones whose AI actually sounds like them.

Our very own Head of Content once said:

“If your brand voice is generic, your content will be too. Make it uniquely yours.”

Copy that sounds like you – specific, consistent, authentic – that’s what gets read, clicked, and remembered. Our AI brand voice tool is built for exactly that.

Ready to sound like yourself again?

Book a demo today and see our AI brand voice in action. Or, if you’re already a Dotdigital customer, head to your account and try it now.

We’ve launched AI that learns your brand voice, two-way SMS, and a wave of new and improved integrations that mean less time wrestling with data and more time using it. Here’s everything that’s new.

Create content in your own brand voice

AI is an amazing tool helping marketers all over the world work smarter and faster, but AI-generated copy is all starting to sound a bit… samey. You don’t want to sound like every other brand, and we don’t either.

Dotdigital’s AI learns exactly how your brand sounds. Upload your guidelines, share some examples of your favorite content, or just answer a few questions about your writing style, and it will start writing (and checking) your campaigns in your voice, not a generic one.

You can share dos and don’ts, flag words you’d never use, and point to real examples of your brand at its best. The more you give it, the better it gets. And from there, the AI tool picks up on your industry, identity, tone, and the kind of language your audience expects. Test and refine the output as you go to make sure every word sounds like you.

For marketers using Dotdigital, this means faster campaign creation, less time tweaking, and content that sounds authentically you.

Plug in Dotdigital to your favorite AI tools

If you’re already using ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool, you can now connect it directly to your Dotdigital account to get faster, conversational insights. It works through something called a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

An MCP server is a standardized way to let AI tools talk to platforms like Dotdigital. Setup depends on your AI tool of choice, but can be as easy as copying and pasting a URL, ID, and secret key from your Dotdigital account. Check out our simple setup guide here.

Once connected, you can ask your AI tool real questions about your data, and even ask it to take action, like creating marketing lists and adding contacts to lists. Put it to work with prompts like these:

• “Show me our email open rates for the past 3 months, broken down by week.”
• “Show all contacts tagged as VIP in Dotdigital.”
• “Create a new list called ‘Event Attendees – Q4’ and add all contacts who filled out our October survey.”
• “Show average Net Promoter Score from last month’s responses.”
• “How does our open rate compare to the industry average in retail?”

Plus, you’ll soon be able to use it to build new email templates and much more using insights from your account. It’s a faster, more conversational way to get more out of your data.

Have real conversations with two-way SMS

SMS is one of the best-performing channels for marketers. And it’s now two-way. You can now view and reply to SMS responses directly inside Dotdigital, in the same place you already manage your WhatsApp and chat conversations.

When a customer replies to a campaign, you can see what they’re responding to and act fast and with context. Customizable quick replies and keywords like “STOP” are filtered out, so your team only sees active, engaged conversations.

Use two-way SMS for lead qualification, appointment confirmation, feedback collection, product recommendations — basically any moment where you want a speedy response from an engaged customer. No more flipping between tools and channels to talk directly to your customers.

Easier WhatsApp subscription management

You can now manage WhatsApp opt-ins using our API, as well as within the platform, so you can track consent consistently across email, SMS, and WhatsApp. This is especially useful if you’re working with custom integrations or third-party data flows.

Pull more data out of Dotdigital with fewer API calls

The new Events API is for teams that pull large volumes of data from Dotdigital. Now you can pull more data in a single API call. Think: opens, clicks, page views, bounces and unsubscribes. You get more up-to-date data, fewer headaches, and a cleaner connection to whichever CRM, CDP, or analytics platform you’re using.

Bring your whole data stack together

If your team runs on Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery,  you can now sync order, contact and product data into Dotdigital. Integrating your marketing data with your data warehouse lets you build on your single source of truth, so data from other tools and platforms you’ve connected to it can flow straight into Dotdigital, with no custom pipelines needed. 

And getting data out has gotten more powerful, too. We’ve expanded our data firehose to push more insights, including contact updates, consent changes, and preference updates automatically into your tech stack. For teams using both firehose and data warehouses, a full two-way sync is possible.

Get deeper data syncs with updated HubSpot CRM integration

The Dotdigital and HubSpot integration has had a serious upgrade. You can sync lists, email and SMS opt-ins, custom properties (like deal value and industry), plus marketing events, form submissions, and custom events as usable data in Dotdigital.

In practice, these upgrades look a little like this: two contacts sign up for your webinar. One attends, one doesn’t. This data syncs from HubSpot to Dotdigital to trigger the relevant follow-up campaign — no workarounds and no need for third-party tools to connect your CRM and marketing automation platform. 

Target subscribers at exactly the right moment with Recharge

If you’re a subscription-based business, customer subscription data is some of the most powerful insight you can act on, and now it’s in Dotdigital. Our new Recharge integration syncs subscription data into your Dotidigital account, so you always know where a customer is in their subscription journey, whether they’ve hit pause, are due for renewal, or are ready to upgrade. That context turns into campaigns that land at exactly the right moment.

Surface customer reviews and UGC inside your emails 

Two new integrations with BazaarVoice and Judge.me make it easier to bring social proof and user-generated content (UGC) into your campaigns. With new app blocks now available for the popular review platforms, you can pull star ratings and reviews directly into your email campaigns. Convince any undecided shoppers to convert with your top five-star ratings. 

Website personalization that stays fresh

Personalization is only as good as the data behind it. Our latest update makes it easier to keep your data current. Now, you can drag-and-drop any Dotdigital audience and serve hyper-personalized web and email experiences based on real behavior and insight data like recent purchases, eRFM scores, and channel preferences. Personalization should move as fast as your customers, so as soon as their behavior changes, their experience refreshes, too. 

Available as a private preview for Dotdigital customers.

Launch and test popups without a developer

You can now launch, test, and disable popup campaigns on any web page instantly and without involving a developer. You control where the pop-up appears and preview it before go-live, so you can fine-tune the experience and drive more conversions.

That’s a wrap

Every update in this release is built to give you the tools to move faster, make smarter decisions, and create customer experiences that actually resonate. Whether that’s AI that learns your brand voice, data that flows freely across your stack, or channels where you can have real conversations — it all adds up to giving you more control, context, and ways to act on what you know. 

Watch the full recording of the session and see the data being presented in real time, or scroll on for a quick summary of the key findings and links to download the full reports.

So what did we discuss?

Rand presented findings from a new study on search behavior and market trends that he worked on with Datos. The study analyzes website visit patterns and platform usage across traditional search engines, AI tools, and e-commerce platforms. The data revealed that while Google maintains significant market share in traditional search, search behavior is increasingly happening across multiple platforms including social networks, e-commerce sites, and AI tools, with Amazon being the top search platform in the US. 

The discussion also dug into new insights about the relationship between AI tools and traditional search, emphasizing that both remain important for optimization strategies and overall marketing that supports commerce and economies.

Search trends in 2026 

A recent research project with Datos on clickstream data, analyzed website visit patterns, revealing that traditional search engines accounted for 10% of visits, AI tools 1%, and e-commerce 3.28% in Q4. Confirming that Google’s market share remains stable, despite some reports of decline, and that AI mode adoption is currently low, but increasing as Google becomes more aggressive with its promotion of AI mode and AI overview search results.

AI search behavior research

With Google still dominating traditional search, AI tools like ChatGPT are starting to show declining usage, as Google’s Gemini gains market share. The research found that audiences are searching across many domains beyond traditional search engines. 14 out of 41 domains that were looked at received visits from over 20% of US desktop devices and 15 domains reached similar stats in the EU. Rand emphasized the importance of focusing on the channels and search engines your specific audience and customers are already engaging with, rather than jumping on general trends. This is particular important if you have an audience that uses social media networks and e-commerce sites.

Search platform market share analysis

Rand presented data on search behavior across different platforms, revealing that while Google maintains a significant market share, other platforms like Amazon, YouTube, and Bing are also major search destinations. The analysis showed that search outside traditional engines represents about 20% of total searches, with e-commerce and social networks accounting for additional shares. Rand noted that Google’s dominance appears to be shrinking slightly when compared to overall web search activity, but is still clearly demonstrating its staining power in the ranks of traditional search platforms.

Cross-platform search behavior data

The data shows that search behavior is happening across multiple platforms beyond traditional search engines. Key findings included Amazon being the top search platform in the US, YouTube* having lower search rates than expected despite its popularity, and ChatGPT showing flattened growth in search activity. The discussion addressed questions about the definition of search across different platforms and the impact of social media on search behavior, with Rand emphasizing that while platforms like YouTube and Instagram may not show high search rates, they still represent significant opportunities for content optimization.

*A point to note here is that many search results that end with YouTube content consumption, don’t necessarily start on YouTube. They are likely to start on Google, with YouTube videos being surfaced as search results.

AI and search optimization 

Rand discussed how AI tools are additive rather than replacing traditional search right now, noting that while AI visibility in Google is important, with 16% of searches now showing AI overviews, the focus should remain on both traditional and AI search optimization. 

Bonus content – marketing is a superpower

With it being noted throughout the session that politics and economical uncertainty play a huge role in how audiences, particularly consumers, adapt their behavior, we finished the discussion by getting a little deep and thinking about the part that marketing plays in the world right now. When asked about marketing’s relevance during challenging times, Rand emphasized that marketing has, and has always had, a positive impact on the world by enabling commerce and free market economies. It allows marketers to build a career around something that they’re truly passionate about, and it allows audiences to find items, hobbies, interests, information and tools (for work or leisure) that help them embrace what makes them happy and brings fulfillment. Letting us all lead better, happier and more interesting lives. So make sure you follow the data that helps your audience find your marketing. 

The session concluded with Rand sharing links to the research reports that were discussed, which can see visuals from in the session recording, or downloads for yourself: 

Further reading: download Rand’s search behavior reports:

• Search everywhere – share of search by platforms, an analysis of 41 websites with significant search activity

• The inconsistency of AI search results – who ChatGPT gives different answers to the same questions

• The state of search – behaviors trends and clicks