We’ll cover:

• What AI does well
• Where human creativity still has the edge
• How to make confident decisions about when to use which

What AI does well in marketing

AI is at its best when the task is repeatable, data-heavy, or time-consuming. Here’s what we’ve found useful, based on our own research, and what customers tell us they use day to day.

Getting a first draft down

AI is great for getting something on the page quickly to avoid blank page syndrome – the anxiety caused by staring at a blank Word doc. Subject lines and first drafts take minutes instead of hours. The output isn’t always great, but having something to edit can spark more ideas and get the job done faster.

Repurposing content across channels

Taking a piece of content and rewriting it for a different channel takes time, and it’s easy to deprioritize. A lot of marketers use AI to edit copy, keeping the core message intact while adjusting for character limits and channel context. It’s one of those tasks that’s easy to hand off once you’ve tried it.

Personalizing across a large contact list

When you have a large mailing list, building personalized, relevant marketing messages can feel daunting. But AI can help add personal product recommendations to campaigns without the extra workload. Using insights like a customer’s purchase history or browsing behavior, AI-powered product recommendations can boost conversions by over 53% and help increase revenue by around 20%.

Making sense of your data

AI spots patterns in your campaign data in seconds. It can highlight underperforming segments, predict when customers are likely to churn, and recommend the best time to send, so you spend less time searching for insights and more time acting on them.

Testing more without doing more

AI can generate different subject lines, different CTAs, and different content angles, so you can run more tests without doubling your workload. Experimenting with new subject lines can help keep your emails feeling fresh and improve engagement. Mountain Warehouse used AI to generate and test new ideas, increasing open rates to 50%, up from a typical baseline of around 35%.

Where human creativity still matters most

While AI is speeding up a lot of day-to-day tasks, there are some areas where the human touch cannot be replaced.

Knowing your audience on a human level

AI can tell you what the data says about your audience, but it can’t tell you what it means. Only you can interpret those insights to understand where someone is in their journey, why one message resonated more than another, or what your audience needs next. That’s the kind of context AI still struggles to replicate.

Brand voice and personality

AI can be trained to write in your brand voice, and with a good voice guide, it’ll get impressively close. But sounding like your brand and knowing what your brand should say are two different things.

Say you’re a retail brand with a playful voice, and your summer sale campaign is ready to go. Then your delivery partner has a meltdown and half your customers are waiting on late orders. The AI will happily write you a cheeky, on-voice sale email, because that’s what it was trained to do. It takes a person to see that the sale email should wait, and that what customers need first is a plain, honest update about their orders.

That call sits nowhere in a voice guide. It comes from someone who knows what’s happening with your customers right now and can judge how the brand should show up for it. Get it wrong and the same voice that usually feels charming suddenly feels tone-deaf. So let AI keep your copy consistent with the voice you’ve defined, and keep a person deciding how that voice meets the moment.

Creative ideas that feel original

AI is very good at producing content that’s technically correct and structurally sound. It’s less good at the kind of creative leap that makes a campaign memorable. The unexpected angle, the cultural reference that lands perfectly, and the idea that makes someone stop scrolling all still come from human creativity.

When a news story breaks, or your audience suddenly cares about something, the brands that land it are the ones where a person spotted the opportunity, judged whether it was theirs to join, and found the angle only their brand could take. AI can help you draft fast once you’ve had the idea, but the instinct for when to act, when to stay quiet, and what only you could say is human through and through.

The human touch in the process

Even the most AI-assisted campaign is full of human fingerprints, and that’s what keeps it feeling genuine:

• Someone edits the draft, catching the sentence that’s technically fine but doesn’t sound like you, and cutting the paragraph that says nothing
• Someone plans the campaign, deciding what to send, who should receive it, and what you’re trying to achieve beyond this week’s revenue target
• Someone sets the triggers and journeys, choosing which behaviors matter and what the right response to each one looks like

None of that work is visible to the customer, but all of it shapes what lands in their inbox. It’s the difference between a message that exists because a system could send it and one that exists because a person decided it was worth sending.

Audiences can’t see the process, but they can feel the result, and they’re getting better at telling the difference between communication with a person behind it and content that was generated.

How to decide when to use AI and when not to

The marketers we see getting the most from AI are the ones who’ve worked out where it saves them time without costing them quality, and where it doesn’t.

Use AI when:

• The task is repetitive and time-consuming
• You need help getting started or planning your content
• You’re generating ideas to test
• You need to create a first draft you can edit and improve
• Analyzing large volumes of data to uncover patterns and trends

A human touch matters most when:

• You need to understand your audience’s current mood or context
• Your message needs to feel distinctly like your brand voice
• The goal is to build an emotional connection, and not just share information

Where to go next

If this has got you thinking about how you’re using AI, these are some helpful reads to check out next, depending on what’s most relevant to you right now.

• See how marketers are using AI to create better campaigns

• Learn how to use AI without losing your brand voice

• Read our CMO’s take on the future of AI and human-led marketing

• Explore how Dotdigital’s AI helps you get more from every campaign

It’s your creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking that make your marketing stand out from others. By merging the best aspects of both AI and human input, you can create campaigns that are both effective and connect deeply with your audience.

There’s no shortage of platforms out there. The hard part is working out which one is right for your team, your goals, and the way you work day to day.

That’s what this guide is for. We’ll walk you through everything worth checking before you commit, so you can make a decision you won’t be disappointed with six months down the line.

We’ll show you how to:

1. Review your current email setup

2. Know what your email marketing goals are

3. Check ease of use

4. Compare automation and personalization features

5. Explore reporting and analytics

6. Review integration with your existing tech stack

7. A platform that grows with you

8. Compare support options and learning resources

9. Understand security and compliance

10. Compare pricing and what you get for it

11. Trial platforms before you commit

12. Get insights from real user experiences

13. See if it works for businesses like yours

Step 1: Review your current email setup

Bear with us here, this one sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people skip straight to the demos without actually stopping to think about what they need. So, before you let someone tell you what your problems are, take a few minutes to figure out:

• Which parts of your current process work, and which make you want to scream?
• Where’s your time going? What feels repetitive with every send?
• What can’t you do right now that’s holding your results back?
• If you could fix one thing about your current setup, what would it be?

Step 2: Know what your email marketing goals are

Before you get dazzled by features in a demo, it helps to know what you and your team want to achieve. It might be getting more subscribers, improving engagement, or increasing revenue per send. The clearer you are on the outcome, the easier it is to pick the right platform. 

Match your goals to the features that matter

Once you know what your goals are, it’s easier to spot which features will help deliver those results: 

• Subscriber growth: sign-up forms, landing pages, easy segmentation
• Engagement: automated welcome series, drip campaigns, dynamic personalization
• Retention: triggered emails, loyalty integrations, win-back campaigns
• Efficiency: drag-and-drop editor, reusable templates, agentic AI
• Revenue: ecommerce integrations, dynamic product recommendations, conversion tracking

Think short-term and long-term too

What you need today might look very different from what you’ll need in 12 to 24 months. Maybe right now it’s email newsletters, but soon you might want to add:

• Transactional emails
• SMS and MMS
• Advanced personalization
• WhatsApp
• Social retargeting

Picking a platform with room to grow saves you from having to do all of this again in two years. 

Step 3: Check ease of use

Nobody wants to file a ticket just to change a subject line. You need a tool your team can pick up and use from day one, instead of waiting on developers or long onboarding processes. 

Look for:

• A platform your team can learn and use quickly
• Drag-and-drop tools and ready-made templates that help you get campaigns out faster
• Automation builders that make it easy to create and manage customer journeys

When a platform is easy to use, your team can work faster and with more confidence. You’ll spend less time solving problems and more time creating campaigns that drive results.

Quick tip: 

Don’t just try a demo – get hands-on experience with the platform. You’ll learn more from a twenty-minute trial, creating campaigns and building segments, than any feature comparison chart. 

Step 4: Automation and personalization

The best email marketing does two things well. It gets the right message to the right person at the right moment without anyone having to manually manage every step. And when it lands, it feels like it was written just for them rather than fired out to everyone on your list.

Here are some things to look for:

• Automated journeys for welcome emails, abandoned carts, or win-back campaigns
• Behavior-based triggers and dynamic content, tailored to the individual
• AI that suggests what to send, who to send it to, and when they’re most likely to open it

The more tailored the email, the better it performs. Automation saves time, while personalization makes emails relevant and thoughtful, helping your brand stand out in crowded inboxes.

Quick tip:

Map your most common campaigns and customer journeys to see if the platform can handle them out of the box or with minimal setup. If it can’t handle your everyday marketing, then it’s probably not the right fit.

Step 5: Reporting and analytics

You’ve sent the campaign. Now comes the fun part, with you, staring at a spreadsheet on a Monday morning, trying to work out if it actually worked. Sound familiar?

Good reporting shouldn’t feel like detective work. The right platform gives you a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do differently next time, without you having to piece it together from five different places.

Look for dashboards that go deeper than just opens and clicks. You want to be able to drill down into segments or individual campaigns, run A/B tests, and track conversions, so every send makes the next one a little better.

Step 6: Integration with your existing tech stack

If your email marketing platform can’t talk to your CRM, ecommerce platform, or analytics software, you’ll end up having to carry out data uploads yourself, which is how everyone wants to spend their Friday afternoons – said no marketer ever!

Strong integrations make sure your data stays clean, workflows run smoothly, and campaigns perform reliably. Look for native integrations in the email marketing platform or strong APIs that let you sync contacts, trigger automated emails, and pull in performance data without someone in your team becoming a part-time data engineer.

Quick tip:

Make a map of your current tech stack and check that any new email marketing platform can integrate with your most important systems first.

Step 7: A platform that grows with you

Your email needs today might not be your email needs in 18 months. A platform that grows alongside you makes sure you’re not re-platforming again when you buy new marketing tech. 

Look for a platform that can handle:

• A growing marketing list without sudden price jumps
• Adding new channels like SMS, push notifications, or transactional emails
• Managing multiple brands or accounts from a single platform

Flexibility matters here, too. The best platforms let you change your workflows, templates, and campaigns as your strategy shifts, so your team can stay agile and responsive.

Quick tip:

Check how easily it grows as your needs change, whether that means upgrading your plan or adding new features.

Step 8: Customer support that feels human

Every platform will tell you its support is great. But there’s a big difference between a chatbot pointing you at a help article and a real person who understands your setup, your goals, and what you’re trying to fix.

Look at what’s included beyond the email marketing software itself. That might be live chat, email or phone support, onboarding sessions, training materials, or an active community of users. Fast, human support in your time zone is just as valuable as a help center.

Also, check out third-party review sites to see how other marketers rate the platform’s support. Consistent praise for responsiveness and expertise tells you even more about your prospective email marketing provider.

Step 9: Look at security and compliance

You already know data privacy matters. What’s less obvious is that not every platform makes it easy to stay on top of GDPR, CPRA, or other regional compliance requirements. 

A platform that takes security seriously protects your data, reduces risk, and lets you focus on running campaigns instead of worrying about compliance or having 2 am panics about data breaches.

Check for real security certifications like: 

• ISO 27001 or SOC 2 compliance
• SSL encryption for data in transit
• Routine security audits
• Two-factor authentication for your team

Step 10: Compare pricing and what you get for it

Pricing varies widely between email marketing platforms. Some charge based on contact volume, others by feature tier, and some by both. Always read the fine print. 

Check what’s included in each tier. Are key features like automation, segmentation, or reporting locked behind higher plans? Costs will rise as your list grows or you add channels. That’s normal. What matters is whether the growth in cost feels predictable or like a trap door. 

Watch for extras like:

• Add-on fees for advanced features
• Charges for additional users or accounts
• Premium support costs
• Overage fees if you exceed send limits

The goal isn’t to pick the cheapest platform. It’s to choose one that gives you room to grow and delivers clear value for the results you expect from email marketing.

Step 11: Trial email platforms before deciding

Once you’ve made your shortlist, it’s time to try them out. Most email marketing platforms offer demos or free trials, so take advantage of them.

While you’re in there, test the stuff you’ll do every week, like:

• Building and sending campaigns
• Setting up automated journeys
• Connecting to your existing tools
• Pulling reports and presenting dashboards

Get your team involved, too, especially if they’ll be using the platform daily. They’ll spot any friction points you miss, before you’ve signed anything. 

Step 12: Get insights from real user experiences

Demos show you the best-case scenario. Real user reviews show you how people are using the platform day-to-day, how reliable it is, and what support feels like in real situations.

Skip the star ratings and read comments about things like:

• Ease of use once you’re past onboarding
• Whether it holds up on high-volume send days 
• What is support like when something breaks 
• Whether updates and new features actually help
• Any common pain points that show up again and again

Third-party sites like G2 or Trustpilot are good places to start. Patterns across reviews tell you more than any five-star post, and they’re a lot more honest than a sales deck. 

Step 13: See if it works for businesses like yours

Not every email marketing platform is built for the same kind of business. Some are made for ecommerce brands sending high volumes of promotional emails. Others fit B2B teams running long sales cycles and slow-burning nurtures. 

Look at case studies and customer stories, and see whether those businesses resemble yours in size, structure, or goals; not just industry.

It’s also worth checking:

• Whether the platform supports your specific use cases
• If it plays well with tools common in your industry
• How it handles the kind of data you rely on
• Whether multi-brand or multi-region support is available if you need it

One last thing before you go

We should probably mention that Dotdigital is an email marketing platform too. And not to toot our own horn, G2 has ranked us #1 for email marketing, and recognised us as a regional leader for 13 categories across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, based entirely on reviews from marketers like you.

Here’s what many teams value most:

It’s easy to use

You can build emails, segment audiences, and launch campaigns without relying on developers. The interface is designed to feel easy, so your team can move quickly and confidently.

It connects with your existing tech stack

Whether you’re syncing CRM data or pulling in ecommerce insights, Dotdigital integrations are straightforward. With no more data silos, you can put your data to work faster.

It grows with you

As your contact list grows or your strategy expands into new channels, Dotdigital grows with you. You can manage multiple brands or accounts from our single platform and adapt as your needs change.

Support that feels human

From onboarding to ongoing optimization, you get support that’s tailored to your business goals. You’re not left alone, trying to figure it out.

Security and compliance built in

Dotdigital is built to help you feel confident about data protection. Things like strong safeguards and alignment with data privacy regulations mean customer data is safe and secure.

If it ticks your boxes, we’d love to show you what it looks like in practice. And if it doesn’t, we hope the guide was useful anyway.

This guide shows you how to make every penny count. Packed with practical tips, proven tactics, and channel-by-channel guidance, it’s everything you need to drive traffic, grow your audience, and raise more donations, all from one platform.

Over 340 non-profit organizations already use Dotdigital to stretch their marketing further. So you’ll find everything in this guide is grounded in real experience, not just theory.

What is non-profit marketing?

The objective of non-profit marketing will vary depending on the type of organization you are. It is generally considered that there are five types of non-profit organizations:  

1. Charitable 
2. Religious and church 
3. Worker’s association 
4. Private foundation 
5. Political 

Despite this covering a wide range of causes, non-profit marketing is, at its heart, all about attracting new support and making a difference. It’s about sharing your organization’s story, attracting support, and inspiring fundraising.

What are the benefits of non-profit marketing?

Marketing is the platform non-profits use to get their message out into the world. It offers many benefits to help you and your organization reach your business goals.  

Here are some of the key benefits you will receive when you implement a carefully constructed non-profit marketing strategy:  

1. Raise awareness

By spreading the word about your organization’s mission and message, more people will become aware of your cause and can actively support you.

2. Increase funding

 Intelligent non-profit marketing campaigns can encourage donations and memberships, enabling your organization to fund its programs and services.

3. Attract volunteers

Recruit more dedicated volunteers who can dedicate their time, skills, and expertise to your cause through targeted marketing campaigns.

4. Build a strong and supportive community

Using personalized and targeted marketing, you can engage with your community and build long-lasting relationships which are vital for success.

5. Improve credibility

By sharing success stories and building a consistent brand image, your brand will gain credibility, trust, and loyalty.

6. Expand outreach

Smart cross-channel marketing enables you to reach new audiences and share your mission with more people, leading to more widespread support.

7. Boost engagement

Through personalized content marketing, you can actively engage supporters and keep them informed, strengthening their connection to your cause.

8. Measure impact

With intelligent marketing analytics, you can easily assess the effectiveness of your campaigns, identify opportunities, and optimize performance.

Challenges facing non-profit marketers

Marketing a non-profit comes with a unique set of challenges; ones that set it apart from the for-profit world in meaningful ways.

Unlike B2C or B2B brands selling a physical product, non-profits and charities must market an idea or a cause, which is a far harder sell. And while a clear, well-defined mission gives non-profits an advantage, reaching the right people with that message is no simple task. Your audience isn’t just customers; it spans donors, volunteers, partners, and service recipients, each requiring their own journey and approach.

Here are the key challenges non-profit marketers face:

1. Limited budgets and resources

As a non-profit marketer, you often have to work with tight budgets and small teams. This makes it difficult to allocate resources and appropriately fund marketing activity.

2. Digital skills gap

The pace at which marketing technology is advancing can feel daunting. With limited budgets and resources, it can be hard for non-profit marketers to stay up-to-date with the latest tools and trends, as well as provide the necessary training across the team.

3. Increased competition

There are literally millions of non-profit organizations worldwide, and the sector’s dynamic nature means it’s constantly changing. As a result of this intense competition for public attention, it can be difficult to differentiate your organization and gain visibility.

4. Short-term vs. long-term impact

Non-profit marketing is a delicate balancing act between short-term goals like fundraising and recruiting volunteers and achieving long-term initiatives that make an impact

5. Overwhelming digital noise

Non-profit marketers are vying for attention on the same digital channels as for-profit companies. Breaking through the noise created by influencers and well-resourced B2C brands is becoming increasingly challenging for non-profit organizations.

6. Privacy and data regulations

Successful non-profit marketing relies on collecting and analyzing customer data. But privacy concerns and evolving data regulations, such as GDPR and CCPR, mean that non-profit marketers have to navigate the complexities of data hygiene, management, and compliance. This can be particularly challenging for non-profits established before the rise of digital marketing.

7. Measuring success and impact

Demonstrating the effectiveness of your non-profit marketing efforts and measuring the real-life impact of your campaigns can be particularly difficult for a non-profit marketer, especially when trying to attribute success to specific initiatives or evaluate long-term results.

How to build a successful non-profit marketing strategy

To successfully navigate the challenges facing you today, you need to adopt a comprehensive and targeted approach to your non-profit marketing. The stage of this is to create a strong marketing strategy. Thankfully, you can do this in six simple steps.

Step 1: Set marketing goals that matter

Do you want to increase the number of volunteers? Convert one-time donors into regular supporters? Increase event attendance? It’s essential you set goals that are relevant, measurable, and timely.

Example goals include:

• Increase donor acquisition: Acquiring new donors is crucial for sustained growth and the long-term success of your non-profit organization.
• Improve donor retention: Retaining existing donors is both more cost-effective and an opportunity for relationship-building and generating larger donations over time.
• Expand digital channels: The shift towards digital channels has increased the importance of leveraging online marketing tactics, including email, social media, and websites, to engage and maintain relationships with donors.
• Adopt personalization: As the non-profit market becomes more saturated, personalization has emerged as a vital tactic to help non-profits stand out, enhance relationships, and ultimately increase donations.
• Make more data-driven decision-making: The effective use of data allows you to make informed marketing decisions by targeting messages, measuring the impact of your campaigns, and adjusting your strategies accordingly.

Step 2: Get to know your supporters

To meet your goals, you need to understand what motivates your audience. What do they want or need from the relationship? Using the data you have on hand; you need to learn as much as possible about your audiences to build solid personas and well-planned customer journeys.

Step 3: Create messages that connect

With a clear goal and personas based on supporter data, it’s time to craft your message. Make sure it is clear and focused, ties into your overall mission, and can be acted upon.

Step 4: Choose the right channels for the right impact

Audiences are spread across an ever-expanding network of channels. As you build your non-profit marketing strategy, you need to clearly define what each channel will be used for. Ultimately, this will help you create the right kind of content for each and highlight where you need to focus your resources.

Step 5: Track your campaigns

Measuring your marketing results is vital to ensure you’re achieving your goals. Analyzing results will help you identify risks, opportunities, and changes in customer behavior. In turn, this will allow you to optimize your non-profit marketing efforts to ensure you continue to hit your goals.

Step 6: Learn, optimize, and repeat

Turn insights into action to continuously optimize and improve your non-profit marketing strategy.

Marketing software and tools every non-profit should use

To improve your reach, engage your audience, and drive support and donations, you need to utilize the tech at your fingertips. For ultimate success, you need tech that plays nicely with others. Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform offers a range of marketing tools and channels in a single, integrated, all-in-one platform.

By leveraging your tech effectively, you can improve donor engagement, increase donations, and streamline your non-profit marketing efforts.

Email marketing for non-profit

Email marketing enables you to deliver personalized content, straight to a subscriber’s inbox. Using email marketing to engage donors, volunteers, and stakeholders, you can foster strong relationships, increase awareness, and inspire action, donations, and volunteering.

The benefits of non-profit email marketing

1. Cost-effectiveness: Email marketing is one of the most cost-efficient channels available to marketers. On average, email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent.
2. Targeted communication: Easily segment your audience to ensure you’re delivering relevant and personalized messages that engage and convert subscribers.
3. Advanced analytics: Measure campaign performance, track links, and clicks, and make the necessary tweaks to email marketing campaigns to improve your results on the go.
4. Flexibility: Email marketing is the most versatile and flexible channel you have. It can be used to raise awareness, provide updates, announce events, thank supporters, and so much more. What’s more, using automation tools, email can make up a central part of your cross-channel marketing strategy.

Email marketing best practice for non-profits

Create quality mailing lists

Use tools like on-site popovers and Facebook lead ads to grow your marketing lists and sync data directly to Dotdigital. Implementing double opt-in ensures your new sign-up are active and engaged users of the email account.

Also, use this opportunity to collect additional zero-party data like first name, phone numbers, and location. This will help you deliver personalized messages throughout the journey.

Segment your audiences

The days of batch-and-blast email marketing are long gone. To create an audience of engaged subscribers, you must provide them with relevant messages. As a non-profit marketer segmentation is more important to you than any other marketer.

With a diverse audience of donors, volunteers, partners, and service users, building segments ensures the right message lands in the right inbox.

Craft engaging subject lines

Engaging subject lines drive email recipients to open. Luckily, Dotdigital’s writing assistant powered by WinstonAI is on hand to help with every send, suggesting subject lines based on your email copy. Writing subject lines has never been so simple.

Design responsive emails

While Apple’s MPP is making it harder to determine if and when opens are happening, you should prepare for every device. That means designing responsive emails that render correctly regardless of whether they’re opened on a phone or desktop.

Focus on emotional connections

Emotional connections are what drive brand loyalty and it’s vital for you to share impactful stories that demonstrate your non-profit’s value. To keep stakeholders emotionally connected with your mission, you need to tell your story, whilst connecting with readers personally.

Using personalization tools, you can demonstrate the impact donations make or thank individuals for the hours spent volunteering.

Include clear calls to action (CTAs)

Every email has a purpose. You want to drive donation, encourage involvement in fundraising activities, drive event attendance, and help people access service – your mission is endless. Don’t overload your email marketing with multiple CTAS, keep the journey simple to get optimal results.

Optimize through testing

Testing is a marketer’s best friend. Whether you’re testing subject lines, layouts, or CTAs, you can monitor campaign performance and refine your strategy. What works one week, might not the next, so it’s important to test every send if you’re determined to smash your non-profit marketing goals.

Stay up to date with regulations

Data privacy and security are a huge concern for customers and marketers alike. GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM are being joined by more and more regulations designed to protect data privacy. Staying up-to-date and compliant is fundamental.

Landing pages and forms

Landing pages and forms foster engagement, encourage conversions, and capture vital information that helps shape successful non-profit marketing campaigns. As a non-profit marketer, they should be an essential component of your marketing strategy.

The benefits of using landing pages and forms

1. Effortless customization: Make sure your landing pages and forms work for your purpose. Customize pages and forms easily and create engaging forms using multiple field types and layouts. Plus, just like email, you can test elements to optimize performance.
2. Enhanced experience: Create a unique and seamless experience for the user by adding personalization to your pages and forms. Ensure users are seeing relevant content and questions that appeal, engage, and inspire action.
3. Promote conversions: Landing pages eliminate distractions with a singular goal, while forms make the submission process simple and fast, both of which maximize the chances of conversion.
4. Data capture: Forms allow you to capture essential data on your supporters, such as their contact information, interests, and preferences. You can use this data to understand your audience better and create more relevant, targeted, and engaging marketing messages. This, in turn, nurtures longer-lasting relationships and encourages stronger support.
5. SEO-friendly: A well-designed landing page can lead to multiple SEO benefits such as higher search engine rankings, increased organic traffic, and better online visibility.

How to use landing pages and forms in a non-profit marketing campaign

• Create responsive, easy-to-use forms to gather valuable information about your supporters and their preferences

• Utilize your tools to manage registration forms and landing pages for events

• Develop dedicated landing pages for fundraising campaigns, making it easy for supporters to donate and share information

Marketing automation for non-profit marketers

Marketing automation software automates repetitive tasks, simplifies cross-channel communication, and improves the efficiency of your marketing efforts. This allows you to better engage, nurture, and manage relationships with your donors, supporters, and volunteers.

Key benefits of marketing automation for non-profits

1. Save time and resources: By automating repetitive tasks, you can free up your time for more strategic tasks like content creation, networking, or event planning.  
2. Improved donor engagement: Marketing automation makes it easier for you to deliver personalized content, building stronger connections with both current and potential supporters. 
3. Campaign performance tracking: Intelligent campaign reporting helps you optimize and measure the performance of automated marketing campaigns, empowering you to make data-driven decisions.  
4. Improved customer journeys: Automation allows you to streamline your marketing communications, such as donor follow-up, event registration, and implement cross-channel marketing tactics.  
5. Increased revenue: The timely nature of behavioral triggered marketing can help drive conversions, increasing results such as donor retention and fundraising, ultimately growing your non-profit organization.  

Essential automation programs for non-profit marketing teams

The welcome series

Triggered when a new donor, supporter, or volunteer signs up for your email or SMS marketing, this series should include:

• A thank you expressing gratitude for their support
• An introduction to your organization and mission
• Details on the impact their support will have
• Links to connect on additional channels such as social media

Retention and re-engagement campaigns

You should have a retention campaign for each of your key stakeholders such as donors, volunteers, service users, and corporate partners. They encourage continued engagement and donations by targeting lapsed or lapsing donors with a series of personalized emails showcasing your organization’s accomplishments and renewing their support.

Event promotion and follow-ups

Events are a great tool for fundraising, engaging volunteers, and achieving your long-term goals. Marketing automation can help streamline and improve the overall experience.

• Event invitations: automatically send targeted and segmented invitations via email or SMS for fundraising events, webinars, and more.
• Event reminders: schedule pre-event reminders via email, SMS, WhatsApp, or push notifications to maximize attendance.
• Post-event follow-up: Share event highlights, thank attendees, and encourage further engagement with pre-planned communications.

Behavioral triggers

Never miss an opportunity to connect with customers by triggering your programs according to how your customers interact with your non-profit marketing efforts. You can target potential donors who visited your donation page but didn’t complete the process with an abandoned browse campaign, or provide follow-up after service users download resources from your website. 

Milestone campaigns

Schedule personalized messages to be delivered to your audience on their birthdays, anniversaries, or during the holidays. This will add a delightful human touch to your marketing efforts and nurture relationships.

Segmentation and personalization

Segmentation and personalization are essential tools for non-profit marketers. They can significantly improve outreach, fundraising, and stakeholder engagement while building a strong, loyal community.

The benefits of segmentation and personalization

1. Effective targeting: By segmenting your audience, you can tailor your non-profit marketing to their specific needs and preferences. This ensures that your messages resonate with your audience, increasing the likelihood of engagement and participation.
2. Efficient use of resources: When you’re working with limited budgets and resources, you need to use all the tools you have to maximize your impact. Segmentation and personalization allow you to target customers with messages about the missions and objectives that matter most to them. This leads to a more efficient allocation of marketing budgets and results in a higher ROI.
3. Improved fundraising: Personalized marketing boosts donor engagement and improves the overall experience. By understanding the needs and preferences of different segments, you can optimize campaigns and generate more revenue for your cause.
4. Stronger customer relationships: Personalization helps build stronger relationships with your supporters. It makes supporters feel valued and appreciated, leading to increased loyalty and long-term commitment to your cause.
5. More effective communications: Personalized messages and segmented campaigns can result in more meaningful conversations with your audience. It can lead to increased response rates and higher engagement, ultimately improving your marketing results.

SMS marketing for non-profit marketers

SMS is a vital channel for non-profit marketing. The channel can significantly boost outreach and engagement due to its adaptability, high open rates, real-time updates, and cost-effectiveness.

The benefits of SMS marketing of non-profit marketers

1. Unparalleled reach

SMS allows you to target your broad and diverse audience because it doesn’t rely on internet access. Most mobile phone users, even those with limited or no internet connectivity, can receive SMS messages, making it highly accessible for everyone.

2. High open rates

SMS enjoys an extremely high open rate of about 98%, which means you can almost guarantee audiences with view your content. Engagement rates with SMS are also considerably higher compared to other channels, greatly improving the chances of hitting your fundraising or brand awareness goals.

3. Immediate and real-time communication

SMS delivery is practically instantaneous. This is especially important for non-profits who need to connect with audiences in real-time. By utilizing the immediacy of the channel, you can share time-sensitive information such as emergency relief efforts, and ensure you get a prompt response from your audience.

4. Cost-effective and affordable

Like email, SMS is low-cost and has an unbeatable ROI. When you have to operate on a limited budget, SMS is the perfect channel as it is an affordable option that maximizes your impact, without financially straining your resources.

5. Personalized messaging

SMS marketing, like email, is great for delivering personalized messages to your audience. You can segment and target your audience according to preferences or geographical location to increase the likelihood of positive engagement.

6. Easy to integrate with other channels

SMS is a channel that works perfectly with the other channels in your marketing stack. It can be easily integrated with email, social media, and more. This will help you create a cohesive and comprehensive non-profit marketing strategy that will improve your overall effectiveness.

Core SMS campaigns for non-profit marketers

Fundraising drives

Targeted SMS fundraising campaigns like text-to-give allow you to drive donations through simple, direct text messages. For ultimate success, include a simple and secure donation process, and update supporters on the progress or results of your campaign to encourage involvement.

Event updates and reminders

Use SMS marketing to keep your supporters informed about upcoming events, such as webinars, workshops, and fundraisers. Through sharing key details and registration links via SMS you can drive attendance. You can also use marketing automation tools to schedule reminders, deadlines, and opportunities to keep supporters connected and engaged.

Volunteer recruitment

Reach out to your potential volunteers via SMS with your latest volunteer opportunities or events. Share details about the roles and responsibilities, along with how they can register or show interest, while also sending current volunteers updates and schedules. This can help develop a more hands-on and committed audience, driving additional impact for your non-profit organization.

Real-time updates

Share real-time updates with your stakeholders during emergencies, fundraising campaigns, or ongoing projects. You can keep supporters informed of progress or urgent needs, encouraging further engagement down the road.

Express gratitude

Send ‘thank you’ messages to donors, volunteers, and supporters to show your appreciation for their contributions. This can help nurture long-term relationships and foster loyalty to your non-profit organization.

Advocacy and mobilization

Encourage supporters to take action in advocacy campaigns (e.g., by signing a petition or contacting a legislator), and provide detailed instructions on how to participate via concise and engaging text messages.

Donor engagement campaigns

Send personalized messages to your donors on anniversaries, birthdays, or milestones to build stronger emotional connections and maintain long-term relationships with your organization.

Feedback requests

Encourage your supporters or service users to share their feedback on events, campaigns, or other activities through SMS-based surveys or use the channel to distribute a link to an online survey.

Reporting and analytics for non-profit organizations

As a non-profit marketer, making the most of your limited budget and resources is crucial. Tapping into powerful reporting and analytics tools can help non-profit marketers streamline and optimize their digital marketing.

Email analytics

Email reporting and analytics give you information about the performance of your email marketing campaigns. You can use this information to:

• Identify trends in the performance of your email marketing campaigns
• Ensure that your campaigns are performing as expected
• Pinpoint weaknesses and opportunities to optimize campaign performance

Email dashboards vs. email reports

Email dashboards tell a collective story of all your email marketing campaigns by adding together all your statistics. An email report tells the story of a single email campaign by displaying an instant overview of your key metrics.

Top email marketing metrics

• Delivery report: discover statistics about delivered, bounced, and skipped emails.
• Engagements: this includes data about opens, unique opens, non-opens, and social shares.
• Open map: a heat map showing the areas of the world where your email campaign was last opened.
• Top links and clicks: discover the most popular links in your campaign, clicks, unique clicks, and click-to-open rates.
• Split tests: if you run a test on your email marketing campaign, this section will display details about your winning and losing split tests.

SMS reporting

SMS campaign reports let you keep track of what’s working well and where you may need to make changes to improve your marketing results.

SMS reports display:

• Last sent
• Campaign name
• Click-to-delivered rate
• Conversion rate
• Direct orders
• Assisted orders
• Last modified
• Revenue
• Assisted revenue
• Total segments
• Total clicks
• Total delivered
• Total sent
• Type
• Unique clickers

Program reports

Program reports can be split into three sections: program information, key program metrics, and a detailed view.

Program information:

• Program name: the name of your program, e.g., welcome
• Program ID: the ID number of your program
• Last run date: the data and time your program last ran
• Date modified: the date your program was last modified
• Last modified by: the user who last made changes to your program

Key program metrics:

• Campaign opens: the sum of all opens of all campaigns in your program.
• Campaign clicks: the sum of all unique clicks of all campaigns in your program.
• Revenue: the total revenue generated within a set date range.

Detailed view:

You can get a more detailed view of your key program metrics by choosing between two chart views:

• Trend: the trend chart shows the incremental comparative rise and fall across your chosen date range.
• Cumulative: the cumulative view shows increases be successive additions across your chosen date range.

Program analytics

Program analytics lets you quickly view your automation data using a visual representation of your program. You can look at an entire program, from start to finish, and analyze the data associated with each program node. Program analytics consist of different sets of data:

• Start nodes: start nodes show you the sum of all your enrolled contacts and the enrollment conditions used.
• Campaign nodes: campaign nodes show you data for specific campaigns used in your program:
  • Emails sent
  • Opens
  • Clicks
  • Revenue
• Decision nodes: decision nodes display the sum and percentage of contacts that chose a decision path.
• Action nodes: this displays the sum of all contacts that interacted with the program node and the action taken.

Revenue attribution

Revenue attribution lets you see how your campaigns are performing and how much revenue they are generating. There are two methods you can adopt to track revenue generated by your campaigns: direct tracking and advanced revenue attribution.

• Direct tracking: direct tracking attributes revenue for email clicks within a one-hour window.
• Advanced revenue attribution: advanced revenue attribution infers revenue for email and SMS campaign clicks that lead to a purchase within a specified conversion window.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing marketing. As a non-profit marketer handling high workloads and limited resources, AI is about to become your best friend. Integrating it into your marketing strategy today will help you get ahead of the competition tomorrow.

The benefits of AI

1. Save time and resources

AI automates repetitive tasks such as segmentation, email personalization, and scheduling. This will free up your time to focus on more strategic tasks.

2. Increase engagement

AI analyzes vast amounts of customer data and learns from their behavior, making it easier and faster for you to create tailored content. Ultimately, you will enjoy higher open rates and conversions.

3. Unlock valuable insights

By processing large volumes of data, AI can quickly reveal patterns and trends that will guide you in making data-driven decisions.

4. Improve targeting

AI-powered tools can help you identify audience segments more accurately, ensuring the right messages reach the right people at the right time.

WinstonAI by Dotdigital for non-profit marketing

As a non-profit marketer, you’re often being asked to make something amazing out of nothing. However, creating a viral campaign is not as simple as those outside of the marketing industry like to believe. That’s why Dotdigital created WinstonAI, our industry-leading marketing intelligence engine.

WinstonAI has ever-growing capabilities to help you get the most out of your marketing.

Generative AI and writing assistance

Subject line assistant

By analyzing the content of your previous subject lines, WinstonAI gives you feedback on the engagement level of your subject line and generates alternatives to save you time and help inspire your next campaign.

Email campaign assistant

As well as offering up alternative subject lines, our campaign assistant powered by WinstonAI provides you with feedback to improve your content, including tone evaluation and out-of-the-box suggestions to include in your next email campaign.

Grammar and spell check assistant

WinstonAI’s grammar check is available for email, SMS, landing pages and forms, and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual proofing tasks shared throughout your team.

One-click email-to-SMS generator

After spending a great deal of time generating exciting and engaging email content, you can quickly reuse content by converting it into an SMS message. With one simple click, WinstonAI can create a concise text message version of your email to send to users who prefer receiving content via SMS.

Brand voice checker

Dotdigital’s WinstonAI 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 WinstonAI will start writing (and checking) your campaigns in your voice, not a generic one.

AI-powered insights and analytics

Predictive analytics

Customer predictions can help you anticipate how your audience will act in the future. This helps you prepare your marketing strategies to keep customers engaged throughout their journey with you.

eRFM segments and opportunities

eRFM is a customer behavioral model that helps you understand the potential of your customers by creating personas by combining engagement scores with RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) scores.

SCV and lookalike segments

Single customer view (SCV) allows you to deep dive into a customer’s profile. When you find your ideal customer profile – be that donor, volunteer, service user, or partner – you can generate a segment populated with customers who look and act just like them.

AI-optimized marketing campaigns

Send time optimization

Make sure your emails arrive in inboxes at the time most convenient for the reader. Send time optimization (STO) is an AI-powered feature that has been around for a while, but using it is guaranteed to improve engagement levels.

Automated reputation manager

Your sender reputation is calculated based on the quality of data you upload and the level of engagement your campaigns inspire. The better your data is, the greater your campaigns will perform, and the higher your sender reputation will be.

Watchdog data importer

Dotdigital’s data watchdog is a powerful and intelligent analysis tool that protects your sender reputation and delivery rates. No email address makes it into the system without being checked by the data watchdog first. Powered by WinstonAI, our data watchdog predicts, detects, and prevents email abuse.

Non-human interaction (NHI) filtering

Contacts in your mailing lists may use security products to keep their inboxes secure. They can open email marketing campaigns and interact with links which can lead to skewed marketing results. WinstonAI allows you to improve the accuracy of your results by filtering out any activity from non-humans.

Integrations and data management for non-profit marketing teams

Integrations play a crucial role in improving the efficiency of your marketing efforts. Especially when you have multiple goals and a spiraling tech stack, to create the targeted and personalized experiences that deliver results, you need to be able to manage your data and tech from one single, centralized hub.

The benefits of integrations and data management

The hardest part of non-profit marketing is keeping up with the changes in the industry. Tools like marketing automation and AI have shaken up the industry over time. But every time you embrace a new tool or feature, your martech stack spirals.

What’s more, as a non-profit marketer, you’re facing additional challenges, such as differing CRM systems across departments. Ensuring you have a marketing platform that integrates and manages data flows seamlessly will provide a wide range of benefits.

1. Streamlined data management

Data is essential for marketing success. You need it to create unique customer experiences that meet supporter’s needs and expectations. Integrating your marketing stack ensures data flows seamlessly between platforms, allowing you to consolidate and manage supporter information from various sources in one central platform.

2. Time and resource efficiency

Integrations help you optimize your time and resources, leading to cost savings and a higher ROI as they reduce the duplication of work and maximize the potential of your existing tools. Building data-driven automated workflows allows your team to invest more time in achieving strategic goals.

3. Cross-team collaboration

By integrating your marketing tools, you can promote better cross-team collaboration as you can all access the same data and insights. This will help foster a more efficient and well-coordinated approach to achieving the goals, targets, and overall mission of your non-profit organization.

4. Improved campaign results

You can track and analyze the performance of campaigns across your channels in a centralized data hub, allowing you to optimize campaigns and provide consistent and seamless experiences for your supporters.

5. Enhanced personalization

Integrated marketing systems allow you to gain a holistic, 360° view of your supports, users, and stakeholders’ preferences and behaviors. This enables you to better tailor your message, helping to foster deeper emotional connections and engagements with your organization. Ultimately, this will boost donations and ongoing support.

6. Scalability

An integrated marketing stack helps you easily handle growth by offering flexibility and adaptability. Features like an open API or ever-growing networks of trusted tech partners allow you to expand your marketing efforts smoothly. This not only helps your organization grow but also ensures you can keep up with wider marketing trends without having to frequently change platforms.

Conclusion

Utilizing the power of your marketing tech is essential to create campaigns and experiences that drive your organization to achieve its goals. Harnessing the power of storytelling, segmenting your audience, and utilizing cross-channel marketing automation will help you spread your mission, garner support, and create a long-lasting impact.

At the same time, integrations and seamless data management play a vital role in streamlining your non-profit marketing efforts, empowering you and your team to focus on creating personalized and engaging experiences for your supporters and stakeholders.

AI-powered solutions like Dotdigital’s CXDP are revolutionizing non-profit marketing. Uncover valuable insights, optimize campaigns, and increase engagement with tools already trusted widely throughout the non-profit sector.

By applying the strategies, tools, and advice covered in this guide, you will be well on your way to creating a stronger community of supporters to help you achieve your ultimate goal.

More than just email marketing software, Dotdigital makes it simple to create a cross-channel experience. Use push notifications, SMS, MMS, and social retargeting to complement email campaigns, and you can do this in just one click – more on that later.

Chances are, your charity holds a lot of customer data, such as their engagement history, donation history, and causes they care about. With Dotdigital, you can easily access this data in real-time to personalize your marketing campaigns, ensuring relevancy and stronger engagement.

You’ll understand more than most that a personal approach is key to generating engagement in the charity space. We make sure your customer data is always easily accessible with easy integrations with Donorfy, CharityBI, StratusLIVE, Beacon, and Donorflex.

When you’re learning about Dotdigital and our technology, you will often see the word ‘customer’. This is to keep things simple – our technology is built to work no matter which sector you operate in. For charity marketers, you have a host of different ‘customer’ types, so don’t worry when you see us say customer, it covers your donors, volunteers, service users, supporters, and customers.

Understanding your charity audience

Knowing your audience is important in any business, and for charities, it’s imperative. Supporting a charity is a deeply personal choice; it can be due to personal ties or experiences, so getting the emotional connection and understanding right is important.

Gather customer data immediately

With Dotdigital’s on-site popovers and customizable preference centers, you will get to know your audience quickly. Begin by asking customers for their preferred name, whether they’re a service user, donor, volunteer, etc., as well as their preferences for messaging frequency, channel, and topics. This gives you a great baseline of zero-party data to send personalized and engaging marketing from the get-go. You’re also improving the customer experience by demonstrating responsible marketing practices. By giving your audience a sense of flexibility and control, you’ll build trust and grow your marketing list.

As the relationship with your audience progresses, you’re going to gain a host of insights. From web pages browsed to links clicked in an email, your supporters will show you what they are interested in with every interaction. Dotdigital collects this data and compiles it for you, so you can see at a glance what’s important, without needing to sift through spreadsheets to get there. Our platform also syncs with all of the leading charity CRMs to make sure your data is always accessible and up to date. We like to say our data is comprehensive but never complicated.

Why you need to segment your charity audience

As a charity marketer, you have your work cut out for you due to the different types of people you need to engage. Segmented email marketing campaigns can increase revenue generation by up to 760%, for your charity, this can mean a significant uplift in core holiday fundraising campaigns or increase engagement with your volunteering initiatives.

Dotdigital’s single customer view (SCV) unites data from across your marketing stack to create a unified customer profile. Easily see a customer’s engagement data, marketing preferences, and program enrolment. This lets you truly understand your supporters and market to them effectively.

With the insights you’ll gain from SCV, you can target your audience and create segments of like-minded customers for targeted campaigns. This could be people who regularly donate, one-off anniversary donors, volunteers, fundraisers, trustees, service users, and so on. With segmentation, personalization takes no time at all. You can be confident that each campaign will resonate with the recipient and reduce spam by reducing generic messaging sends.

Creating segments is a smooth and logical process in Dotdigital. You can choose to make a segment from one of our pre-made templates for ease, or create a brand new segment using your own unique contact behavior and data fields. Each segment can be as detailed or as simple as you choose.

Use Dotdigital to:

• Develop full, engaged marketing lists using personalized on-site popovers that appear on actions such as visiting a high-intent page.
• Collect valuable data through bespoke preference centers with custom data fields that let you gather unique insights that matter to your charity.
• Easily identify different customer groups to target with segmentation, and easily send a fundraising request to people who have donated previously but not recently.

Cross-channel marketing with Dotdigital

Cross-channel marketing is the creation of connected customer touchpoints across all marketing channels, and it is essential for successfully motivating supporters. Cross-channel marketing is growing, and charity marketers now have more ways to reach their audiences. Using Dotdigital, you can create a connected cross-channel campaign that spans email, SMS, WhatsApp, and retargeting ads to better engage your audience.

By using a cross-channel marketing strategy, you can communicate with your supporters on the channel that makes the most sense at the time and stay front-of-mind as they move about the web.

Dotdigital makes it easy for you to create campaigns across various channels, so you’re not using different software for each channel – can you imagine the manual admin and the cost? Dotdigital lets you simplify your tech stack, saving you time, reducing your manual workload, and minimizing your financial outgoings.

Email for charity marketers

For charity marketers, email is a great channel as it lets you send relevant and engaging content to your audience regularly. Emails can easily be personalized, ensuring every campaign is relevant and engaging for each recipient.

Thanks to its ability to support long-form content, email is perfect for relationship-building. Email is versatile too; you can send written content, such as a fundraiser newsletter, to boost charity-supporter loyalty or an image-heavy campaign full of personalized updates on a cause the donor has previously supported with CTAs designed to drive a repeat donation.

SMS for charity marketers

SMS is a great channel for marketers who need to get a message out there and fast. SMS messages land on a customer’s cell phone lock screen or notification bar, so it is more likely to be seen than an email. Use SMS to update volunteers on location information and timing around a fundraising event, or to update donors on your fundraising targets.

How Action for Children combined email and SMS for engagement

Action for Children needed to use online marketing tools to generate revenue after in-person fundraising events had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The charity opted for a virtual event to drive fundraising revenue, bringing in a cross-channel approach using Dotdigital to keep supporters informed and engaged.

To engage participants, Action for Children used SMS as an additional communication channel alongside email. As well as using SMS to confirm event registration, the charity also delivered key announcements on this channel.

SMS was the perfect channel to use as the event was progressing at such a speed that the organization couldn’t add all the developments to its email campaigns in enough time. SMS, with its non-existent design requirements and high read rates, meant competitions, prize incentives, and celebrity announcements were delivered quickly without a huge uplift from the team.

Take me to the case study

WhatsApp for charity marketers

Messaging apps such as WhatsApp are popular messaging apps, increasingly used by marketers. These apps let you engage in a two-way conversation with ease, creating a better customer experience. At Dotdigital, we integrate with these apps to make it simple to communicate with your audience on their preferred messaging app.

WhatsApp is a great channel for charities looking to deliver messages that cut through the noise. Plus, as a two-way channel, it’s great for mobilizing volunteers or providing vital service updates when they’re needed.

Retargeting ads for charity marketers

For many people, supporting a charity is one of the most personal decisions they make, and people take time to research and consider different ones. A cross-channel approach that keeps your charity front-of-mind throughout this research and consideration process is imperative to maintain the engagement and encourage support.

Using a channel like targeted ads means that whether a prospective supporter is actively checking their inbox or simply browsing social media in their free time, your charity and its mission will be on their mind at all times. Use the data you have on these leads to confirm these ads speak to their interests by including content they’ve shown interest in already, such as browsed pages and topics on your website.

Push notifications for charity marketers

Push notifications are very similar to SMS in terms of the benefits. Push notifications let you show a message on your supporters’ cell phone lock screen or notification bar to instantly grab their attention. Push notifications are great for time-sensitive updates and important messages. Especially if the action you want to achieve is done via your app, as you can deep-link the notification to the relevant app page.

The benefits of a cross-channel approach to charity marketing

A cross-channel marketing strategy amplifies your message and your mission. If you’re only sending out emails, your audience will probably only think of you when they go to their inbox – and that’s only if you’re at the top when they do so.

When you add in a mixture of SMS, app push, WhatsApp, and social retargeting, you’re going to be front-of-mind a lot more. We never want to spam supporters and leads, so when you naturally integrate with your customers’ day-to-day channels, your marketing will feel more natural and be more successful. Marketing across a plethora of channels is not as daunting as it sounds, and you can do it all on one platform with Dotdigital.

Use Dotdigital to:

• Use WhatsApp to have a two-way conversation with your supporters – these apps are especially valuable to charities as it helps create a natural, human-to-human connection
• Use push notifications to alert volunteers of important event updates and provide a direct link for them to find more information on your app
• Use retargeting ads in your holiday automation program to engage non-openers of your email campaigns
• Target your audience with dynamic and personalized email content and SMS messages that will drive engagement and boost emotional connections
• Turn an existing email into an SMS in just one click thanks to Dotdigital AI. Cross-channel marketing doesn’t need to take up your entire day

Personalization for charity marketers

Supporting a charity is a very personal thing, and for some, it makes up a huge part of their identity. People will choose a charity based on their own experiences, or those of their loved ones. People choose charities that mean something to them, which is why building a genuine connection with your audience is what turns one-time donors into lifelong supporters.

Personalization in all kinds of marketing is important, but for charity, it’s imperative. You need to show supporters that you understand them and speak to them directly to build trust. People are, quite rightly, cautious when it comes to handing over their hard-earned money or their precious free time. It’s important that you connect with your supporters directly and show them how their help is making a positive difference.

Stand out by building a rapport built on understanding, emotional connection, and helpful, uplifting marketing content.

How personalization creates support for charity brands

We live in a time when digital marketing is super sophisticated and targeted. At Dotdigital, we want you to be able to use all of that audience data you’re collecting and put it to use easily, every time you create a campaign.

From classic first-name personalization to showing customers mission updates based on their donation history, personalization is the key to supporter engagement and boosting donations. When you show someone content that is clearly tailored to them, they appreciate it. When you show them the positive impact their donations have already had, they’re going to continue to support your cause. When you personalize your campaigns, you’re improving their experience and boosting engagement and rapport, which is important for life-long support.

With Dotdigital, you can use Liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language that lets you pull in sophisticated customer data to campaigns and landing pages in order to hyper-personalize the experience.

Personalize your charity website and boost engagement

Dotdigital’s advanced personalization tool lets you personalize your website without needing any support from your website development team.

It helps charity marketers deliver a bespoke, relevant, and consistent experience on the most important channel you own, which is your website.

“Before Fresh Relevance, we had one of those homepages that was stuffed with information. But now we can tailor the homepage to each person. We’re able to listen to website visitors and serve them what they need rather than broadcasting the same content to everyone.” 

– Janis Thomas, E-commerce & Marketing Director, Look Fabulous Forever

Use Dotdigital to:

• Personalize the supporter journey from the very first interaction thanks to sophisticated data capture.
• Use dynamic content to personalize your homepage to greet visitors based on their persona, such as volunteer, fundraiser, service-user, etc.
• Use geo-targeting to provide relevant information to your supporters when they’re volunteering at an event by providing handy ‘what to wear’ tips based on the weather at their location.
• Use customer data to inform when you send campaigns, as well as deciding the content inside. For example, send supporters who donate on a special anniversary a timely and sensitive reminder.

Automation and triggered marketing for charities

Marketing automation is a charity marketer’s best friend. Automation means you can set up a program in advance and know that your supporters are going to get the perfect campaign at the perfect time – without you doing anything. This is perfect for the traditionally overstretched, time-poor charity marketer. Examples of this include welcome, abandoned browse, pre-event check-in, post-event feedback requests, and so on.

Triggered marketing makes sure you’re sending the right message at the optimum moment – when a supporter or lead has done something that indicates interest or a need for more information. You can check your triggers and automated campaigns to answer those potential drop-off points with perfectly timed and relevant content. It’s a great way of providing relevant and direct support to your audience, without huge amounts of manpower.

The benefits of automation for charity marketers

Automation programs do a great job of building leads and supporters at different stages of the journey, and once an automation program is set up, it’ll run in the background while you’re busy with other priorities.

For charity marketers, automation programs can do a lot of heavy lifting for you. They mean that at the start of a campaign, you can create automations to be sent when certain milestones are hit, send thank you messages instantly, and spread the word with triggered refer-a-friend campaigns when a supporter is highly engaged.

Use Dotdigital to:

• Make sure all leads are actively looked after with a triggered welcome program that outlines ways to get involved and collects vital data and preferences
• Send pre- and post-event check-ins full of relevant information or feedback requests to make sure your supporters feel appreciated and informed throughout their experience
• Use Dotdigital’s persona movement report and automation program builder to create a triggered campaign to re-engage otherwise lapsed contacts
• Save time with automations, and know that every time a supporter takes a relevant action, they are going to be served with the perfect message to continue their journey

Integrations with your charity tech stack

Dotdigital integrates with hundreds of world-class platforms and specialist agencies to strengthen your marketing and make your workflows easier. You can be sure of a reliable data feed from your CRM and any other tech you rely on, straight into Dotdigital.

Easily connect with charity-specific marketing agencies and CRM platforms, that are experienced with Dotdigital. To deliver a smooth customer experience, you need to be able to access and understand every step of the customer journey in one place. With Dotdigital, you can do just that and be confident that your marketing messages are always accurate, reliable, and relevant.

Dotdigital and Donorfy

Key features:

• The ability to update contacts in a Dotdigital address book with constituent data from a Donorfy list. This update process can be configured to send data held about a constituent in Donorfy, mapping this information to either data fields or preferences in Dotdigital. Updates can run either on demand or according to a schedule.
• Constituents in Donorfy are updated according to their Dotdigital campaign activity. For example, activities are added to constituent timelines when Dotdigital campaigns are emailed to them, or they open or click such campaigns.
• Donorfy triggers may be used to either enrol a constituent in a Dotdigital program (customer journey) or send them a one-off transactional email.
• Donorfy can be linked to one or more Dotdigital accounts simultaneously, and all the above features are available for each linked account.

Learn more about Dotdigital and Donorfy.

Dotdigital and Beacon

Key features:

• Intuitively manage your data while keeping supporters engaged.
• Wave goodbye to CSV uploads and manual data entry; Beacon does it for you.
• Segment lists of contacts in Beacon and send them to any Dotdigital address book in just a few clicks.
• Sync opt-outs automatically so you never have to worry about emailing someone who has asked you not to.

Learn more about Dotdigital and Beacon.

Raiser’s Edge and Dotdigital

Key features:

• A two-way flow of data between the systems, for a full 360-degree view of donors. Importacular lets you connect Dotdigital to RE and RE NXT
• Easy integration, improving data quality, and avoiding errors or duplication
• Completely customizable mapping, bringing in contact updates, mailing results, and consent details
• Set your own rules for matching records
• Export Raiser’s Edge data directly into Dotdigital
• Easy to get started! Importacular is available as a default plug-in for all users

Learn more about Dotdigital and Raiser’s Edge.

Discover all of Dotdigital’s integrations.

Reporting and analytics for charity marketers

87% of marketers report that data is their company’s most underused asset. We know that for charity marketers, reporting – particularly finding and proving the value in your work – can be difficult as it’s not as simple as driving sales. Our reporting dashboards are built so that it’s as easy as possible for you to see all of your data in one place and be able to use it to create highly engaging marketing. You’re also able to personalize elements of our reporting and analytics tools to check that these insights fit your goals and consider the typical lifecycles of your charity audience.

Reporting and analyzing campaigns may feel like the final step of a campaign, but it should always be the start of the next one, as you learn from every campaign. With Dotdigital, you’re able to quickly and easily understand what made a campaign successful or not. This helps you to make the most of every penny by always improving future campaigns to grow ROI and make the most of the time and resources available to you.

In charity marketing, the relationship you build with your audience matters just as much as the message you send. When you can see exactly what kind of communication resonates with your audience, you can tailor your future campaigns to appeal to them in a much stronger way. This will result in higher engagement and lifetime loyalty.

Dotdigital’s campaign reporting and analytics tools for charity marketers

Dotdigital’s reporting and analytics dashboards are designed to show you the important parts without being labor-intensive. Essential campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are shared in a digestible format so that you can see how your campaigns performed instantly.

Gain a single customer view

Deliver a smooth customer experience when you can understand your audience’s entire journey by accessing every interaction in one place.

Single customer view (SCV) shows you every touchpoint a customer has experienced and every engagement. See a supporter’s experience and demographic data in one place to gain a detailed understanding of them. From here, you can generate a lookalike segment that automatically collates other contacts like them.

SCV in action

There are a wide variety of ways SCV can be implemented to improve your charity marketing.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• Track engagement trends to create personalized donor journeys
• Discover optimal email send times based on a supporter’s location
• Create segments based on your ideal volunteer persona in one click
• Personalize content based on donation and engagement history

Dotdigital for charity marketers with an ecommerce store

At Dotdigital, we have lots of features to support your charity’s ecommerce store. Dotdigital has created an eRFM customer modeling tool that builds personas based on your customers’ spending and engagement habits. It combines traditional recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) scores with engagement scores to give a much fuller picture.

RFM scores depend on customers’ order data:

• The number of days since the last purchase
• The total number of orders made
• The average value of all those purchases

Engagement scores are measured by:

• Email opens -this is the weakest scoring criterion
• Email clicks -this is the middle scoring criterion
• Viewing your webpage for five seconds or more – this is the highest scoring criterion

You can use these insights to create segments, enroll customers into automations, and to inform your promotional planning.

These insights are combined with AI predictive analytics. AI analyzes reams of your customers’ data in the background, then shows you the opportunities identified, ready for you to capitalize on. These predictive analytics give you a heads up on when to target customers based on their likely next move.

The different types of predictive analytics in Dotdigital:

• Churn probability: (e.g., this customer is 40% likely to churn)
• Predicted next purchase date: (e.g., this customer’s next purchase date is predicted to be June 3)
• Predicted customer lifetime value: (e.g., this customer’s predicted CLV is $360)
• Predicted total future orders: (e.g., This customer is predicted to have three future orders in total)

Dotdigital is compliant with data and sustainability regulations

Data privacy regulations are of paramount importance to you, so compliance tools have been built into everything in the Dotdigital platform. The Dotdigital data watchdog uses AI to run a complex set of algorithms and checks to predict, detect, and prevent abuse. By assessing and blocking problematic data, you’re protected from complaints and potential ISP blocklistings, and guarding your all-important delivery rates.

Dotdigital is ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR data processing agreements and EU Model Contract Clauses are in place between any service providers processing data held by Dotdigital. We believe in data being secure, but never complicated. Rest assured that all data we hold is protected and secure, and know you’re able to action data subject requests in a timely fashion thanks to our logical and easy-to-navigate data reporting tools.

Dotdigital helps you with your carbon footprint

Sustainability is important to consumers, especially those engaging with charities, as it shows that they are ethically minded.

At Dotdigital, we make it easy for you to reduce your carbon footprint as the world’s first carbon-neutral cross-channel marketing automation platform – we’re also committed to being net-zero by 2030.

By offering charity marketers like you a carbon-neutral option for your marketing automation, it’s one more thing off your to-do list as we take care of it for you. Dotdigital customers have access to a designed badge for their email footers to proudly showcase its carbon neutral credentials, thereby boosting their brand image to their customers with none of the legwork needed.

Dotdigital support you can rely on

At Dotdigital, our customers’ experience is paramount, and it’s something we pride ourselves on. Whilst we’ve built the Dotdigital platform to be incredibly easy to use, we know that sometimes you will run into something new or unexpected and want some support.

When you are a Dotdigital customer, you gain access to the Dotdigital Academy, which is full of educational content, so you are getting the most from the platform. We also have a huge library of educational ‘how-to’ pages that break down everything you could ever imagine.

Sometimes you just want to speak to someone and get some advice. You don’t have time to be trawling through irrelevant help articles or getting nowhere speaking to a confused chatbot, so our friendly, knowledgeable support team is on hand to help you out.

“The impact of Dotdigital on our operations has been profound, enabling more nuanced and efficient engagement strategies that are critical in our fight against poverty. For any charity seeking a reliable and supportive email marketing solution, I can confidently recommend Dotdigital.” 

– Mark C. – Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Conclusion

To generate and maintain engagement with your supporters, you need a platform that helps you to deliver an exceptional customer experience, driven by data. We also know how important it is for your marketing platform to be easy-to-use so you don’t waste time, and for you to be able to access immediately helpful support whenever you need it.

Charity marketers need comprehensive data capture and reporting to support hyper-personalized marketing that speaks to individuals on a personal and emotional level. You need to be able to trust the data you collect and know that it will reliably inform triggered campaigns such as welcome, pre-event information, and thank you campaigns. It’s worth keeping your audience engaged and informed to keep them motivated and engaged with your cause.

People rarely choose a charity on the spot. It’s a considered decision that is sometimes shaped by personal experience, values, or a connection to the cause. This is why a cross-channel approach is needed to maintain engagement during the consideration phase. When you can easily keep your charity’s cause front-of-mind as your audience goes about their daily life, your charity is the one they will choose when they’re ready to commit to supporting.

Dotdigital ticks all the boxes for charity marketers, from data capture at the start, to engaging and informative campaigns throughout, and simple but detailed reporting for you to make sure you’re always getting the most from your resources.

Dotdigital is your partner in success. Our comprehensive suite of marketing channels and tools is designed to help you:

• Deliver personalized experiences that resonate with your audience, from targeted email campaigns to tailored retargeting ads

• Maximize your online engagements with powerful features like triggered campaigns, single customer view, and AI product recommendations

• Leverage the latest marketing trends, including AI and hyper-personalization to create unforgettable experiences

With Dotdigital, you can rest assured that you’re investing in a platform that understands the unique challenges and opportunities of the sports and entertainment industry. As a result, we have created a powerful customer experience and data platform (CXDP) that is built on three key pillars:

Marketing automation

Cross-channel marketing automation

Dotdigital offers a comprehensive suite of marketing channels, including email, SMS, MMS, retargeting ads, WhatsApp, push notifications, and live chat. By leveraging these channels in a connected and coordinated manner, you can deliver a superior fan experience and maximize your marketing efforts.

How does cross-channel marketing automation work?

Dotdigital’s CXDP allows you to seamlessly integrate and manage multiple channels, ensuring a consistent brand message across all touchpoints. By tracking fan interactions and preferences, you can personalize your communications and deliver relevant content at the right time on the most appropriate channel.

Benefits of cross-channel marketing automation

• Enhanced customer engagement: Provide a more personalized and consistent experience across all channels.
• Improved campaign effectiveness: Optimize your marketing efforts by analyzing performance data from multiple channels.
• Increased ROI: Drive higher conversion rates and revenue by delivering targeted messages at the right time.
• Streamlined workflow: Automate repetitive tasks and save time.

Cross-channel marketing automation in action

• Create tailored experiences based on fan preferences and behavior across different channels.
• Launch coordinated campaigns that leverage multiple channels to reach fans at different stages of the customer journey.
• Re-engage fans who have shown interest in your products or services but haven’t converted with Facebook or Google retargeting ads.
• Deliver timely updates and promotions directly to fans’ mobile devices using SMS, MMS, and push notifications.

Triggered marketing automation

Marketers in the world of sports and entertainment face many unique challenges. Catering to a diverse audience with varying interests and preferences can be daunting. Coordinating multiple marketing channels and campaigns efficiently while ensuring a positive return on investment requires careful planning and execution.

That’s where Dotdigital steps in. Triggered marketing automation resolves these challenges by enabling you to personalize fan experiences, automate routine tasks, and provide real-time data and analytics to optimize marketing efforts. What’s more, relevant triggered campaigns drive 18x more revenue than generic, non-targeted marketing messages.

Smart marketing automation is about much more than increasing team output. It ensures you get the right message to the right customer, at the optimal time.

How does triggered marketing automation work?

Dotdigital acts as a central hub for all your data thanks to our seamless integrations with your tech stack, agency partners, and more. Our automation tools leverage data from multiple sources to trigger personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns. You can also plug in third-party providers to boost the relevancy of each email.

Triggered campaigns use customer actions to kick-start your automation workflow, ensuring messages are timely and relevant.

Common program triggers

• New newsletter subscription
• Abandoned browse on high-priority pages
• Shopping cart abandonment
• New account creation
• Email opens or clicks
• Form or survey completion

Key benefits of triggered marketing automation

• Increased revenue: Drive sales by sending timely and relevant messages.
• Improved engagement: Keep fans engaged throughout the customer journey.
• Boosted retention: Nurture long-term relationships with your audience.
• Personalized experiences: Create tailored content that resonates with individual fans.
• Optimal timing: Deliver messages at the right moment to maximize impact.

Triggered marketing automation in action

• Welcome series: Collect fan preferences including interests, locations, and channels to personalize future communications and marketing preferences to improve personalization further along the customer journey.
• High-intent page visits: Use web tracking on high-intent pages to trigger a hyper-personalized campaign populated with relevant, dynamic content.
• Abandoned browse or cart recovery: Recapture lost conversions with a multi-touch abandoned browse or cart campaign.
• Post-event follow-up: Maintain engagement after an event, match, or game to nurture relationships with personalized content.

See how Tottenham Hotspur boosted fan engagement with marketing automation

Read the case study

Triggered marketing automation reporting

Dotdigital’s automation reporting tools provide valuable insights into the performance of your triggered campaigns. Track key marketing metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to optimize your strategy and maximize ROI.

Behavioral targeting

The value of moments-based marketing cannot be underestimated. 71% of your audience expect to receive personalized interactions and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Turning audience engagements into personalized experiences is essential for growth in today’s market, and, thanks to behavioral targeting, not difficult to achieve.

How does behavioral targeting work?

Dotdigital’s powerful website tracking tool allows you to monitor the online behavior of your fans. By tracking their interactions with your website, you can gain valuable insights into their preferences and interests. Key data such as pageviews and session duration can be used to target contacts at the right time with the right message.

Once web behavior tracking is installed, the online interactions tracked from your website are fed into Dotdigital and stored at contact level. Your team can then use this data to build website behavioral segments and create targeted cross-channel campaigns that reflect previous online activities.

The benefits of behavioral targeting

• Remove barriers to conversion and streamline online experiences.
• Increase customer engagement with timely marketing.
• Improve personalization capabilities for tailored experiences.
• Drive more revenue by creating targeted and relevant content.
• Gain insights into fan behavior to optimize your marketing strategy.

Behavioral targeting in action

• Deliver personalized retargeting ads using browsing behavior, for example, viewing a new event page more than twice.
• Create personalized recommendations for events or merchandise based on pageviews or past purchases.
• Turn exit intent into conversion opportunities with personalized popovers.

Transactional marketing automation

The average transactional email is 3x higher than a non-transactional email – standing at 4.8% compared to 1.6%.

Transactional messages, such as order confirmations, shipping updates, and password resets, are essential for maintaining a positive fan experience. They provide valuable information, build trust, and offer opportunities for additional engagement.

Dotdigital’s transactional messages allow you to build, personalize, and track the performance of these vital customer communications. Whether you’re sending emails or SMS, we have you covered.

How does transactional marketing automation work?

Transactional messages are vital to your success. Ensuring that your marketing platform is up to the task will significantly improve your performance all around.

Whether you are set up to send transactional messages using an ecommerce or ticketing platform, API, or SMTP, you can create your transaction email templates in Dotdigital’s drag-and-drop email or SMS builder. This will guarantee every message you send is branded, building brand trust and recognition.

Dotdigital’s analytics tracks the performance of your transactional messages. Using the dashboard, you will be able to collect insights about what subject lines perform best and how many messages bounce. Due to the high levels of engagement with transactional emails, keeping bounce rates low will help ensure your deliverability scores remain high.

The benefits of transactional marketing automation

• Keep fans informed and engaged throughout the customer journey.
• Maintain high deliverability rates by optimizing your transactional emails.
• Boost engagement and build stronger relationships with your fans.
• Create visually appealing and consistent transactional emails for instant brand recognition.

Transactional marketing automation in action

• Personalized confirmations: Include details such as first names and personalized images following a ticket or merchandise purchase.
• Cross-selling and upselling: Suggest related products or upgrades in post-purchase messages to increase revenue.
• Dynamic content: Include tracking links and other relevant information to make it easy for fans to find what they need.
• Loyalty program promotion: Encourage fans to join your loyalty program for exclusive benefits.

How sports and entertainment marketers should utilize personalization

Personalization drives performance and better marketing outcomes. Brands that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. Standing out from the crowd is crucial.

With so many options available, fans expect a tailored journey that caters to their individual preferences. Delivering a personalized fan experience is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity.

How does web personalization work?

Our personalization platform helps you deliver a bespoke, relevant, and consistent experience on the most important channel you own: your website.

By personalizing the online experience of your visitors, you can create stronger customer relationships, encourage repeat engagement, and increase conversions. Plus, in such a highly competitive market, capturing the attention of your web visitors helps to build a sense of connection and trust that increases conversion rates and customer retention.

The benefits of web personalization

• Increase average order value (AOV) by encouraging fans to spend more on upgrades or relevant merchandise.
• Convert more website visitors into paying customers with personalized experiences.
• Increase customer loyalty and retention by demonstrating an understanding of fan preferences, needs, and wants.
• Stand out in a competitive and crowded market by using personalized experiences to differentiate your brand.
• Meet fans’ expectations and create a positive impression, improving overall customer satisfaction.

Web personalization in action

• Personalized popovers: Capture valuable fan information and increase conversions with targeted popovers at the optimal time.
• Dynamic content: Deliver relevant content and images based on fan behavior, preferences, and interests.
• Geo-targeted experiences: Use real-time location data to create personalized experiences at scale.
• Product recommendations: Suggest products or experiences that fans are likely to enjoy to improve experiences and increase revenue.

Personalized messaging

Fans crave a personal touch – messages that speak directly to their interests and preferences. Dotdigital helps you achieve this with a suite of powerful personalization tools that can be employed beyond your website, in email, SMS, and retargeting ads, too.

How does personalized messaging work?

Personalized experiences are more than simply adding first names to subject lines (though that is always a winning tactic). Thanks to Dotdigital’s impressive integration capabilities, you have access to more customer data than ever before to deliver personalized, targeted messages.

Here are just some of the forms of personalization you can add to your marketing messages to deliver impactful messages to fans:

• Product recommendations: Leverage AI-powered algorithms to suggest relevant merchandise, tickets, or experiences based on fan behavior and purchase history.
• Social proof: Increase trust and conversion rates by showcasing personalized testimonials and user-generated content relevant to a fan’s journey. Learn how Buyagift saw a 13% uplift in sales thanks to utilizing social proof.
• Countdown timers: Create a sense of urgency and excitement by displaying dynamic countdown timers for sales, events, or exclusive content.
• Image personalization: Tailor visuals to individual fans by dynamically inserting their names, team logos, or preferred bands.
• Liquid personalization: Utilize Dotdigital’s Liquid language to dynamically insert data into any message, crafting truly one-to-one communication.

The benefits of personalized messaging

• Personalized messages grab attention and spark interest, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement.
• Cater to individual needs and preferences, driving fans towards desired actions and purchases, and increasing conversion rates.
• Personalized communication fosters stronger relationships and encourages repeat visits or purchases and better retention.
• By delivering targeted messages that resonate, you maximize the effectiveness of your marketing spend and boost ROI.

Personalized messaging in action

• Send an email to a fan who recently purchased a jersey, showcasing other merchandise from their favorite player.
• Use text messages to deliver important safety updates before arriving at a venue.
• Show a website visitor who viewed a specific event a retargeting ad featuring an exclusive discount code.

See how Wolves win big with personalization tactics

Read the case study

Segmentation

Segmentation should be considered a branch of personalization. When you have an audience that is as wide and diverse as yours, segmentation ensures you deliver the right message to the right fan.

Dotdigital empowers you to achieve this with powerful segmentation capabilities. Instead of sending generic messages to a broad audience, segmentation allows you to create targeted groups based on specific criteria.

How does segmentation work?

Thanks to Dotdigital’s powerful and user-friendly segment builder, you can create even the most granular of segments. The platform’s vast network of integrations ensures that all your data is unified in a single source of truth. That means you have an endless amount of customer data to use to create your segments.

Segmenting your fan base

Dotdigital allows you to create segments based on various criteria, including:

• Demographics: Age, location, gender, etc.
• Preferences: Bands, teams, venues, etc.
• Membership type: Gold card, fan club, etc.
• Purchase history: Past purchases, ticket types, frequency, etc.
• Website behavior: Pages viewed, time spent, abandoned carts, etc.
• Engagement: Email and SMS open, clicks, content preferences, etc.
• RFM & eRFM: Champion, high potential, needs nurturing, engaged, etc.

The benefits of segmentation

• Increase relevance by delivering personalized messages that resonate with each fan segment, leading to higher engagement.
• Improve conversion rates with targeted messaging to specific fan groups that addresses their unique needs and interests, ultimately driving conversions.
• Enhance customer experiences that cater to individual preferences and expectations, fostering a more positive and rewarding experience.
• Boost ROI by focusing your marketing efforts on the most receptive segments, you can maximize the return on your investment.

Segmentation in action

• Segmentation by band preference: Send a targeted email campaign to fans of a specific band featuring upcoming merchandise drops or exclusive events.
• Segmentation by ticket history: Segment fans based on past ticket purchases and offer them early access to new events or exclusive ticket packages.
• Segmentation by online behavior: Identify fans who have shown interest in a specific player and send them personalized messages featuring content or merchandise related to that player.
• Exclude specific segments: Select segments to exclude from marketing messages to save time and avoid building complicated exclusion rules.

See how USA Rugby utilized segmentation to boost open rates by 205%

Read the case study

Ecommerce marketing

The retail dashboard

In the complex industry of sports and entertainment, marketers have to wear many hats. As well as engaging fans, inspiring loyalty, and driving awareness, you’ll often find yourself responsible for the ecommerce branch of your company’s offering.

Dotdigital’s comprehensive suite of ecommerce features ensures you hit your retail ticketing and engagement goals. The purpose-built retail dashboard surfaces valuable, actionable insights to empower data-driven decision making.

See how Southampton FC boosted kit sales with creative marketing automation

Read the case study

How does the retail dashboard work?

By integrating with your ecommerce platform, the retail dashboard offers a holistic view of your ecommerce marketing results. It categorizes data into three key areas:

1. Revenue: total revenue, average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV)
2. Orders: total orders, average item per order, average delay (days)
3. Customers: total customers, single purchase customers, repeat customers

The retail dashboard allows you to customize your insights by applying filters and creating custom views to meet your specific needs. Track data by date range, segment, order value, and more. Reports are refreshed daily to ensure your team always has current, up-to-date insights about its customers.

The benefits of the retail dashboard

• Monitor marketing performance by tracking revenue, orders, and customer metrics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Demonstrate value by showcasing the impact of your marketing efforts to stakeholders and external teams.
• Optimize campaigns by identifying areas for improvement using order data and customer behavior.
• Track the customer journey to understand customer behavior and optimize your marketing strategy accordingly.

The retail dashboard in action

• Use average order data to determine the best time to send marketing campaigns via email, SMS, or push.
• Create filter views to discover trends based on average order value or customer segment.
• Identify common behaviors of single-purchase customers to optimize the customer journey and drive repeat purchases.
• Build segments based on order history to deliver relevant and personalized messages that drive conversions.
• Run reports based on campaigns to discover the ROI and make optimizations to improve revenue generation.

The retail dashboard is an invaluable tool for sports and entertainment marketers. By providing a comprehensive view of your marketing performance, you can make data-driven decisions, optimize your campaigns, and drive revenue growth.

The customer dashboard

Understanding your fans – their wants, motivations, and behaviors – is vital for sports and entertainment marketers, especially those with an ecommerce store looking to deliver relevant, conversion-driving marketing campaigns. Dotdigital’s customer dashboard provides a visual representation of your fan base, categorized based on their purchasing behavior.

How does the customer dashboard work?

Dotdigital’s customer dashboard pulls in customer data from your ecommerce integration to group customers according to their purchasing behavior. There are six distinct groups:

1. Champions
2. Loyal
3. Recent
4. High potential
5. Need nurturing
6. Inactive

Each persona is categorized into one of three stages in the customer lifecycle:

1. Active
2. Lapsing
3. Inactive

You can drill down into each persona group to discover key metrics including:

• Total customers in each group.
• Total lifetime revenue yield of the segment.
• The percentage of total revenue yield from each persona.
• The average customer lifetime value per persona.
• The average number of orders placed.
• The average order value by each persona.

The benefits of the customer dashboard

• Get a visual representation of customers based on recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) model.
• Identify high-value fans and focus on your most valuable customers.
• Nurture potential fans to become loyal.
• Reactivate lapsed fans with targeted campaigns.
• Optimize your marketing efforts by tailoring campaigns to specific segments.

The customer dashboard in action

• Create personalized campaigns for fan segments based on RFM modeling for effective, targeted marketing.
• Track and monitor AOV per persona to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
• Identify lapsing customers and extend your reach by targeting using cross-channel tactics such as retargeting ads and SMS.
• Create automated nurture programs designed to move customers between RFM personas.

Turn window shoppers into loyal customers

Find out more

Persona movement report

Do you know the Pareto Principle? It states that 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue.

Engaged, loyal customers play a huge role in the success of your marketing strategy, especially in the realm of ecommerce. Being able to track and identify where your fans are in their journey will improve your ability to convert them into revenue-generating customers. Dotdigital’s persona movement report allows you to understand how your customer behavior is changing over time.

How does the person movement report work

Dotdigital’s persona movement report is a visual representation of how your audience is changing over time and what your customer lifecycle looks like. Grouped according to RFM personas, our persona movement reports chart the movement of customers from one group to another.

The benefits of persona movement reports

• Discover key dates, times, and events that customers engage with most.
• Follow movements to uncover behavior trends over time.
• Create up-to-date segments based on persona movement.

The persona movement report in action

• Create a segment for customers who have moved from ‘high potential’ to ‘inactive’ and enroll in a re-engagement automation program.
• Invite fans who have moved from ‘need nurturing’ to ‘recent’ to join your exclusive loyalty program.
• Reconnect with ‘loyal’ fans who have moved to ‘inactive’ with a time-limited offer or discount.

Product recommendations

Customers know you’re collecting data on them, so put it to good use and surface products you know they’ll love. Dotdigital’s intelligent product recommendation tools use your product catalog and AI to showcase the right product to the right person.

How do product recommendations work?

Dotdigital’s intelligent product recommendation tools leverage your product catalog and AI to deliver personalized recommendations at the optimal stage of the customer journey.

Types of product recommendations include:

• Best sellers: Showcase popular products.
• Trending: Highlight trending items.
• Most viewed: Recommend products that fans have frequently viewed
• Lookalikes: AI-powered suggestions similar to previous purchases.
• Best next: AI predictions of the next products in a fan’s journey.
• Also bought: Recommend products often purchased together.
• Custom: Create custom recommendations based on your specific criteria.

AI affinity scoring

Dotdigital’s AI affinity scoring measures how confident we are that a product will resonate with a particular fan. This allows you to adjust recommendations based on each fan’s individual preferences.

The benefits of product recommendations

• Increase conversion rates by showcasing relevant products to drive sales.
• Increase AOV and improve your chances of cross and upselling.
• Foster stronger relationships by providing personalized recommendations.
• Increase sales and revenue through targeted and personalized recommendations.

Product recommendations in action

• Include lookalike recommendations in an abandoned cart campaign to encourage the completion of abandoned purchases.
• Add also bought recommendations to product landing pages to showcase related or complementary products.
• Incorporate best next recommendation in transactional emails to optimize cross-sell or upsell opportunities in order confirmations.
• Highlight trending products to display personalized recommendations on key website pages.

Data, reporting, and analytics

In today’s always-on consumerist landscape, your fans, members, and customers are on the lookout for standout experiences. Data is an integral part of your ability to deliver these experiences.

You need a fully integrated marketing tech stack to ensure you’re meeting these demands. By connecting Dotdigital with your existing systems, you can create a unified marketing ecosystem, eliminate data silos, and unlock new opportunities.

How do martech stack integrations work?

Dotdigital has a vast network of tech partners that offer plug-and-play integrations so you can get the most out of your data. Plus, with self-serve webhooks you can easily expand your stack to grow with your business.

Whether you’re connecting one, two, or more systems to your Dotdigital account, you’ll enjoy a whole host of benefits. Here’s just some of what you can expect:

• Ecommerce platforms: Connect your ecommerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.) to Dotdigital to manage customer data, segment fans based on purchase behavior, and deliver personalized marketing campaigns.
• CRM systems: Integrate your CRM (Salesforce, Skeptrix, etc.) with Dotdigital to gain a 360-degree view of your fans, personalize marketing efforts based on past interactions, and streamline communication across teams.
• Ticketing platforms: Connect your ticketing platform (Gigantic Tickets, Eventbrite, etc.) with Dotdigital to engage fans with targeted promotions based on ticket purchases, segment fans by preferred teams or events, and drive repeat business.

The benefits of an integrated tech stack

• Eliminate data silos and gain a holistic view of your fans across platforms by unifying fan data.
• Deliver enhanced personalized experiences thanks to combined data sources.
• Automate tasks and optimize your marketing efforts for streamlined workflows.
• Gain deeper insights for data-driven campaign optimization and improve campaign performance.
• Maximize ROI by leveraging a unified marketing ecosystem and streamlining your marketing efforts.

Integrations in action

• Personalized post-purchase emails using purchase data from your ecommerce platform to send targeted emails with recommended merchandise or exclusive offers.
• Segment ticketing promotions by utilizing CRM data to create audience groups based on fan preferences and target them with relevant promotions for upcoming events.
• Analyze cross-channel data to understand your audience and tailor cross-channel communications to resonate with specific fan groups.
• Synchronize customer journeys by integrating your ticketing platform with Dotdigital to send triggered emails based on ticket purchase, offering additional services or merchandise.

Single customer view

Single customer view (SCV) is essential for sports and entertainment marketers seeking to build strong relationships and drive results. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of your fans, you can deliver personalized experiences that resonate and foster loyalty.

How does SCV work?

Dotdigital’s SCV is made up of a variety of informative data sections:

1. Customer information
2. Customer predictions
3. Channels
4. Membership
5. Sales
6. Engagement
7. Activity timeline and recent records

This data empowers you to gain valuable insights into your fans, such as their RFM personas, preferred communication channels, and optimal engagement times. In turn, this makes designing hyper-personalized experiences easy.

The benefits of SCV

• Gain a deeper understanding of your fans’ behaviors and preferences.
• Deliver targeted, personalized campaigns that resonate with individual fans.
• Ensure a seamless experience across all channels.
• Streamline data access for marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
• Create targeted segments based on fan behavior and preferences.

SCV in action

There are a wide variety of ways SCV can be implemented to improve your ecommerce marketing. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Track engagement trends to create bespoke journeys.
• Discover optimal email send times and marketing channels to maximize conversions.
• Tailor experiences based on fan preferences and behavior.
• Create segments based on your ideal customer persona in one click.
• Personalize content based on engagement history.

Single customer view

Nearly a third of CMOs see effectively measuring ROI of marketing campaigns as a serious challenge.

Getting an accurate measure of the return on investment (ROI) is crucial. It’s the vital information you need to optimize campaigns for optimal performance. Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution provides valuable insights into which marketing activities are driving sales and generating revenue.

How does advanced revenue attribution work?

Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution capabilities allow you to track the impact of your campaigns by:

• Installing the ROI tracking script: Integrate the script into your website to track customer interactions.
• Syncing order data: Connect Dotdigital with your ecommerce platform to capture sales data via our ecommerce integrations, webhooks, or an SFTP client.

You can also view your revenue generation within the campaign report area. This will display the revenue attributed to each email or SMS marketing campaign.

The benefits of advanced revenue attribution

• Identify top-performing campaigns.
• Identify opportunities for campaign improvement to maximize ROI.
• Directly attribute sales to specific campaigns.
• Understand the impact of campaigns that may have a delayed influence on sales.
• Simplify currency conversions for accurate reporting.

Advance revenue attribution in action

• Identify high-performing campaigns and replicate successful strategies for future campaigns.
• Track campaign touchpoints to understand the customer journey and optimize touchpoints.
• Tailor attribution windows to reflect your business model.
• Use revenue data to make data-driven decisions and inform your future campaigns.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Dotdigital’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine is designed to simplify your daily marketing activities. As a marketer, you’re often considered to be a jack of
all trade. But, with our AI tool. you can focus your time on the strategic wins that will deliver the results you need by reducing your workload and uncovering new revenue opportunities.

Generative AI

Marketers often face tight deadlines and the need to create engaging content that resonates with your wide and varied audience sets sports and entertainment marketers apart from their competitors. Generative AI is the ultimate solution to these challenges by automating content creation and providing you with valuable insights.

The benefits of generative AI

Dotdigital uses generative AI to streamline content creation and enhance marketing results. Key benefits include:

• Unlock inspiration and creativity. Get fresh ideas and overcome writer’s block.
• Improve time efficiency. Automate content generation and reduce manual effort.
• Enhance fan engagement. Create more engaging content that resonates with your audience.
• Deliver meaningful conversions. Drive higher conversion rates with personalized and optimized content.

Generative AI in action

• Allow AI to help you rewrite, rephrase, and simplify your copywriting.
• Easily convert email campaigns into SMS messages with one-click email to SMS conversions for consistent campaigns.
• Improve content quality and reduce errors with grammar and spell checks.
• Personalized subject lines: Generate subject lines based on audience behavior to increase open rates for engaging hyper-personalization.

Predictive analytics

AI-powered predictive analytics is a powerful tool for sports and entertainment marketers. Predictive analytics provides the insights you need to anticipate fan behavior, optimize your marketing efforts, and drive results.

By leveraging data-driven insights, you can anticipate fan behavior, optimize your marketing efforts, and drive results.

Dotdigital’s predictive analytics capabilities

With AI, you can easily tap into powerful insights at your fingertips:

• Churn risk
• Predicted customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Next order date
• Number of orders

The benefits of predictive analytics

• Deliver personalized messages based on fan preferences and behavior.
• Engage fans at the optimal time to drive conversions.
• Maximize your marketing efforts by focusing on high-value segments.
• Go from reactive to proactive marketing and adapt to changing market conditions and fan preferences.

Predictive analytics in action

• Identify at-risk fans and proactively re-engage them before they churn.
• Focus on your most valuable fans and tailor experiences to maximize their potential.
• Deliver personalized offers at the optimal time to drive conversions.

Campaign optimization

By leveraging Dotdigital’s campaign optimization features, you can streamline your marketing efforts, improve performance, and deliver exceptional results. With the power of AI, you can optimize your campaigns for maximum impact and drive success in the competitive sports and entertainment industry.

The benefits of campaign optimization features

• Streamline workflow by automating tasks and saving you time.
• Improve conversions by delivering more targeted and effective campaigns.
• Enhance engagement using AI to create personalized experiences that resonate with your fans.
• Achieve unparalleled results allowing AI to measure campaign performance accurately and identify areas for improvement.
• Avoid the pitfalls of inaccurate metrics and make data-driven decisions.

Campaign optimization in action

• Let AI help you reach the right customer at the right time by using send time optimization (STO) insights.
• Maintain a clean and accurate database, healthy using features like automated reputation manager and our watchdog data importer.
• Avoid the impact of non-human interactions (bot opens and clicks) on your data using AI’s non-human interaction (NHI) filtering.

Marketing solutions for sports and entertainment growth

As a leading provider of all-in-one marketing solutions, Dotdigital is committed to empowering sports and entertainment marketers to achieve their goals. Our deep understanding of the industry, combined with our innovative platform, positions us as your ideal partner.

The benefits of partnering with Dotdigital

• Stay ahead of the curve. Reap the benefits of our continuous platform development and commitment to staying at the forefront of industry trends.
• Personalized 24/7 support. Our team works closely with you to understand your specific needs and tailor our solutions accordingly.
• Robust integrations. Seamlessly integrate with your existing technology stack, including leading ecommerce platforms and industry-specific tools.
• Enjoy expert guidance. Access our professional services for outsourced tasks, strategic workshops, and data audits.
• Get ahead going green. Partner with a company that prioritizes environmental responsibility and a sustainable future.

By partnering with Dotdigital, you can leverage our expertise and innovative platform to drive growth, enhance fan engagement, and achieve your marketing objectives in the competitive sports and entertainment industry.

More than just email marketing software, Dotdigital makes it simple to create a cross-channel experience. Use push notifications, SMS, MMS, and social retargeting to complement email campaigns, and you can do this in just one click – more on that later. 

We all know personalized messages are the key to engagement, but to do so, you need reliable customer data. Whether you want to dig deep or see a top-level view, we ensure your customer data is always easily accessible with seamless integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Experience Cloud, GA4, Zendesk, Meta, and more. 

Chances are, your travel brand holds a lot of customer data, from their preferences to their experiences. You need a platform that allows you to easily access this data in real-time so that you can personalize your marketing campaigns, ensuring relevancy and stronger engagement. You can turn impulsive browsing into invoices and deliver a customer experience that’s sure to get your brand invited on future vacations.  

Understanding your travel audience

Knowing your audience is important in any business, but for travel, it’s imperative. A vacation isn’t a small purchase, so you need to know how to target and appeal to each and every customer’s personal temptations.

Gather customer data immediately

With Dotdigital’s on-site popovers and customizable preference centers, you get to know your audience quickly. Begin by asking customers for their preferred name as well as their preferences for messaging frequency, channel, and topics. This gives you a great baseline of zero-party data to send personalized and engaging marketing from the get-go. You’re also enhancing the customer experience by demonstrating responsible marketing practices. By giving your audience a sense of flexibility and control, you’ll build trust and reduce churn.

As the relationship with your customers progresses, you’re going to gain a host of insights. From web pages browsed to links clicked in an email, your customers show you what they want and who they are with every interaction. Dotdigital collects this data and compiles it for you; you’ll be able to see at a glance what’s important and not need to sift through spreadsheets to get there. We like to say our data is comprehensive but never complicated. 

All the data in one dashboard

Deliver a seamless customer experience thanks to understanding your customers’ entire journeys by accessing every interaction in one place. Single customer view (SCV) shows you every touchpoint a customer has experienced and every engagement. See a customer’s experience and demographic data in one place to gain a detailed understanding of your customer. From here, you can generate a lookalike segment that automatically collates other contacts like them.

SCV in action

There are a wide variety of ways SCV can be implemented to improve your travel marketing. 

Here are a few of our favorites:

• Track engagement trends to create personalized customer journeys
• Discover optimal email send times based on a traveler’s current location
• Create segments based on your ideal traveler persona in one click
• Personalize content based on booking, browsing, and engagement history

Why you need to segment your travel audience

Segmented email marketing campaigns can increase revenue generation by up to 760%. Segmentation allows you to create like-minded groups of travelers together so you can easily select a particular audience for your targeted campaigns. This could be families, business travelers, adventure seekers, last-minute travelers, and so on. Having easily defined groups means personalization takes no time at all.

Creating segments is a smooth and logical process in Dotdigital. You can choose to make a segment from a template for ease, or create a brand new segment using contact behavior and data fields. 

You don’t have to start from scratch with segmentation. Dotdigital has created an eRFM customer modeling tool that builds personas based on your customers’ spending and engagement habits. It combines traditional recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) scores with engagement scores to give a much fuller picture. 

RFM scores depend on customers’ order data:

• The number of days since the last purchase
• The total number of orders made
• The average value of all those purchases

Engagement scores are measured by:

• Email opens – this is the weakest scoring criterion
• Email clicks – this is the middle scoring criterion
• Viewing your webpage for five seconds or more – this is the highest scoring criterion

Use Dotdigital to:

• Develop rich marketing lists using personalized on-site popovers that appear on actions such as exit intent.
• Collect valuable data through bespoke preference centers with custom data fields that allow you to gather unique insights for your brand.
• Build clear audience segments using SCV to surface contacts similar to your ideal traveler profile.
• Connect with travelers at the optimal time using eRFM to identify the engagement levels of your audience.

Cross-channel marketing with Dotdigital

Cross-channel marketing is the creation of seamless, connected customer touchpoints across all marketing channels, and it is essential for successfully converting travelers. Cross-channel marketing is growing, travel marketers now have more and more ways to reach their audiences. At Dotdigital, we have made sure that marketers can utilize the channels they need, all from within the Dotdigital platform. From email, SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and targeted ads, you can create a cross-channel campaign that spans these channels to better engage your customers.  

By adopting a cross-channel marketing strategy, you can communicate with your customers on the channel that makes the most sense at the time. Reminding a customer to check in to their flight only needs to be a short message, and you want to ensure it’s seen, so SMS will work better than an email. Likewise, when you want to showcase a selection of hotels in an area a customer has shown interest in, email is the way to go. 

Dotdigital makes it easy for you to create campaigns across various channels, so you’re not using different software for each channel – can you imagine the manual admin? You can even turn an email into an SMS in just one click, thanks to our AI tool.

SMS for travel marketers

SMS is an especially valuable channel for travel marketers. People don’t tend to check their email as much on vacation, and that’s if they even have Wi-Fi. SMS doesn’t need an internet signal to get the message to your customers, and it’s much more likely to be seen, which is perfect for important travel updates and reminders.

Get inspired by British Airways’ use of SMS

The British Airways management team regularly monitors customer satisfaction through the monthly global “Think Customer Survey”.

BA required a way to survey customers as soon as possible post-flight. The survey needed to be delivered in a timely fashion and provide the traveler with an easy route to feedback on the service they’d experienced and grade their overall experience.

SMS was chosen as a convenient and immediate channel. The user journey involves four messages offering easy service grading and the ability to give individual feedback. This is triggered from the BA operational platform, with messages sent automatically at a period shortly following arrival. 

Thanks to Dotdigital, the two-way SMS survey is conducted in over 40 countries worldwide, which are major territories for BA. Each country is provided with localized two-way functionality to minimize costs to the customer.

Email for travel marketers

Email is a great channel for travel marketers; it allows you to send personalized, relevant, and engaging content to your audience regularly. Emails can easily be personalized, ensuring every campaign is relevant to the individual. 

As emails are longer than the likes of SMS and push, you can include more content and CTAs. This could be written content, such as a travel newsletter to boost brand-customer loyalty, or an image-heavy campaign full of dynamic, personalized, and enticing travel offers with CTAs designed to drive a sale. 

See how travel brand Awaze boosted conversion rates with dynamic content

Travel brand Awaze uses countdown timers in its mass marketing emails for cottages.com and Hoseasons to highlight sales and boost urgency. “The emails definitely drive a lot more urgency when customers can see the time counting down to the end of a discount,” says Tina Calder, Head of Customer Retention, Awaze.

The company is seeing close to a 40% increase in conversion rate across cottages.com and Hoseasons with dynamic countdown timers.

Push notifications for travel marketers

Push notifications are very similar to SMS in terms of the benefits. Push notifications allow you to surface a message on your customers’ cell phone lock screen or notification bar to instantly grab their attention. Push notifications are great for time-sensitive updates for marketing, such as flash sales, or transactional, such as ‘time to check in’ messages. 

WhatsApp for travel marketers

Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and LINE are popular messaging apps, increasingly used by marketers. These apps allow you to engage in a two-way conversation with ease, creating a better customer experience. At Dotdigital, we integrate with these apps to make it simple to communicate with your customers on their preferred messaging app. 

Messaging apps can be used as broadcast-style channels for marketing messages, but the real winner is using these apps for customer service. You’re able to provide a natural and engaging experience and filter support requests by urgency based on automatic filtering you can set up. 

Retargeting ads for travel marketers

Vacations are rarely spur-of-the-moment purchases; people take time to research and consider. This means a cross-channel approach that keeps your brand front-of-mind throughout this consideration process is imperative to secure the sale. 

Utilizing a channel like targeted ads means that whether a customer is actively checking their inbox or simply browsing social media in their free time, your travel brand will be on their mind at all times. Use the data you have on these customers to ensure these ads speak to their desires by including content they’ve shown interest in already. 

How icelolly.com uses Facebook Extensions to boost conversions

As part of its personalization strategy, icelolly.com decided to add the Facebook Extension into its business-as-usual marketing programs in Dotdigital. The tool targeted engaged email subscribers with personalized ads based on the zero-party data customers had shared via the preference center. This encouraged customers along the customer journey – from awareness to consideration and conversion – by providing highly relevant Facebook ads.

Engaged contacts were served with targeted ads that reflect their individual data, such as local airports, to maximize the relevancy of the message. icelolly.com generated a 17% conversion rate from Facebook. What’s more, retargeting ads have seen a 3% higher conversion rate than general social ads, which we can attribute to the increased relevancy. 

Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time has also bolstered customer satisfaction, as Trustpilot reviews are at an all-time high. Plus, by leveraging browsing data, icelolly.com has enhanced its emails by displaying the searched and abandoned deals, improving the relevancy of email content for its customers. The results have been compelling, with the brand seeing a 35% higher open rate; 201% increase in CTR; and a 45% increase in conversions with this strategy.

The benefits of a cross-channel approach to travel marketing

As well as different messages suiting different channels, a cross-channel approach hugely increases your reach. If you’re only sending out emails, your audience will probably only think of you when they go to their inbox – and that’s only if you’re at the top when they do. 

When you add in a mixture of SMS, app push, WhatsApp, and social retargeting, you’re going to be front-of-mind a lot more often. We never want to spam customers, but when you naturally integrate with your customers’ day-to-day channels, your marketing will be more successful. Marketing across a plethora of channels is not as daunting as it sounds, and you can do it all on one platform with Dotdigital. 

Use Dotdigital to:

• Use WhatsApp or LINE to enable a two-way conversation with your customers – these apps are especially valuable to travelers with a spotty internet signal, as the conversation won’t cut off
• Use push notifications to alert travelers that they can check in and provide a direct link for them to do so on your app
• Utilize retargeting ads to keep your brand front-of-mind during the consideration phase of the travel customer journey
• Employ SMS to reach customers even when they’re in a destination without an internet signal and keep them informed and updated
• Target your audience with dynamic and personalized email content that will drive conversions and boost engagement

Personalization for travel marketers

A vacation is more than a regular purchase; it’s when people make memories and traditions – and for many, it’s the reward they work for all year round. Travel is a very personal thing; it makes up a huge part of people’s identity. When you show you understand that, you’re going to gain customers for life. 

Personalization in all kinds of marketing is important, but for a big-ticket and often emotional purchase such as travel, it’s imperative. You need to show customers you understand them to build trust. No one is going to book something so important with a company they don’t feel understands their wants and needs. 

You need to show customers content relevant to their interests. If someone loves to explore on city breaks and you send them all-inclusive resorts, they’re not going to engage. 

Stand out from the competition by building a rapport built on understanding, relevancy, and helpful marketing content. 

How personalization creates conversions for travel brands

Personalization is great; it removes generic messages, gets rid of the guesswork, and makes every single message you send resonate with your audience. We live in a time when digital marketing is super sophisticated and targeted. At Dotdigital, we want you to be able to utilize all of that customer data you’re collecting and actually put it to use easily every time you create a campaign.

From classic first-name personalization to showing customers travel destinations based on their browsing history, personalization is the key to customer engagement and boosting conversions. When you show someone content that is clearly tailored to them, they appreciate it. When you show them the exact hotel, flight, or excursion they’ve been looking for, they’re going to book it. When you personalize your campaigns, you’re improving their experience and removing barriers to conversion by making it super easy for them to click and book.

How to use personalization to enhance the customer experience

Location-based personalization is essential for a travel brand. You want to be able to show your customers relevant content based on where they are at that moment. 

Use geo-targeting to showcase relevant content to your customers based on where they are on that particular day. You can use it to showcase nearby excursions or update them on the weather forecast for where they are to add a touch-point whilst they’re on vacation. 

You can also utilize geo-targeting by dynamically showing or reacting to the weather in your customers’ home locations. On days full of grey skies and rain, an email promising some Mediterranean sun is going to really appeal to them. 

Use personalization in your messaging to build trust with travelers

Personalization is key to engaging prospects and customers, and it’s crucial for trustworthy communication post-booking. The difference between ‘Check in for your flight’ vs ‘Hey, David. Check into your 12:15 pm flight to Chicago online now’ is huge. 

This isn’t about getting engagement, but delivering a trustworthy and sophisticated experience for the customer. When you’re on vacation, you’re on high alert for scams, and the last thing you want is for your brand to add to that pressure. Don’t give your customers any reason to doubt the legitimacy of your messages by including details only you would know. 

With Dotdigital, you can use Liquid, a flexible and dynamic markup language that allows you to pull in sophisticated customer data to campaigns and landing pages to hyper-personalize the experience. 

Personalize your travel website and boost engagement

Fresh Relevance, Dotdigital’s advanced personalization tool, allows you to personalize slots on your website without needing any support from your website development team. 

Our personalization platform helps travel marketers deliver bespoke, relevant, and consistent experiences, like Janis Thomas, E-commerce and Marketing Director at Look Fabulous Forever:

Before Fresh Relevance, we had one of those homepages that was stuffed with information. But now we can tailor the homepage to each person. We’re able to listen to website visitors and serve them what they need rather than broadcasting the same content to everyone.

Web personalization in action

• Ensure your homepage uses dynamic content to display relevant content, such as recently browsed destinations, to instantly grab your customers’ attention.
• Personalize your website with real-time customer data. Such as including a quick link to a customer’s flight details on your website’s homepage in the days before they fly.
• Utilize customer data to see where similar customer segments booked next and showcase these options to your audience to boost relevancy and engagement. 

Use Dotdigital to:

• Personalize the customer journey from the very first interaction, thanks to sophisticated data capture, and win over prospects by showing that you understand their needs.
• Use browsing, previous purchases, and preference data to remove barriers to conversion and speed up the booking process by delivering customers their perfect travel itinerary.
• Show constant care and check in with your customers when they’re on vacation, and showcase nearby activities or areas of interest based on their personal location.
• Ignite that travel bug by sending targeted campaigns based on your audience’s location and weather conditions.
• Use customer data to inform when you send campaigns as well as deciding the content inside. For example, send customers who have children an enticing day spa offer on the first day back to school after a long and tiring summer break. 

Automation and triggered marketing for travel brands

How travel marketers should utilize automation

Marketing automation is a travel marketer’s best friend. Automation means you can set up a program in advance and know that your customers are going to get the perfect campaign at the perfect time – without you doing anything. Examples of this include welcome, abandoned browse, pre-trip check-in, post-trip review requests, and so on. 

Triggered marketing like this ensures you’re sending the right message at the optimum moment – when a customer has done something that indicates interest or a need for more information. You can ensure your triggers and automated campaigns answer those potential drop-off points with perfectly timed and relevant content.  

How Awaze boosted conversion thanks to marketing automation

Proving that timing is everything, and following your customers’ lead is a lucrative strategy for the travel company, Awaze. The brand tested out different send times of an abandoned browse campaign, testing 15-minute, 30-minute, and 60-minute delays. After one month of testing, there was a clear winner that sooner was better as the 15-minute variation saw higher conversion rates. 

The brand updated its program to run at a 15-minute delay and then saw a 4% conversion rate from an abandoned browse automated email program and a 14% conversion rate from a cart abandonment email program. Here’s what Tina Calder, Head of Retention, said:

“The abandonment emails are doing really well and we’re very pleased with the results. The conversion rates are much higher than our mass campaigns.

The benefits of automation for travel marketers

Automation programs do a great job of nurturing customers at different stages of the journey, and once they’re set up, they’ll run in the background while you’re busy with other priorities.

For travel marketers, good customer service is the key to a long and fruitful relationship. Marketing automation programs allow you to deliver an impeccable customer service experience at scale.

Creating a pre-trip automation that outlines all the steps and information your travelers need to be aware of is an essential step to ensure a smooth customer experience. Likewise, a post-trip check-in can go a long way in boosting customer satisfaction. For travel companies that work at scale, automating these steps is essential for reliability and internal teams’ time management.

Use Dotdigital to:

• Ensure all prospects are actively nurtured with a triggered welcome program that automatically sends your brand to new subscribers.
• Capture otherwise lost revenue with abandoned browse and abandoned cart automation programs to re-engage customers and give them an easy way to continue the booking process.
• Send pre and post-trip check-ins full of relevant information or review requests to ensure your customers feel supported and informed throughout their experience.
• Use Dotdigital’s data tools and easy-to-use automation program builder to create reliable and detailed triggered cross-channel campaigns.
• Save time with automations, and know that every time a customer takes a relevant action, they are going to be served with the perfect message right when they need it.

Integrate your travel tech stack

Dotdigital integrates with hundreds of world-class platforms and specialists to enhance your marketing and streamline workflows. Ensure a reliable data feed from your booking software, CRM, and anything else into Dotdigital.

Easily connect with travel-specific marketing agencies, CRM, and more that have experience with Dotdigital. To deliver an informed and seamless customer experience, you need to be able to access and understand every step in one place. With Dotdigital, you can do just that and rest assured that your marketing messages are always accurate, reliable, and relevant.

Dotdigital travel partners spotlight

Dotdigital and Adobe

• Provide personalized recommendations with real-time price/availability updates, related products like hotels and tours, and weather-specific website and email content
• Boost profitability with dynamically priced packages integrated with your global delivery systems (GDS), purchase options for flight upgrades and in-flight amenities, and smart segmentation
• Enhance customer loyalty programs with destination-specific loyalty rewards, holiday bundles, and marketplace options, plus gain insights into behavior and preferences for future campaigns
• Improve travel marketing efficiency with AI assistance, timely automated message delivery, and easy cross-channel campaigns

Learn more about the Dotdigital and Adobe integration.

Dotdigital and Inspiretec

• Inspiretec’s CRM for travel marketers unlocks the power of technology to solve the challenges facing the travel and leisure industry and help your business grow
• Find new customers more easily. Use what you know about your current customers to find new ones. Now it’s easy to target each prospect with specific offers that tick all their travel boxes
• Make metrics make sense. Decode the data to understand online customer behavior. When you know what resonates and why, it’s easier to create targeted communication that converts
• Stay in contact. Segment your contact lists according to location, age, gender, buyer stage, and more. This makes it easy to find the people you want to contact at any given time

Learn more about the Dotdigital and Inspiretec integration.

Reporting and analytics for travel marketers

All too often, as marketers, we spend all our time and energy getting a campaign out into the world, and the reporting takes a back seat. Reporting and analyzing campaigns may feel like the final step of the customer journey, but it should always be the start of the next one as you learn from every campaign.

This is especially true for travel marketers, as booking a trip is usually a big purchase, and the booking window can be quite a long time. When you take the time to analyze your marketing and see exactly what kind of communication resonates with your audience, you can tailor your future campaigns to appeal to them in a much stronger way. This will result in higher conversions and a stronger customer lifetime value as the customer knows your brand understands them and serves them well.

Dotdigital’s campaign reporting and analytics tools for travel marketers

Dotdigital’s reporting and analytics dashboards are designed to show you the important parts without bogging you down in the details – but it’s always there if you want it. Essential campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are shared in a digestible format so that you can see how your campaigns performed instantly.

The Dotdigital customer dashboards for travel marketers

Dotdigital’s customer dashboard pulls in customer data to group customers according to their purchasing behavior.

There are six distinct groups

1. Champions
2. Loyal
3. Recent
4. High potential
5. Need nurturing
6. Inactive

Each persona is categorized into one of three stages in the customer lifecycle

1. Active
2. Lapsing
3. Inactive

You can drill down into each persona group to discover key metrics, including:

• Total customers in each group
• Total lifetime revenue yield of the segment
• The percentage of total revenue yield from each persona
• The average customer lifetime value per persona
• The average number of orders placed
• The average order value by each persona

Understanding your travel audience with Dotdigital reports

The Dotdigital persona movement report lets you see how your different customer segments are behaving and changing over time.

As well as understanding how your audience is behaving, you can easily create segments based on the persona movement report. For example, you can enroll customers who have just dropped from ‘recent’ to ‘inactive’ into an automated re-engagement campaign.

How to turn customer insights into revenue

• Instantly spot who to focus on and target thanks to customer labeling such as ‘needs nurturing’.
• Tailor the decision window in Dotdigital to reflect your brand’s usual buying cycle to ensure these customer insights are 100% useful for your brand.
• Travel is an industry built on loyalty and perks, so easily identify and segment your loyal customers for targeted activity.
• Easily segment and contact your brand champions, and ask them for reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content (UGC) as these are imperative in the travel industry.

Predictive analytics saves you time and boosts accuracy

AI-powered reporting tools analyze reams of your customers’ data in the background, then show you the opportunities identified, ready for you to capitalize on. These predictive analytics give you a heads up on when to target customers based on their likely next move.

The different types of predictive analytics in Dotdigital

• Churn probability: (e.g. this customer is 40% likely to churn)
• Predicted next purchase date: (e.g. this customer’s next purchase date is predicted to be June 3)
• Predicted customer lifetime value: (e.g. this customer’s predicted CLV is $360)
• Predicted total future orders: (e.g. This customer is predicted to have three future orders in total)

Predicted next purchase date is ideal for travel marketers, as a lot of people have certain times of the year when they tend to book a trip. Our AI model uses recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) data and other machine learning techniques to predict when a customer is likely to purchase again. This gives you the go-ahead to know when to craft a tempting and personalized campaign, knowing you aren’t wasting your time.

Get the credit for your hard work with revenue attribution

Understanding where your revenue comes from is vital for the optimization of your marketing campaigns. Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution tool helps you identify which campaigns are driving customer action and converting into revenue.

The benefits of advanced revenue attribution

• Discover which of your campaigns are generating high amounts of revenue.
• Uncover which campaigns are underperforming and realize opportunities to optimize.
• Directly attribute marketing campaigns to sales for recognition of team activities.
• Infer revenue attributed to marketing campaigns within a wider conversion window.
• Automatically convert local currencies into your base currency using the exchange rate on the day of purchase.

You can tap into Dotdigital’s advanced revenue attribution capabilities by installing our ROI tracking script or syncing your order data using our integrations, API, or an SFTP client. You can also view your revenue generation within the campaign report area. This will display the revenue attributed to each email or SMS marketing campaign.

Dotdigital is compliant with data and sustainability regulations

• Identify campaigns with the highest revenue generation and duplicate those tactics across additional marketing activities for revenue generation.
• Identify campaigns where certain audiences convert and create lookalike segments to target with a similar campaign.
• Track direct and assisted revenue across the last and multiple campaign touchpoints and understand which are delivering ROI.
• Tailor the revenue attribution window to suit your business model and learn which campaigns are pulling their weight.
• Use revenue data to inform future campaign activity and better define what success looks like.

Dotdigital makes data security a breeze

Data privacy regulations are of paramount importance to you, so we have built them into everything we do. The Dotdigital data watchdog uses AI to run a complex set of algorithms and checks to predict, detect, and prevent abuse. By assessing and blocking problematic data, we’re protecting you from complaints and potential ISP blocklistings, and guarding your all-important delivery rates.

In terms of the data you store with us, Dotdigital is ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR-specific data processing agreements and EU Model Contract Clauses are in place between Dotdigital and its subsidiaries, as well as service providers processing data. We believe in data being secure, but never complicated. Rest assured that all data we hold is protected and secure, and know you’re able to action data subject requests in a timely fashion thanks to our logical and easy-to-navigate data reporting tools.

Dotdigital helps you with your carbon footprint

Sustainability is of ever-growing importance to consumers, and the travel industry is no stranger to sustainability-based scrutiny.

At Dotdigital, we make it easy for you to reduce your carbon footprint as the world’s first carbon-neutral cross-channel marketing automation platform – we’re also committed to being net-zero by 2030.

By offering travel marketers like you a carbon-neutral option for your marketing automation, it’s one more thing off your to-do list as we take care of it for you. Dotdigital customers have access to a designed badge for their email footers to proudly showcase its carbon neutral credentials, thereby boosting their brand image to their customers with none of the legwork required.

Key takeaways

Ultimately, to stand out from the competition, motivate new customers, and retain existing customers, you need a platform that empowers you to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Travel marketers need comprehensive data capture and reporting to enable hyper-personalized marketing, especially including location-based targeting to appeal to travelers directly. You also need to be able to trust the data you collect and know that it will reliably inform triggered campaigns such as pre-trip reminders, itinerary notifications, and so on. It’s crucial you keep your audience engaged and informed throughout their booking and travel experience to keep them coming back.

We know that travel isn’t something people tend to book in the spur of the moment. This is why a cross-channel approach is needed to maintain engagement during the consideration phase and then secure the booking. When you can easily keep your brand’s offering front-of-mind as your audience goes about their daily life, your brand is the one they will choose when they’re ready to complete the booking.

Dotdigital ticks all the boxes for travel marketers, from data capture at the start to engaging and informative campaigns throughout, and simple but detailed reporting for you to ensure you’re always optimizing.

To make an impact with your marketing, you need to stay on top of the latest trends and technology. In this ultimate marketing strategy guide, we’ll explore the challenges you’re currently facing in the higher education industry, upcoming trends, and what technology you need to stand out in a crowded market.

What is higher education marketing?

Higher education marketing isn’t just about using flashy marketing tactics to lure students in. It’s about promoting your educational institution and the programs you offer to attract prospective students, engage with alumni, and build your reputation. It’s about positioning the university in a way that attracts the right students, answers their questions, and showcases your programs, facilities, faculty, and unique offerings to prospective students.

You can use many strategies, methods, and tactics to engage with your audiences, get across the unique selling proposition of your institution, and reinforce your brand image in a competitive environment. Ultimately, your goal is to create a friendly and welcoming atmosphere that inspires learners to reach their full potential.

Types of higher education institutions

The higher education sector consists of institutions that offer different programs and degrees. These institutions can be categorized into five major types:

• Universities mainly focus on research and offer degrees at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels

• Colleges offer undergraduate education and award associate and/or bachelor’s degrees

• Further education colleges provide programs that lead to diplomas, certificates, or foundation degrees. Here, learners develop practical skills and industry-relevant knowledge, preparing them for university or the workforce

• Technical and vocational institutions specialize in providing instruction in specific trades and professions

• Online learning offers diverse programs through distance learning or online platforms, helping learners to study from anywhere

Why is marketing important for your higher education institution?

Marketing is of great importance for higher education institutions for many reasons, but here are the highlights:

1. Build awareness: Make your higher education institution stand out from the competition and reach a larger audience
2. Attract prospective students: Show your unique attributes, attract high-quality applicants, and increase enrollment rates, which contribute to the financial sustainability of your institute
3. Promote programs, degrees, and courses: Highlight specific academic programs and generate interest among potential students to join these programs
4. Alumni relations: Maintain connections with alumni, who are valuable sources of donations, mentorship, and professional networks
5. Improve institutional reputation: Highlighting the achievements, research, and expertise of your faculty members, as well as the success stories of students and alumni, helps you build a strong reputation that will keep you top of their minds when applications roll in

Challenges facing the higher education industry

Here are the key challenges that marketers face in the higher education industry:

1. Competition: Growing competition among higher education institutions creates a difficult environment for marketers to differentiate their offerings
2. Diverse audiences: Marketers must connect with diverse audiences, such as high school students, parents, working professionals, and international students, each with its own needs and expectations
3. Demonstrating ROI: Marketing budgets are highly scrutinized, and marketers must track, analyze, and demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts
4. Rapidly changing landscape: The higher education industry is always changing, driven by technological advancements, new methods of learning, and shifts in market demand for specific programs
5. Regulations and restrictions: Compliance with regulations can limit marketing activities, which can hinder the ability to quickly capitalize on opportunities

These challenges mean you need to stay current with the latest marketing trends and strategies, and be creative in your approaches to reach and engage with your target audience.

Top 10 higher education marketing trends

A large proportion of people entering higher education are in their late teens and early twenties, an audience that’s grown up with social media, instant messaging, and an expectation of personal, relevant communication. Reaching them means showing up on the channels they actually use and with messaging that feels like it was meant for them.

1. Adding AI into your marketing stack

From generative AI (writing assistance, image creation, and video production) to predictive analytics and note-taking, there are more ways than ever that you can include AI in your day-to-day marketing.

It’s all very exciting. AI is touted to be the answer to easier and quicker processes, but it’s important to consider the finer details. Multiple stakeholders, not just those in marketing, should be involved to avoid potential issues with copyright and privacy policy infringements and make sure all teams have access to the resources they need.

2. Using zero-party and first-party data

Unlike third-party data, zero- and first-party data is unique to your brand and owned by you. It’s collected with explicit consent from your website visitors, through direct interaction, text communications, or other marketing campaigns.

Personalizing your marketing efforts has never been easier. By collecting first-party data, you can segment prospective students based on their academic interests and program preferences. This approach helps you to target students who are most likely to enroll in your university.

3. Personalized messaging

Gen Z is highly skilled at spotting marketing that feels inauthentic. As a result, marketing to all audiences all the time is too broad and doesn’t create the genuine, personalized feeling that Gen Z is searching for.

Fortunately, with the help of AI and big data, you can now understand what each student is looking for, letting you reach them at the right time and with the right message. Through email, SMS, and web personalization, as well as segmentation, you can create memorable marketing experiences that connect with prospective students.

4. SMS communication

Did you know that most members of Gen Z prefer to use text messages over emails for communication? This means that SMS is becoming a more popular way to communicate. Gen Z members are three times more likely to open a text message than an email.

Universities and colleges can use SMS to reach out to prospective students and establish trust by providing important information such as enrollment deadlines, inviting students to information sessions, or welcoming new students with exclusive discounts.

Alumni can also benefit from text messages by getting job placement alerts, reunion invites, and donation drive messages, which can help them stay connected with their alma mater.

Whether they’re a student or an alum, SMS is a communication tool that should not be overlooked. By using simple and familiar language, organizing the information logically, and keeping sentences short and direct, you can make sure that everyone can understand what you mean.

5. Authentic content

Many members of Gen Z prefer to see real people in marketing campaigns, with 67% being more interested in content that features realistic depictions of people. While influencers and brands aim to create visually stunning content on social media platforms like Instagram, this generation has resisted the trend, preferring raw, less polished content.

According to data from GWI, Gen Z cares most about content that is funny/lighthearted (58%), inspirational (52%), and helpful (51%) when it comes to brands. They value authentic content and expect it to align with the context of the platform. Content that appears too polished, sleek, or heavily branded is less likely to perform well on their preferred platforms like TikTok.

6. TikTok marketing

TikTok can be used to showcase campus tours, highlight the new programs, and share student-generated content, including alumni success stories.

Gen Z enjoys keeping up with the latest TikTok songs and trends, which is why higher education institutes need to stay on top of content creation. In fact, TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes such content. However, TikTok trends have a short lifespan of about 3 to 5 days, so it’s worth posting your content regularly; otherwise, it will become irrelevant.

7. Conversational marketing

Conversational marketing is a growing trend centered around having open chats with your audience or anyone who comes to your website. Using a variety of channels, including WhatsApp, live chat, and social media messages, you can connect with both potential learners and students who have already enrolled with you.

8. Learners turned content creators

The latest generation of learners wants to be a part of the brands they interact with. Gen Z loves creating content far beyond viral TikTok dances. Today, young people from around the world are collaborating to create authentic content that represents them.

Prospective students are searching for genuine content that accurately portrays “a day in the life” or career opportunities they’ll encounter after enrolling in your institution. To get great marketing results, you need to tap your Gen Z content creators and turn them into brand ambassadors.

9. Multi-form video content

Video content is brilliant for capturing attention, providing in-depth explanations, and entertaining your audience. Uploading these to YouTube can help boost brand awareness and improve your SEO ranking.

However, the attention span of your average Gen Z-er peaks at eight seconds, so short-form videos (under 90 seconds) have become their preferred length. So, when creating video content, think about how it can be used, the alternative forms it may take, and how it can be repurposed across your channels.

10. Lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences are another way AI can speed up your marketing strategy. Lookalike audiences help you prioritize resources on individuals more likely to engage with your institution and enroll, instead of targeting a broad audience that may include less interested individuals.

Using customer insight tools like single customer view (SCV), you can easily spot your ideal customer profiles. Whether that’s someone who was super engaged throughout the whole enrollment process or someone who converted after a prolonged nurture series, you can use their profiles to inspire bespoke customer journeys.

Key higher education marketing strategies for impressive results

Student loan interest rates are at a high. Online and hybrid learning is on the rise. Focused, vocational courses are more in demand. Workplaces are investing more in upskilling their employees. Competition is at an all-time high.

To address these changes, modern marketing strategies need to focus on expanding higher education marketing channels, using data, and building communities based on experiences.

In this section, we’ll explore ten effective higher education marketing strategies that will grow your institution’s reach, reputation, and results. By using creativity, new ideas, and targeted marketing efforts, you can change your institution’s future and make sure its long-term success.

1. Higher education email marketing strategy and best practice tips

Email marketing has dominated the world of digital marketing for a long time – and for good reason. Email generates a whopping $48 (£38) for every $1 spent.

The flexibility of email – its visual, video hosting capabilities, and adaptability to both long and short-form content – makes it the perfect communication channel for marketers looking to build long-lasting relationships with their audience.

6 essential benefits of email marketing for higher education

Here are six benefits of email marketing for higher education marketers:

1. Cost-effectiveness

Email marketing is a cost-effective way for higher education marketers to communicate with prospective and existing students, especially compared to traditional marketing methods like print materials or direct mail.

2. Targeted communications

Email marketing lets you segment audiences based on factors such as academic interests, course preferences, location, or demographics. This helps you deliver highly targeted and relevant messages that connect and convert.

3. Improved personalization

Email marketing easily integrates customer data and personal details like the recipient’s name, location, or program of interest to create a more personalized and engaging experience for prospective students.

4. Timely communication

Email marketing lets higher education institutions send time-sensitive information, such as application deadlines or course updates, directly to students’ inboxes. This helps make sure important news reaches them on time.

5. Clear reporting and analytics

You can easily develop future email communications and make data-driven decisions by tracking and analyzing the engagement metrics of your email campaigns via your marketing automation platform.

6. Building long-term relationships

Email marketing lets you maintain consistent and ongoing communication with students before, during, and after their academic journey. This creates long-term relationships and improves overall student satisfaction.

Email marketing best practices for higher education marketers

When it comes to email marketing in the higher education industry, there are certain best practices that you need to keep in mind. By following these best practices, you can improve your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Know your audience

Segment your email list based on factors like prospective students’ year in school, interests, or program of choice. This lets you do targeted messaging that resonates more with each group.

Personalize the experience

Use students’ names and tailor content to their interests. This can be done by including relevant program information, scholarship opportunities, or upcoming events.

Craft compelling subject lines

Keep subject lines short, action-oriented, and pique the reader’s curiosity. Consider personalizing them with the student’s name or program of interest.

Mobile-friendly design

Make sure your emails are responsive and render well on all devices, especially smartphones, which students are likely to use most.

Visuals are key

Add high-quality images and videos to break up text and make your emails more visually appealing.

Calls to action (CTAs)

Tell students what you want them to do next. Use clear and concise CTAs that direct them to a specific landing page, event registration, or application form.

Strategic timing

There are optimal times to send emails to students. Consider sending emails during evenings or weekends when they’re more likely to check their inboxes.

Test and develop

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different subject lines, content formats, and CTAs. Use A/B testing to see what resonates best with your audience and continually improve your campaigns.

Permission-based marketing

Only send emails to those who have opted in to receive communications from your institution. This can be done through clear opt-in forms on your website, during registration processes, or at events.

Clear unsubscribe options

Make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe from your emails. Include a prominent unsubscribe link in every email footer, and check it works properly.

Accurate and up-to-date contact lists

Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive subscribers or invalid email addresses. This helps maintain good deliverability rates and avoids complaints.

Align across departments

Collaborate with other departments, like admissions or financial aid, to make sure your messaging is consistent and provides a good experience for students.

Respect student data privacy

Be transparent about how you collect, use, and store student data. This aligns with regulations like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in the US or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.

Combine with social media

Promote your email campaigns on social media platforms to reach a wider audience and encourage further engagement.

By following these best practices, you can build trust with students and create effective email marketing campaigns that connect with prospective and current students, driving them further down the admissions funnel.

2. Marketing automation for higher education

Marketing automation automates repetitive tasks like sending emails and SMS to your audience. Its ability to personalize communications with your prospective and current students makes growing your campaigns to meet the new demands of online and hybrid learners, as well as keeping your alumni close, simple.

Benefits of marketing automation for higher education

1. Increased efficiency

Automating tasks like email nurturing and social media scheduling frees up valuable time for strategic planning and personalized outreach. 

2. Personalized communication

Deliver targeted messages based on a student’s interests, demographics, and stage in the enrollment journey. This builds deeper engagement and improves conversion rates.

3. Improved lead scoring

Assign points to student actions (e.g., downloading brochures, attending webinars) to identify high-potential leads and prioritize outreach efforts.

4. Better data-driven decision making

Track campaign performance and get insights into student behavior. Use this data to refine messaging and improve future campaigns.

5. Better enrollment process

Automate workflows for tasks like application reminders, financial aid guidance, and welcome messages. This will create a smoother transition for new students.

Essential marketing automation programs for higher education

• Email drip campaigns deliver a series of targeted emails based on student interests and enrollment stage. Offer relevant content, answer their questions, and guide them towards applying

• Use lead nurturing workflows to keep prospective students engaged with personalized content like program spotlights, alumni success stories, and virtual campus tours

• Automated lead scoring to spot qualified leads by assigning points to website visits, downloads, and other interactions. Focus your outreach efforts on your highest-scoring leads

• Send timely reminders to complete applications and submit necessary documents. This helps create a smooth application process for potential students

• Onboard new students with a series of personalized emails offering resources, introducing key contacts, and building a sense of community

3. SMS marketing for higher education marketers

Most students and prospective students are glued to their devices, making SMS a great communication tool in your marketing arsenal.

Top 4 benefits of using SMS marketing

1. High open rates

The reach of SMS marketing is unrivaled. Average SMS open rates sit around 98%, making sure your message gets seen, every time.

2. Direct communication channel

Reach students directly, bypassing cluttered inboxes and delivering your message right into the palm of their hand. What’s more, did you know that as many as 45% of people reply to SMS marketing messages? That means you can start real-time, meaningful conversations with your audience.

3. Time-sensitive updates

SMS marketing is ideal for sending urgent reminders or important deadlines to your wide and diverse audience. By avoiding the email inbox, you can guarantee your time-sensitive message is delivered and read with a single send.

4. Personalized touch

SMS marketing built into your cross-channel automation platform lets you send targeted text messages based on subscriber data like demographics and course interests.

5 types of SMS campaigns to get you started

According to G2, only 39% of businesses are using SMS as a marketing channel. Considering it’s a cost-effective channel with great engagement rates, that stat is a bit of a head-scratcher. SMS is quick and easy to set up, and with no design requirements, it’s not as complicated as other channels.

Let’s have a look at some of the core SMS campaigns you can build today to drive enrollment and deliver engagements:

• Send course information, scholarship updates, and virtual tour reminders to turn prospects into happy students

• Make sure prospective students remain well-informed by providing application deadlines, status updates, and next steps. This will help build a strong and loyal relationship with students as they become donors and alumni

• Use SMS to promote campus events, deadlines, career fairs, and mental health resources

• Communicate campus updates, travel alerts, or weather emergencies to make sure students are safe and informed

• Like email, text messages can be personalized using information from your database. Send reminders for upcoming appointments, financial aid deadlines, or registration dates to provide a one-to-one experience for every student

Best practice tips for higher education SMS marketing

To get the most from your SMS outreach, here are some key best practices to keep in mind:

1. Permissions are essential: Always get explicit opt-in consent before sending SMS messages – marketing or otherwise
2. Keep it concise: SMS has a strict limit of 160 characters per message. Keep texts short for optimal readability
3. Establish a frequency: Don’t bombard subscribers. SMS can feel more intrusive than other channels as it’s delivered directly to the palm of a hand. Aim for 1-2 messages per week to keep students engaged
4. Think about the value of your message: Make sure you’re providing valuable information, not just promotional content. Sending too much promotional content will cause students to switch off
5. Track and analyze results: Like any other marketing channel, you can monitor results to refine your strategy for greater impact

MMS marketing: the secret to making your SMS stand out

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) expands your SMS marketing by letting you send images and videos. Here are some ways you can put it into action:

• Showcase your campus: Send visually appealing MMS messages featuring campus life, facilities, or student activities
• Virtual tour enhancements: Add short video clips into campaigns promoting your virtual tours for a more immersive experience
• Event promotion: Use eye-catching visuals to promote upcoming events, webinars, speakers, or workshops

Remember, always prioritize clear value for your audience. SMS and MMS driver higher engagement than most other channels. Sending too many batch-and-blast messages will reduce their impact.

4. Two-way conversational marketing channels for higher education

One of the biggest struggles you face as a higher education marketer is the fact that your target audience is neither a consumer nor a working professional. This makes figuring out which tactic works best for your institution a struggle.

Choosing a higher education institution is not a small decision. Most of your audience will be investing a lot of time and money into you and their education. Naturally, with such a big decision ahead of them, they’re going to have questions.

Having an open dialogue and inviting your audience into a two-way conversation will set you apart from the competition. Email and SMS are great for engagement, but this is where you can drive potential learners to convert.

Benefits of two-way conversation channels for higher education

Personalized communication

You can answer individual questions, address specific concerns, and tailor your message for every potential student

Build stronger relationships

Two-way conversations help build trust and rapport with potential students. This, in turn, makes them feel valued and can help them connect with the real people who represent your institution

Improved data collection

It provides valuable insights into potential student concerns, interests, and decision-making processes. This data can be used to refine and develop your marketing strategies and tailor your messaging

Increased engagement

Interactive two-way channels build deeper engagement compared to basic or passive content. Proactive outreach through live chat or personalized messages on WhatsApp can spark conversations and keep your education institution top-of-mind

Improved conversion rates

Real-time communication lets you address specific doubts and objections quickly. By effectively removing any potential roadblocks, you’ll enjoy higher application and enrollment rates

How to add two-way marketing channels to your marketing mix

The biggest struggle your marketing team will face is figuring out where and how to implement them. Often, they’re considered to be less of a marketing tool and more suitable for student-facing departments like finance and student services.

This is a mistake. You can learn so much about your target audience through these channels, making them an essential part of your marketing tech stack. Yes, the main users may be external teams, but by having these channels sync to your marketing automation platform arms you with unlimited insight into audience behaviors and help nudge them down the path to conversion.

Live chat use cases for your website:

Program advice and guidance

Provide live chat support to answer program-specific questions about curriculum, faculty, career outcomes, and application requirements. This will help speed up the decision-making process and improve overall experiences.

Application assistance

Offer live chat support for students filling out their online applications to significantly increase completion rates. By guiding them through the process and addressing any technical difficulties, you will see the number of completed applications soar. 

Financial services and support

Connect students with financial aid advisors to answer questions about scholarships, grants, and student loans. This will help build a relationship based on trust from the get-go.

Event registration

Let prospects register for events over live chat to create more opportunities to engage with them and answer questions about upcoming webinars, open houses, or information sessions.

WhatsApp as a communication channel: use cases

Host pre-application Q&A sessions

A great way to engage new potential students is to host interactive Q&A sessions on WhatsApp. This is where prospective students can ask questions directly to admissions officers or current students.

Deliver campus life content

Share engaging content like photos, videos, or blog posts showcasing campus life, student activities, and upcoming events.

Provide personalized welcome messages

Deliver personalized welcome messages to newly opted-in contacts. Take the opportunity to introduce your institution and highlight relevant programs, resources, or contacts they’ll need in the future.

Deliver application deadline reminders

Use automated messages to remind students of upcoming application deadlines, provide last-minute application tips, and offer assistance as necessary.

Send scholarship and grant updates

Inform students about scholarship and grant opportunities relevant to their academic interests. This can boost the student experience by making sure they feel like your top priority.

Provide post-enrollment support

Offer ongoing support through WhatsApp after enrollment to help students transition smoothly into academic life.

5. Personalization tools and tactics for higher education

Mass mailing, generic messaging, and purchased marketing lists won’t help you hit the targets you need to drive enrollment, recruitment, and alumni donations. Your audience today is far too wary. They understand the importance of the decision they’re about to make and the financial implications it can have on their future. They’re picky, and they have every right to be.

To make your email, SMS, marketing automation, and two-way conversational marketing impactful, you need to create unique experiences for your audience. Including personalization as a central pillar of your marketing strategy will help your institution stand out in the highly competitive higher education industry.

Why is personalization an important tactic for higher education institutions?

Student expectations have shifted, especially if you’re targeting Gen-Z. Your audience today craves authenticity. They want to feel a sense of connection and community with the institution they choose. Generic marketing is too impersonal. Personalization, on the other hand, demonstrates that you understand your audience as individuals, creating a sense of trust and building a stronger bond with your institution.

What are the benefits of personalized marketing?

1. Increase application rates

Using targeted communication to showcase programs and opportunities relevant to an applicant’s interests and goals makes them feel like your institution is the perfect fit. This will result in more completed applications.

2. Improve conversion rates

Personalized messaging can address students’ questions and concerns throughout the application process. By providing them with important information when they need it most, you can smooth the path to enrollment and increase conversions.

3. Stand out in a crowded market

Your audience is bombarded with generic messages from countless institutions looking to recruit them. Personalization helps you stand out by speaking directly to their wants, needs, and interests.

4. Build stronger relationships

Today’s learners crave authenticity and genuine connection. Adding personalization in your marketing shows you understand them as individuals, building trust and creating a stronger bond with your institution.

5. Boost overall engagement

Generic content gets ignored. That’s just facts. With personalization, you can tailor your messaging and content to resonate with your audiences, leading to higher click-through rates and stronger engagement.

6. Enhanced donor and alumni relations

Connect with personalized outreach to alumni to strengthen connections and loyalty. This leads to increased alumni giving and stronger overall support for your institution.

Essential personalization tools for one-to-one experiences

Data collection tools

You can’t personalize anything without data. As you begin planning your personalization strategy, you need to have a look at your data collection tools and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. For truly seamless and unique experiences, you need a centralized data storage solution. Your data collection tools, like surveys, landing pages, and onsite popovers, should all sync smoothly with your CRM to make sure your data is always up-to-date.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the first step towards building personalized experiences. You should start by dividing your audience into smaller groups based on who they are, e.g. prospective students, enrolled learners, alumni, donors, and employees. You can dive in further by thinking about their shared demographic characteristics.

As you learn more about your audience, you can create more bespoke segments based on academic interests, position in the funnel, and levels of engagement.

Intelligent segmentation tools let you use data stored in your CRM to create these bespoke audience groups. More advanced tools have already added AI to segment builders. This gives you access to predictive analytics and real-time behaviors to create moment-based marketing that resonates with your audience.

Cross-channel marketing automation

Your marketing automation platform must sync with your CRM and data collection tools to make sure you can deliver personalized experiences. Using your cross-channel marketing automation tools lets you send personalized emails, SMS, push notifications, and retargeting ads.

AI marketing intelligence engine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing how people go about their daily lives, so it’s important you add it to your business. AI can analyze data and predict the behaviors of your audience. It can also show content most relevant to segments or individuals, such as recommended courses or financial aid options.

Website personalization

Long before prospective students visit your campus or enroll in a program, they visit your website. In many respects, your website is now the face of your institution, so it’s worth making every visit as warm and welcoming as a face-to-face meeting.

Personalized greetings for repeat visitors help elevate every experience. Whether they’re prospective students, already enrolled, or returning alumni, this personal touch on your website will keep students and donations rolling in.

Personalization in action: Higher education examples

Personalization can be used throughout your marketing campaigns to increase the experiences of your audience. Here are just a few examples of how you can add personalization to your cross-channel marketing campaigns to inspire action.

1. Targeting high school seniors by location

Target audience: High school seniors from a specific state or county (e.g., in-state vs. out-of-state).
Data used: Location data from website sign-up forms or demographic data from surveys.

Tactics used:

Email marketing

Use dynamic content to send targeted emails to your selected segments. Highlight the benefits of attending your institution to in-state prospects, like hybrid learning opportunities, scholarships, or proximity to family. For your out-of-state students, showcase vibrant campus life, online learning opportunities, or unique programs.

Social media retargeting ads

Run targeted social media ads using the same data to showcase student testimonials from their specific state or highlight local internship opportunities available through your institution.

2. Providing personalized content based on course interests

Target audience:  Prospective students who have expressed an interest in a specific course or program
Data used:  Website behavior data (e.g., pages visited), program preferences submitted through surveys or preference centers, or email engagements (e.g., clicking links grouped as ‘engineering courses’).

Tactics used:

Dynamic website content

Use past browsing activity to prompt repeat website visitors to ‘pick up where you left off’ or use popovers to highlight the latest events taking place in the department.

Email nurture programs

Send a series of emails with personalized content related to their past behavior (e.g., upcoming webinars or success stories of recent graduates) to nurture them until they complete their application process.

3. Enhancing onboarding experiences

Target audience: Newly enrolled students.
Data used: Application data such as intended major or extracurricular activities.

Tactics used:

Personalized welcome series

Send a welcome series with information about student organizations, information relating to their intended major, and invitations to relevant campus events or online mixers, depending on their status as an in-person or hybrid learner.

Connect with current students

Use two-way channels to connect new learners with current students enrolled in the same program through a mentorship program or online forum.

4. Re-engaging alumni

Target audience:  Previous students who have graduated or completed their course.
Data used: Enrollment status and any previous interactions (emails opened, website visits).

Tactics used:

Email re-engagement campaign

Send personalized emails highlighting new programs, recent achievements of fellow graduates, and upcoming alumni mixers.

Re-targeting campaigns

Run re-targeting ads across Google and social media, reminding graduates about upcoming fundraising events and driving more donations.

6. Retargeting marketing for higher education institutions

Decisions aren’t reached quickly in the world of higher education. Chances are, they’re out there right now, scoping out potential colleges, universities, or further education institutions.

At the beginning of the decision-making process, your institution is probably one of many. To make it to the top of their ‘dream school’ list, you need to keep your brand and your message in front of them.

95% of website visitors don’t convert on their first visit. Marketers in the higher education industry need to find effective ways to turn these one-time visitors into legitimate leads. When prospective students visit your site, they’re expressing interest, so you need to keep your message in front of them to convert them. But, how? The answer lies in retargeting.

What is retargeting

For those of you still trying to understand the many nuances of your marketing channels, here’s a brief overview of retargeting.

Do you ever wonder why you see ads for websites you just visited popping up everywhere you go online? That’s retargeting. It’s a channel that reminds your site visitors who you are and why they should enroll.

With retargeting, you can follow curious potential learners across the web and give them a friendly (and personalized) nudge back to your site.

How does retargeting work?

The best way to understand how retargeting marketing works is to think about a use-case scenario.

Imagine a student checking out your new study abroad options. Behind the scenes, a tiny piece of code (known as a pixel) on your website relays this activity to your cross-channel marketing platform, where it is stored in your unified contact profile. This data can then be used to create personalized display ads that will appear as they browse other websites. It’s a gentle reminder that your study abroad program is there, ready and waiting for them to enroll.

Will the end of third-party cookies affect retargeting marketing?

There has been a lot of buzz and uncertainty around third-party cookies, but there’s nothing to worry about. Retargeting is still a strong marketing channel. It’s only going to get stronger as third-party cookies stop interfering with your marketing activity.

Here are some of the key changes you can expect to see:

Zero-party and first-party data will take center stage
The collection of zero-party data will be more important. Zero-party data is information collected directly from the user, like email addresses and marketing preferences. First-party data is based on tracked activity such as opens, clicks, and registrations. This will let you target known visitors and subscribers who have already shown interest in your institution with relevant ads.

Contextual targeting will get more savvy
Cross-channel platforms like Dotdigital can track online activity to deliver contextually relevant ads to website visitors. For example, a prospective learner visiting your Literature course pages will receive ads inviting them to visit your campus for a look around the Literature department’s facilities and talk to existing students.

By focusing on the data you collect naturally throughout their journey, you can stay top-of-mind and drive conversions with retargeting marketing.

The benefits of retargeting marketing for higher education marketers

At a time when your audience is being bombarded by choice, retargeting is one of the ultimate tactics to help turn website visitors into enrolled learners. Benefits of retargeting include:

1. Increased conversions

Most of your website visitors won’t decide on one visit. Retargeting lets you reconnect with those users who are almost ready to convert. By providing them with gentle, visual, and personalized ads about your programs, campus, or learning opportunities, you will build stronger relationships that drive conversions.

2. Improved brand awareness

Decision-making in the higher education industry can take months. Retargeting helps keep your institution at the forefront of students’ minds as they compare options. By retargeting throughout the decision-making process, you reinforce your brand image as ‘the’ place they should be. 

3. Hyper-personalized marketing

The time of batch and blast marketing is long gone. Retargeting lets you ditch that approach to focus on students who have already expressed interest in your institution. An all-in-one marketing platform allows you to tap into a visitor’s complete contact profile, so you can display personalized ads that will deliver conversions. 

4. Strong ROI

All these benefits come together in delivering an impressive return on investment. By focusing your advertising budget on those most likely to convert, i.e., students who’ve already shown some interest, you will see improved results compared to traditional, broader marketing tactics. 

Best practice tips for retargeting marketing ads

To make your retargeting ads stand out, we have a few simple, easy-to-implement best practice tips that will help you reach your full potential.

1. Segment your audience

For impressive retargeting results, try to avoid blasting the same message to everyone. Segment your audience based on their web behavior.

For example, show targeted scholarship ads to those who visited your scholarship page, highlight specific programs to students who explored a particular course, and showcase student life to those who browsed your dorms section.

This personalization makes your ads more relevant and increases their effectiveness.

2. Keep ads fresh and compelling

To avoid ad fatigue, create a variety of ad creatives with fresh visuals, compelling headlines, and clear calls to action. This keeps your audience engaged and prevents them from tuning out your message.

Tap into audience data to create bespoke campaigns that can be served to customers depending on their preferences and online activity, and check that users are unenrolled from campaigns to prevent them from being overwhelmed by seeing the same ad.

3. Test and refine

The best thing about retargeting marketing is that it lets you test different ad variations and see what resonates best with your audience.

Continuously monitor your results and adjust your campaigns based on what performs best. This makes sure you’re always delivering the most impactful message to your target audience.

7. Data collection tools for higher education institutions

Information is power. But not just any information – collecting the right customer data is the key that unlocks marketing success. It’s the difference between a marketing team that consistently hits its targets and one that struggles to connect with its audience.

But how you collect data matters just as much as what you collect. Gone are the days of intrusive tactics that alienate potential customers. Modern marketing needs a strategic approach. You need to understand not only when to collect data, but also how to do it in a way that respects consumer privacy and builds trust.

This needs careful selection of the right data collection tools. The wrong tools can lead to irrelevant data overload, making it difficult to spot trends and insights. Or worse, they can damage your reputation if they’re seen as intrusive or violate data privacy regulations.

By understanding the importance of data collection tools and tactics, you can make sure you’re gathering the right information, in the right way, to fuel successful marketing campaigns and achieve your goals.

Why choosing the right tools is important 

1. Better data for better decision-making

A huge amount of your marketing success hinges on the quality of the data you collect, how it’s stored, and how you can access its insights to improve your marketing. Choosing data collection tools that are integrated with your marketing channels is key. This will give you easy access to insights that can be used to inform your marketing strategy. 

2. Improved team efficiency

With big data at your fingertips, you need data collection tools that align with your specific goals. There’s no point in having a tool that collects lots of data that you’re not going to use, but doesn’t allow you to send out surveys. Ultimately, the wrong tools can lead to irrelevant data overload. To keep team efficiency high, you need tools that meet your objectives. 

3. Cost-effectiveness

It’s worth picking tools that deliver value for investment and avoid redundant or irrelevant features. Making sure they work with your CRM and marketing automation platforms saves the need for costly custom integrations to be built. What’s more, with all-in-one platforms like Dotdigital, surveys, forms, and popovers are all part of the whole package.

4. Security and trust

As marketers, you’re responsible for a lot of data. With privacy concerns at an all-time high, you need data collection tools with robust security to protect this information. This will help build a strong relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

5. Compliance with privacy regulations

As well as addressing user concerns, you also need to keep up with changing data privacy regulations. Your tools should always be certified, guaranteeing they collect data ethically and comply with relevant rules. 

Essential data collection tactics

1. Email newsletter subscription

Newsletters provide targeted outreach to current students, prospective students, and alumni. By tracking opens, clicks, and engagements, you can understand content preferences, identify behavior trends, and tailor future communications.

2. Blog subscription

Similar to your marketing newsletters, blog subscriptions let you spot interested individuals and track content that resonates with your audience.

3. Surveys 

Surveys gather feedback directly from students, prospective students, and alumni. You can use them to gauge program satisfaction, career aspirations, and campus life experiences. Surveys also help you identify areas for improvement and tailor marketing messages to address specific needs.

4. Downloadable content 

As a higher education institution, downloadable content such as digital prospectuses, admissions guides, and sample syllabi is a great lead capture tool. Using this tactic, you can gain valuable insights into user interests and generate qualified leads.

5. Event registration

Track registrations for virtual information sessions, campus tours, or admissions events to identify high-interest programs and locations for targeted marketing efforts. You can also analyze attendance data to improve future event experiences.

6. Quizzes and assessments

Interactive quizzes and skill assessments reveal much more about your audience than basic demographics. The gamification of your data collection will help you uncover the strengths, weaknesses, and academic goals of your audience. Following up with recommendations for relevant programs or resources also helps increase their overall experience.

7. Preference centers

Preference centers give learners or alumni control over their communication preferences and let you collect valuable zero-party data. Offering options to choose preferred communication channels, areas of interest, and frequency of updates builds trust and increases engagement levels in your audience.

8. Live chat support 

Live chat provides a real-time connection with prospective students, letting them ask questions and receive immediate answers. Your chat agents can gather valuable data during conversations, address concerns, and personalize the recruitment experience.

9. Website behavior tracking

Web behavior tracking lets you analyze how users interact with your website. This will help you understand what content resonates and identify areas for improvement.

10. CRM integration

Integrating your data collection tools with a CRM system helps you create a central hub for student and prospect information, making way for personalized communication and better workflows.

8. Integrate with your favorite marketing tools 

The technology you use and how you use it can be the difference between a successful institution and one struggling to meet its targets.

But it’s not as simple as just having software tools. After all, what’s the point of having personalization tools if they don’t speak to your CRM? Or marketing automation software that doesn’t communicate with your website? It would all be pretty pointless.

You need an integrated marketing stack – i.e., a unified system where all your marketing tools work together seamlessly. This will make sure your marketing activities run as smoothly as possible.

Benefits of having an integrated marketing stack

1. Better communication

With an integrated marketing stack, you can easily run your campaigns across all your channels. Imagine you’re launching a new summer school program. By integrating all your channels and software, you can easily publish pop-ups on your website, send targeted emails to interested students, and promote your school using social media ads on their favorite platforms. This helps you deliver a consistent and targeted message.

2. Centralized data hub

Every tool in your marketing stack collects valuable data. With an integrated marketing system, you can see and access all this information in one place. You can understand how website visitors interact with your content, which emails resonate with your audience, and how well your retargeting ad campaigns perform. This data is the secret sauce that fuels your marketing strategy and helps you create personalized and relevant messages.

3. Time-saving efficiency

Repetitive tasks like sending email newsletters, onboarding new students, and scheduling social posts can all be automated within an integrated marketing stack. This frees up your limited time for strategic planning, personalized outreach, and analyzing data to optimize campaigns. 

4. Unified profiles 

An integrated marketing stack consolidates data from various sources. This lets you create a 360-degree view of every contact in your database. Whether they’re prospective student, enrolled learners, alumni, or staff, you can deliver targeted communication and personalized experiences.

5. Deeper data insights

Integration of your marketing stack lets data from your various tools be centralized. This simplifies the process of analyzing campaign performance and pulling insights from student behavior. You can easily discover what’s working and what’s not. This lets you allocate your budget more strategically and improve your overall strategy to deliver better ROI and results.

Building the perfect higher education marketing stack

As a higher education institution, your marketing team can rely on hundreds of applications, programs, and tools to achieve its marketing goals. But, over the years, these can spiral out of control and lead to a sprawling mess of disconnected technologies.

This can lead to many problems, including a poor experience that causes prospects to drop out of the enrollment process.

So, building the perfect tech stack needs careful planning. You need to know what tech is essential, why, and how to incorporate it into your marketing stack.

CRM (customer relationship management)

Your audience interacts with your institution in various ways, including website visits, email engagements, applications, and submissions. A CRM tracks all these interactions, creating a comprehensive profile for every contact. This lets you:

• Tailor your marketing messages and content based on a contact’s interests, academic background, and enrollment status
• Identify prospects most likely to enroll and prioritize communication efforts accordingly
• Automate email programs to keep prospective learners engaged and informed throughout the application process

CMS (content management system)

Your CMS is typically a software application that lets you build and manage your website without having to code it from scratch, or even know how to code at all. A user-friendly CMS helps you to:

• Easily design landing pages with clear calls to action (CTAs) to encourage prospects to download brochures, register for webinars, or complete applications

• Easily publish informative blog posts, course descriptions, and virtual tours showcasing your institution’s USPs

• Communicate with your marketing automation platform to display personalized content based on a contact’s profile or interests

Web analytics tools

Understanding how visitors interact with your website is key to refining your website strategy and improving campaigns for better results. Armed with web analytics data, you can identify what content resonates with students, which pages need improvement, and which marketing channels drive the most qualified traffic.

Web analytics tools provide insights into:

• Where website visitors come from, such as search engines, social media, and referral links.
• The actions of your visitors by measuring pages visited, time spent on specific content, or engagement with CTAs
• How many visitors take desired actions, such as registering for events or completing application forms

Social media management platforms

Today’s learners are highly active on social media. By managing your social media activity effectively, you can connect with your audience on a more personal level, showcase your college culture, and build brand awareness. An integrated social media management platform lets you:

• Easily plan and publish engaging social media posts across your social channels
• Reach your audience with relevant content based on demographics, interests, and academic goals
• Monitor online activity, measure the performance of your content, and understand student sentiment

Event management platforms

Running smooth, successful events is a key tactic for high engagement and strong conversion rates. From webinars and campus tours to fundraising events, using an event management platform helps create a smooth and enjoyable experience. Plus, these are invaluable for collecting data for future outreach. These platforms help you:

• Manage event registrations effectively, collect student data, and send automated confirmation emails
• Integrate event information with your marketing automation platform to promote events through targeted email marketing campaigns and social media posts
• Use post-event comms to collect feedback via surveys, and analyze data to understand audience sentiment and improve future events

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for a perfect tech solution. It all depends on your institution’s specific needs, budget, and audience demographics. Here are some of our top tips for integrating your marketing software into the perfect tech stack.

1. Start with your goals

What are your primary marketing goals, e.g., increasing website traffic, boosting student inquiries, or improving application rates? Prioritize tools that align with these goals.

2. Focus on integration

Make sure all your marketing software integrates well with your marketing automation software platform. This lets you create a centralized system for data collection, analysis, and campaign execution.

3. Consider scalability

Always choose tech that can grow with your needs. As your offering and recruitment efforts expand, your tech stack should be able to handle the increased volume and complexity of changing behaviors.

4. Prioritize user-friendliness

Overly complicated tools will sit there underused, wasting precious marketing budgets. Investing in tools that are easy to learn and use helps with an efficient workflow and makes the most of the return on investment (ROI).

9. Use AI in your higher education marketing

Tech like ChatGPT has already become commonplace; there are hundreds of new applications that promise to change the way you connect with your audience. From advanced recommendation engines to image recognition software, AI is weaving itself into the world of marketing at an unprecedented rate.

Luckily, higher education institutes are well-positioned to benefit from these capabilities. 

The benefits of AI in higher education

Higher education marketers face unique challenges. Whether it’s connecting with a wide range of stakeholders (students, prospects, teachers, alumni, and more) or meeting the diverse needs of your audience, marketing to this sector can feel like an uphill battle. But thankfully, AI can address many of your unique challenges through: 

1. Personalization

With the help of AI, you can personalize learner experiences by tailoring messages, content, and recommendations to an individual’s needs and interests. This leads to higher engagement and conversion rates, no matter your goal. 

2. Efficiency

AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as email marketing and content creation, freeing up valuable time for marketers to focus on strategic initiatives. 

3. Real-time support

AI-powered chatbots can provide your audience with 24/7 support, answering questions and resolving issues quickly, which is important for higher education institutions looking to expand their international student intake. 

3. Data-driven insights

AI’s biggest and possibly most important benefit is its ability to analyze large amounts of data to identify trends and patterns. This gives you valuable insight to inform your marketing decision-making. 

AI for higher education marketers

Personalized email marketing

AI can help you generate personalized email content and subject lines that resonate with individuals. Whether it’s course recommendations or dynamically displaying relevant events, AI can help increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. 

Content creation

From grammar and tone adjustments to converting email campaigns into SMS in one click, AI helps you improve the time spent on building campaigns, so you can focus on the tactics that matter. 

Predictive analytics

You can use this information to personalize your marketing campaigns, reach prospects, students, and alumni at the optimal moment, and improve your marketing outcomes altogether. 

By using AI tools available at your fingertips, you can create a more personalized and data-driven strategy. But don’t forget, the key to successfully using AI to improve your marketing takes planning and consistent use.

Here are our top tips for effectively adopting AI into your higher education marketing: 

Develop a clear AI strategy

Before you start, define your goals and identify the specific areas in your marketing strategy where it can add the most value.

Focus on your audience’s experience

Use AI to personalize marketing messages and provide a smooth cross-channel experience throughout their journey.

Data privacy

Always be transparent about how you are using AI and audience data, and make sure you are complying with all relevant data privacy regulations.

Measure your results

The only way you’ll be able to guarantee the success of your efforts is by tracking the impact of your marketing campaigns. Keep a close eye on your results and improve as needed.

Key takeaways for your higher education marketing strategy

In this guide, we have explored the unique challenges and opportunities facing marketers in higher education institutions. Let’s recap some of our top takeaways to develop your marketing strategy: 

• Use AI for personalization, marketing automation to smooth out processes, and add SMS marketing for higher engagement

• Gen Z in particular craves authenticity. Make sure you segment your audience and deliver targeted messages based on data to build connections and build trust

• Reach your audience where they are with a mix of marketing channels, including email, social media, live chat, and WhatsApp

• Create valuable content that addresses student concerns, showcases campus life, and highlights program offerings in a variety of formats

• Track and analyze marketing campaign performance to improve future efforts

By implementing these strategies, you can attract top students, strengthen alumni relations, and make sure your institution thrives in a competitive landscape. 

But the competition keeps growing. Standing out from the crowd is becoming increasingly difficult, and keeping travelers engaged enough to complete the checkout process is a challenge.

At the same time, there are question marks over how long this travel boom will last. Staffing issues, the cost of fuel and energy, and uncertainty around the cost of living are causing concern for travelers and travel marketers alike.

In this ultimate guide, we will have a look at the current state of travel marketing and break down all the channels and tactics you need to succeed in the highly competitive sector.

What is travel marketing and why is it important?

People are always dreaming of their next vacation, surely that means travel brands basically sell themselves, right?

Unfortunately, not. How brands market themselves is what makes travelers choose one resort and airline over another. Travel brands must promote and sell their products, services, and experiences to customers. You need to showcase the distinctive features of your destination, accommodation, leisure activities, and travel packages to spark interest and motivate bookings.

The travel industry is always changing. Some of the primary types of businesses that make up the industry include:

Transportation providers

• Airlines
• Train operators
• Cruise liners
• Bus companies
• Car rental agencies

Accommodations

• Hotels and resorts
• Hostels
• Bed & breakfasts (B&B)
• Vacation rentals (e.g., Airbnb, VRBO)
• Camping and glamping sites

Travel services

• Travel agencies (online and offline)
• Tour operators
• Online travel agencies (OTAs)
• Travel management companies (TMCs)
• Travel insurance providers

Leisure activities and attractions

• Guided tours and sightseeing excursions
• Adventure activities and sports (e.g., skiing, scuba diving)
• Museums, galleries, and cultural centers
• Theme parks and amusement parks
• Restaurants, bars, and cafes

Destination marketing organizations (DMOs)

• National tourism boards
• Regional and state tourism offices
• City visitor bureaus

Travel technology and platforms

• Travel booking and comparison sites
• Mobile applications for travel planning and navigation
• Travel review and recommendation sites (e.g., TripAdvisor)
• Metasearch engines for flights, hotels, and car rentals (e.g., Kayak, Skyscanner)

What are the benefits of travel marketing?

• Marketing helps potential customers become aware of the travel services and experiences you offer and boosts overall visibility in the crowded marketplace

• A well-executed marketing campaign attracts new customers by showcasing the value and unique aspects of your travel business, ultimately driving revenue growth

•  Marketing helps your travel brand to maintain long-term relationships with your existing customers by offering personalized and contextually relevant content and engaging with them consistently across channels

• Including loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized promotions in your marketing can build customer loyalty, leading to repeat business and higher customer lifetime value (CLV)

• New and targeted marketing strategies can help your travel brand stand out from the competition, positioning you as a leader and providing an advantage in a highly competitive market

• Marketing can be used to generate upselling and cross-selling opportunities, increasing the average transaction value and ultimately resulting in higher revenue

• Using marketing, you can manage your online presence, customer reviews, and social media engagement. This positively influences your brand reputation, driving more business from potential customers who trust and value your brand

• Using data collected through your marketing activities for analysis and insights can help your business make informed decisions about product and service offerings and marketing strategies, letting you improve your performance

• Marketing can play a key role in identifying new potential markets, demographics, and customer segments to target, helping you to expand your reach and tap into new growth opportunities

• Marketing lets you react quickly to unpredictable events, market trends, and competitive moves, adapting your strategies to maintain customer engagement and drive bookings while ensuring resilience in the face of challenges

Need to know marketing statistics for the travel industry

Using these statistics, you will be able to get a bird’s eye view of global trends, customer behavior trends, and forces that are set to drive the multibillion-dollar industry forward in the years to come.

What are the challenges of travel marketing?

Despite economic uncertainty, the travel industry is returning to pre-pandemic levels and enjoying steady growth.

Still, airlines, hotels, travel agencies, and other travel brands across the world are facing unique challenges that set you apart from typical marketing teams. You have your hands full keeping up with the latest trends and technological advancements. Below are just a few of the top challenges you’re facing on an almost daily basis and how to overcome them.

1. Price is top-of-mind

With inflation in flux and travel expenses rising, travelers now consider price to be their top priority. To connect with your audience, you should emphasize low rates and demonstrate high value. Promoting discounts, bundles, and loyalty programs will appeal to budget-conscious consumers.

2. Traveler habits are changing

As remote work, digital engagement, and eco-consciousness continue to impact customer behaviors, you need to stay on top of trends to cater to emerging segments like bleisure (business and leisure) travelers. Data-centric platforms like Dotdigital plug into CRM systems and use machine learning can help brands understand these new customer groups.

3. Personalization will take center stage

With 86% of travelers seeking personalized experiences, you need to create tailored campaigns that resonate with your audience. Data collection and integration with CRM platforms are essential for delivering enjoyable, relevant, and personalized marketing experiences.

4. Engage travelers throughout their journey

By understanding and following emerging travel trends, you can engage with audiences throughout the whole customer journey. You need to approach the journey holistically and create a cohesive experience across channels. Tools like single customer view (SCV) and eRFM will help you get a clearer view of travelers’ behavior.

5. Try new technologies

To maintain your competitive edge, you need to give customers a great experience, from booking to post-break feedback. You should tap into technology to adapt to market changes. Ensuring data quality and consolidation will help you reap the full benefits of new tech advancements.

6. Sustainability is increasingly important to travelers

To cater to your more environmentally-conscious travelers, you need to demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainable practices. Avoiding greenwashing and taking on eco-friendly practices helps you align your campaigns with customer values and support a greener future.

How to build a successful travel marketing strategy

Building a successful travel marketing strategy involves careful planning, targeting the right audience, and effectively using your various marketing channels. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a winning travel marketing strategy:

Step 1: Define your target audience

Start by clearly defining your target audience. Conduct market research to determine their demographics, preferences, and behaviors. This will help you tailor your marketing materials to resonate with this specific group and achieve better results.

Step 2: Develop a strong brand identity

Create a memorable and eye-catching brand identity that encapsulates your company’s ethos and values. This includes your company name, logo, tagline, color scheme, and visual style. Consistency across all marketing channels reinforces brand recognition and establishes trust.

Step 3: Grow your online presence

Create a user-friendly website that provides relevant information, showcases your offerings, and guides visitors to conversions (i.e. bookings or inquiries). Make sure your website has strong SEO to improve search engine ranking. Use social media platforms to engage with your audience and share valuable content.

Step 4: Get more from your content marketing

Produce high-quality, informative, and engaging content that inspires travelers and provides value. This could include blog articles, videos, or destination guides. Diversifying your content not only keeps your audience interested but also addresses different stages of their customer journey.

Step 5: Monitor, analyze, and adapt 

Implement analytics tools to track your marketing efforts and identify what works best. Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust your strategy to improve results. By continually learning from your data, you can make better marketing decisions.

Boost growth with modern marketing technology

To grow your visibility, captivate travelers, and boost bookings and inquiries, it’s essential to tap into the technology you have available. For peak success in the travel sector, you need technology that collaborates seamlessly with your existing tech solutions. 

Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform (CXDP) delivers an array of travel marketing tools and channels through a unified, all-encompassing platform. Getting more from your tech stack can improve traveler engagement, increase bookings, and improve your travel marketing initiatives.

Email marketing for travel marketers

Email marketing is a great tool for the travel industry, as it helps you to reach your target audience, build lasting relationships, and drive conversions.

In this section, we’ll explore the benefits of email marketing and the essential elements of successful email marketing for travel businesses, including creating targeted campaigns, using data to send personalized content, and ensuring that emails are engaging and mobile-friendly.

The benefits of email marketing for travel brands 

Email marketing is an essential tool for marketers in the travel industry for several reasons:

1. Direct communication channel

Email marketing is a direct line of communication with your target audience, letting you share news, updates, offers, and content straight to subscribers’ inboxes, enhancing engagement and nurturing long-term relationships.

2. Strong ROI

Compared to other forms of marketing in the travel sector, email marketing is relatively inexpensive while maintaining a high return on investment (ROI). This makes it one of the best options for travel brands looking to reach large audiences or target specific segments without breaking the bank.

3. Personalization capabilities

Email marketing lets you create perfectly personalized content and offers based on your subscriber’s demographics, preferences, and travel or engagement history. Ultimately, personalization leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, as your audience feels catered to and valued by your brand.

4. Behavioral targeting

With email marketing campaigns, you can track various metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, giving you a better understanding of travelers’ behaviors and preferences. This valuable information can be used to improve future campaigns, ensuring better audience targeting and building long-term customer relationships.

5. Urgency and exclusivity

You can use email marketing to create a sense of urgency through time-sensitive offers, limited promotions, and exclusive deals, encouraging customers to book their travel or upgrade reservations.

6. Increased customer retention

By regularly sending informative content, helpful resources, and engaging promotions through email marketing campaigns, you will nurture customer loyalty and increase repeat bookings over time.

7. Relevance and timeliness

Email campaigns can be triggered based on specific events or customer actions, ensuring that the content is relevant and timely as per each individual’s needs. This could include sending reminder emails about upcoming trips or limited-time promotions resulting in better engagements and more conversions. 

Email marketing best practices for travel marketers 

Travel marketers can employ these best practices to create effective and engaging email campaigns:

Craft compelling subject lines

Write catchy and enticing subject lines to increase open rates. Make your subject line relevant to the email’s content, and make sure it resonates with your target audience. Tap into generative AI to really save time and improve results. 

Personalize your emails

Personalize your email campaigns by using the recipient’s first name and providing recommendations, content, or offers based on their preferences, travel history, or demographics.

Segment your audience

Divide your subscribers into targeted segments based on factors such as geographical location, interests, booking history, or language, and send tailored content that appeals to each segment’s unique attributes.

Use dynamic and engaging visuals

Embed high-quality images and videos of destinations, accommodations, or activities to inspire and evoke emotions, leading to higher engagement levels.

Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs)

Make your CTAs clear, concise, and visually emphasized, directing subscribers toward the desired action, such as visiting a web page, booking a travel package, or redeeming special offers.

Make sure designs are responsive and mobile-ready

Check that your email template is mobile-friendly, with easy-to-read text and a clean layout, as a large portion of your audience will likely read your emails on mobile devices.

Check if the content is always relevant

Aim to provide valuable, informative, and engaging content that relates to the interests and needs of your subscribers, building trust and creating lasting customer relationships.

Test and improve

A/B test various elements of your emails, such as subject lines, send times, layout, or content, to determine what generates higher engagement and conversions. Continuously fine-tune your campaigns based on the insights gained from these tests.

Monitor important metrics

Keep track of key email marketing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement.

Maintain email list hygiene

Regularly review and clean your email list, removing inactive subscribers or outdated addresses to improve deliverability and maintain a high-quality mailing list.

Segmentation strategies for travel marketers

Segmentation is a key tactic for all marketers, but none more so than marketers in the travel sector. It involves dividing your target audience into distinct groups based on their preferences, demographics, or behaviors.

Implementing a segmentation strategy helps you to create highly targeted marketing campaigns that resonate better with each group, ultimately driving higher customer engagement and conversions.

Top five benefits of segmentation

1. Targeted marketing messages

Segmentation lets you tailor your marketing messages and content to specific segments, resulting in greater relevance, customer engagement, and conversion rates.

2. Improved customer experience

Offering personalized content, recommendations, and offers based on segmentation develops a better customer experience, deepening brand loyalty, and strengthening long-term relationships.

3. Resource allocation

By focusing marketing resources on specific customer segments, you can effectively allocate your budget, time, and efforts, ensuring maximum impact for your marketing activities. eRFM customer modeling will help you identify highly engaged, high-value customers to prioritize.

4. Increased ROI

Using segmentation, you can build tailored campaigns designed to appeal to different groups, resulting in higher response rates and, ultimately, an increased return on marketing investment.

5. Market insights

Segmentation provides insights into your customer preferences and behaviors, helping you identify new market opportunities, improvement areas, or trends that can inform marketing strategy.

Top tips for implementing a segmentation strategy

Gather customer data

Collect customer data from various sources, such as website behavior, booking history, survey responses, third-party travel partners, and CRM systems, and unify them to build a comprehensive understanding of your audience.

Use eRFM and SCV

Use advanced segmentation tools, including eRFM (engagement, recency, frequency, monetary) modeling and single customer view (SCV) data. These features helps you achieve more precise targeting and improved insights into customer behavior.

Create tailored content and offers

Develop content and promotional offers that resonate with the specific needs, desires, and pain points of each segment. Personalized marketing messages have a higher chance of engaging and converting customers. Use the data collected from Dotdigital’s eRFM and SCV features to inform these strategies.Align channels and campaigns

Align channels and campaigns

Make sure that appropriate marketing channels are used for each segment. Different customer groups may prefer email, SMS, or other channels, so align your strategy accordingly. Dotdigital’s customer insights will help you build a seamless cross-channel marketing plan.

Test and refine

Continuously test and analyze the performance of segmented campaigns. Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and CLV to identify areas for improvement. Adjust your segmentation approach and marketing strategies based on these data-driven insights.

Regularly update segments

Customer preferences and behaviors change over time. Periodically reassess your segments, refresh your data, and use updated customer insights to make sure your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective.

SMS marketing in the travel industry

SMS marketing can sometimes be an underused marketing channel, but it’s a tool that can boost engagement and provide exceptional value for travel businesses like yours. As a direct and immediate form of communication, SMS marketing can help you reach customers in ways other channels might not.

Benefits of SMS marketing for travel marketers

1. High open rates

SMS messages have an exceptional open rate, with most recipients reading the message within minutes of receiving it. This makes sure that promotional offers, updates, or reminders are seen by the majority of your target audience.

2. Real-time communication

SMS provides real-time, immediate communication that lets you send time-sensitive offers, last-minute deals, or important travel updates to your customers.

3. Mobile accessibility

With the majority of the population carrying mobile devices, SMS marketing is a great way to reach your customers regardless of their location or internet access.

4. Cost-effective

SMS marketing campaigns are easy to set up and cheaper than most other marketing channels. This means you can effectively reach your target audience, even on a budget.

5. Personalized experiences

SMS campaigns can be tailored to individual users based on their preferences, interests, or travel history, creating a more personalized and engaging experience for your customers.

6. Easy integration with other marketing channels

SMS marketing can be easily combined with other channels such as email, app, or social media to create a comprehensive and cohesive marketing campaign for your travel brand.

How to integrate SMS into your travel marketing

By using SMS marketing, your travel business can open up new avenues of customer engagement and diversify your overall marketing efforts, ultimately boosting bookings and customer satisfaction. Here are some campaign ideas that can be implemented through SMS marketing:

Booking confirmations

Provide instant booking confirmations, reservation details, and reference numbers to customers who have made a reservation or purchased a travel package.

Reminders

Send helpful reminders for upcoming trips, pre-travel checklists, departure times, locations, or travel document requirements.

Flight and travel updates

Share essential real-time updates like flight delays, gate changes, or itinerary adjustments, ensuring customers are well-informed and prepared. Ultimately, this will lead to higher satisfaction and experience overall. 

Promotional campaigns

Send exclusive deals, discounts, limited-time offers, or last-minute specials to encourage customers to book travel or secure a service through your business.

Abandoned cart recovery

Remind customers about travel packages, accommodation options, or services they were considering but have not completed the booking process.

Cross-selling and upselling

Suggest relevant add-ons or upgrades to customers based on their travel plans, such as excursions, activity bookings, premium seating, or transportation options.

Customer feedback

Request post-trip feedback, ratings, or reviews through an SMS message, using the insights to improve your services and customer satisfaction. SMS is a great channel for this because it needs little lift from your team and has a high completion rate. 

Loyalty programs

Notify customers of their rewards or loyalty points balance and inform them of any opportunities to earn additional points or redeem special offers.

Destination tips and recommendations

Share useful destination-based information, such as local attractions, events, dining options, or safety tips, to improve your customers’ travel experiences.

Top tips for successfully incorporating SMS into your travel marketing campaigns

• Combine SMS with email marketing to your existing email marketing strategy, sending important alerts, reminders, or limited-time offers through SMS to complement your email marketing activity.

• Segment your audience based on demographics, geographic location, or travel preferences, ensuring that your messages resonate with subscribers and are relevant to their needs in the moment.

• Personalize messages based on customers’ booking history, travel destinations, or preferences, creating a sense of exclusivity and personal connection.

• Use automation to trigger SMS marketing campaigns, such as booking confirmation, travel reminders, or payment due notices. This will make sure your text messages are landing at the best time to drive customer conversions.

• Deliver the key message or the call-to-action within the constraints of the character limit. Stay concise and focused, and your message is easy to understand. Tap into AI tools to help.

MMS for travel marketing campaigns

MMS (multimedia messaging service) is a bit like SMS marketing, the difference being you’re able to send content, such as images, videos, and audio files, alongside text messages. It offers new and exciting opportunities to engage customers in a more dynamic and visually appealing way.

Rich visual content

MMS lets you send rich visual content, including high-quality images and videos that showcase destinations, accommodations, or activities. This helps customers to get a better sense of the travel experience being offered and will inspire them to book.

Higher engagement rates

Multimedia messages, including images and videos, have higher engagement rates compared to simple text messages. By using MMS, you can evoke stronger emotional responses and drive customer interest, resulting in increased conversions and bookings.

Improved storytelling and immersion

MMS helps you to create immersive narratives by sharing pictures, videos, or audio clips of real travel experiences. This storytelling approach can help build a connection with potential travelers, increasing the likelihood of them engaging with your brand.

Greater personalization

MMS can be customized based on individual preferences, interests, or travel history. By sending personalized multimedia content to customers, you can create a more relevant and memorable connection, creatingy brand loyalty.

Competitive advantage

Although MMS is growing, many businesses still primarily rely on text-based marketing. Using MMS can differentiate yourself from competitors and establish a unique brand identity in the minds of consumers.

Integration with other channels

MMS works well in conjunction with SMS, email, and social media campaigns. Integrating MMS into your overall marketing strategy can help create a comprehensive and cohesive approach that covers different stages of the customer journey.

Marketing automation for travel marketers

Marketing automation speeds up repetitive marketing tasks, reduces manual efforts, and improves results. Intelligent marketing automation tools like Dotdigital create conversion-driving, loyalty-inspiring experiences by tapping into customer data and turning it into real-time marketing campaigns.

Benefits of marketing automation for travel brands

1. Time-saving and cost-efficiency

Marketing automation significantly reduces manual tasks associated with campaign management and customer segmentation, freeing up time for you and your teams to focus on strategic tasks, such as content creation and performance analysis.

2. Seamless communication

Marketing automation keeps your communication consistent across every channel, without you having to manage it manually, which is important for maintaining customer engagement and building long-term brand loyalty.

3. Personalization

By tracking customers’ actions, preferences, and booking history, marketing automation tools help you deliver personalized and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. This moments-based approach to marketing improves the overall customer experience, improving ROI, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (CLV).

4. Cross-channel campaign management

Marketing automation platforms help you manage and coordinate campaigns across various channels, such as email, SMS, social media, and web push notifications, ensuring a seamless and cohesive marketing strategy.

5. Data-driven insights

With the help of detailed analytics provided by Dotdigital, you can make data-driven decisions, monitor campaign performance, and develop your strategies for maximum results.

Essential automation programs for travel brands

Welcome programs

Set up automated welcome emails or messages for new subscribers, providing an initial introduction to your brand, exclusive offers, and personalized travel recommendations based on their preferences.

Automate booking confirmations, reservation details, and pre-travel reminders, ensuring all necessary information reaches the customer on time. This can include flight check-in reminders, pre-trip preparation tips, and travel documentation.

Abandoned cart recovery

Implement automated messages for customers who added travel packages or services to their cart but didn’t complete the booking process. These messages can include personalized incentives or offers to encourage conversion, AI-driven recommendations, or exclusive discounts for high-value customers.

Re-engagement campaigns

Build automated re-engagement or nurture campaigns to connect with inactive or lapsed customers, offering relevant travel deals or content that sparks renewed interest in your brand. Use eRFM to identify these customers and SCV to gain insight into the channels and content that will drive them toward conversions.

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are a big motivating factor in the decision-making process of modern travelers. Automate loyalty program updates, notifications, or special offers to reward repeat customers and builds long-term brand loyalty.

Customer feedback

Automate post-trip feedback requests, analyze customer experiences, and collect valuable insights to inform improvements in your offerings and services. Positive reviews also make great marketing collateral so the importance of this program must not be underestimated. 

Seasonal and promotional campaigns

Schedule automated campaigns centered around holidays, seasonal offers, or special events, targeting customers with relevant deals and packages. Use customer insights to see when customers are most engaged or typically looking at your website to identify essential times to launch annual offers.

By understanding the benefits of marketing automation and implementing these recommended automation programs, you can simplify your marketing efforts, engage customers across multiple touchpoints, and improves the overall customer experience while driving revenue and brand loyalty.

Web personalization

Web personalization involves tailoring website content to individual visitors based on their preferences, behavior, and demographic data.

In the travel industry, web personalization offers significant benefits and opportunities for enhancing customer engagement and boosting conversion rates. In this section, we’ll discuss the advantages of web personalization for travel marketers and provide strategies to create personalized online experiences.

Benefits of web personalization for travel marketers

1. Better customer engagement

Personalized content and offers on your website can capture users’ attention and create a positive, engaging experience, increasing the likelihood of bookings and purchases.

2. Improved relevance

By addressing customers’ preferences and needs, web personalization makes sure that your website’s content remains relevant and tailored to each user, making your brand more appealing to potential customers.

3. Increased conversion rates

Personalized content, offers, and recommendations can lead to an increase in customers taking action, whether booking a trip, subscribing to newsletters, or requesting more information.

4. Reduced bounce rates

An engaging and personalized website encourages visitors to spend more time exploring your offerings, reducing bounce rates and increasing the chances of customer conversions.

5. Improved ROI

By delivering personalized content and experiences to specific segments, web personalization can result in better use of marketing resources and a higher return on investment.

Strategies for personalizing web experiences

Geolocation targeting

Show customers recommended travel destinations, offers, or services based on their current location, accounting for local events or geographic preferences.

Behavioral data

Use customer behavior, such as browsing habits, pages visited, or previous booking history, to deliver personalized content, deals, or recommendations.

Customer segmentation

Divide your website visitors into specific segments based on demographics, interests, or travel preferences, and tailor website content to cater to these segments.

Exit intent pop-overs

Implement exit intent pop-overs with tailored, last-minute offers or incentives that persuade visitors to book, subscribe, or engage further with your brand before leaving the website.

Dynamic content

Use dynamic content that adapts based on user interactions, website behavior, or previous travel bookings, recommending related destinations, accommodations, or activities.

Personalized remarketing

Employ remarketing campaigns that display personalized ads to users who have previously visited your website, featuring customized offers, messages, or promotions.

Recommendations backed by AI

Integrate AI-driven recommendations into your website, providing visitors with personalized travel options across your homepage, product, and service pages.

Landing pages for promotions

Create dedicated, personalized landing pages for various promotions or travel offers based on customer segments, increasing the chances of conversions and bookings.

Push notification marketing

Push notification marketing is a helpful tool for brands operating in the travel industry. It lets you engage with customers directly through real-time, targeted, moment-based messages delivered directly to users’ mobile devices or web browsers.

Benefits of using push notifications in your travel marketing

1. Increased engagement

Push notifications give you new opportunities to re-engage customers by sending personalized promotions, announcements, and reminders. Ultimately, this imrpoves customer interactions and brand connection.

2. Real-time communication

Timely and relevant notifications help you to communicate instantly with users, facilitating real-time updates on special deals, flight status, itinerary changes, or exclusive offers.

3. Higher conversion rates

By delivering tailored offers and targeted content, push notifications can increase conversion rates, driving bookings and encouraging customers to take action.

4. Improved user experience

Push notifications can improve the user experience by offering personalized recommendations, location-based offers, and immediate assistance, building a stronger bond between customers and your brand.

5. Trackable performance metrics

Push notifications offer valuable performance insights, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Reporting and analytics

For marketers in the travel industry, using your budget and resources effectively is important. Here’s some of the ways you can do this:

Email reporting and analytics

Email reporting and analytics provide insights into the performance of your email marketing campaigns. This information helps you to:

• Identify trends in your email marketing campaigns
• Check your campaigns are meeting their objectives
• Pinpoint areas that need to be improved to build on your campaign performance

Email dashboards

Email dashboards provide you with an overview of all your email marketing campaigns, while email reports focus on a single campaign, outlining key performance metrics. By getting a full picture look at your email marketing campaigns, you can discover:

• Statistics about your delivered, bounced, and skipped emails.
• Data about opens, unique opens, non-opens, and social shares.
• A heat map showing the areas of the world where your email campaign was most opened.
• The most popular links in your campaign, clicks, unique clicks, and click-to-open rates.
• Details about your winning and losing split tests.

SMS reporting

SMS campaign reports monitor channel performance, helping you to continuously improve your marketing results. These reports showcase:

Last sent

Helps track the frequency of SMS campaigns and analyze performance metrics over time.

Click-to-delivered rate

Measures the effectiveness of your campaign, comparing the number of clicks to successfully delivered messages, which can inform improvements in content or targeting.

Conversion rate

Indicates the percentage of recipients who completed a desired action, such as booking a trip or signing up for a newsletter, helping to evaluate the success of promotional efforts.

Revenue

Evaluates the total revenue generated by a specific SMS campaign, determining ROI and guiding budgeting decisions.

Assisted revenue

Provides insight into the revenue generated from bookings or purchases influenced by an SMS campaign, even if completed through different channels.

Total segments

Informs segmentation strategy by showing the number of segment groups targeted in the campaign, helping you assess the depth and breadth of your reach.

Total clicks

Indicates engagement with SMS content by revealing the number of clicks on embedded links, helping you to better analyze which messages resonate best with your target audience.

Total delivered

Measures the reach of an SMS campaign by tallying messages successfully received, helping to gauge overall marketing effectiveness.

Total sent

Provides an overview of SMS campaign volume, letting you see the relationship between quantity and campaign success.

Program analytics

Dotdigital’s program analytics tools offer several benefits to travel marketers, especially by helping you improve your marketing automation programs. Key benefits include:

Data-driven decisions

Program analytics provide a comprehensive and data-driven overview of your marketing automation programs, helping you to make informed decisions about marketing strategies and tactics.

Visual representation of performance

The visual representation of the different nodes in your marketing automation workflow helps you to gain a deeper understanding of your programs and quickly identify areas that need improvement.

Real-time monitoring

Dotdigital’s program analytics tools help you to monitor the performance of your marketing automation programs in real-time, helping you to quickly adapt to changing trends and make necessary adjustments.

Customizable views

The detailed view feature lets you choose between different chart views (trend and cumulative) to get a granular analysis of key program metrics, providing insights tailored to your specific needs.

Increased automation effectiveness

By evaluating the performance of start nodes, decision nodes, and action nodes, you can better understand customer interactions and improve your marketing automation programs to increase effectiveness.

Better targeting

Program analytics tools can help you identify the success of different segments and decision paths in your automation workflows. This helps you to refine your targeting strategies and drive better results.

Simplify your marketing

The ability to analyze the detailed data and insights provided by program analytics tools helps you to remove inefficiencies and allocate resources more effectively. 

Improved ROI

By providing in-depth data and insights on marketing automation programs’ performance, program analytics tools can help you improve your campaigns to increase ROI. Through continuous improvement, marketers can generate better results and higher revenue, ultimately improving the overall ROI of their marketing efforts.

Advanced revenue attribution

Advanced revenue attribution is a method used to calculate the revenue generated by email and SMS marketing campaigns, based on clicks that lead to a purchase within a specified conversion window. Unlike direct tracking, which attributes revenue to clicks within a single window, advanced revenue attribution provides a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of how a campaign may have influenced the customer’s purchasing decision.

The benefits of using advanced revenue attribution include:

Better understanding of campaign value

By tracing revenue to specific email and SMS campaigns, you can better assess the true influence of your marketing efforts on customers’ purchases, even if the purchase occurs outside the one-hour window of direct tracking.

A holistic view of the customer journey

Advanced revenue attribution offers a more complete picture of how different touchpoints contribute to your customer’s decision-making process, helping you to make improvements to your campaigns for higher engagement and conversion rates.

Better resource allocation

Visibility into campaign performance through revenue attribution helps you to allocate budget and resources more effectively, focusing on campaigns that deliver the most significant ROI.

Getting more from your marketing channels

You can analyze the performance of email and SMS campaigns side by side, determining which channel is more effective at driving revenue and adjusting your marketing strategies accordingly.

Improved targeting and segmentation

By understanding which campaigns generate higher revenue, you can refine your targeting and segmentation strategies to engage the right audience with relevant and persuasive messaging, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Long-term relationship building

Advanced revenue attribution can reveal patterns in customers’ behavior over extended periods, helping you identify important touchpoints for nurturing long-term relationships and customer loyalty.

AI marketing

Designing a successful marketing campaign is far from easy but using artificial intelligence (AI) in your day-to-day marketing will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Benefits of using AI

1. Perfect personalization

AI helps you to offer highly tailored experiences to your customers. By analyzing large amounts of customer data, AI can identify patterns and preferences that are important for the creation of personalized marketing campaigns. As a result, your customers are more likely to be engaged and satisfied with their overall experience.

2. Data-driven decision making

AI-driven analytics provides you with actionable insights and data that help you make informed decisions. Early users of AI can use tools that analyze customer behavior, identify trends, and provide valuable recommendations. This makes sure that your marketing resources are optimally allocated and drives higher ROI.

3. Time and cost efficiency

AI early helps to speed up and automate your routine tasks. As AI can process a lot of data quickly, it saves time, increases productivity, and greatly reduces human errors. This frees up your time to focus on higher-value strategic and creative tasks.

4. Real-time optimization

AI provides real-time performance tracking and ideas to better your marketing campaigns. By continually monitoring and adjusting, you can increase your outreach methods, ultimately enhancing customer engagement, conversions, and revenue.

5. Competitive edge

Marketers who use AI in the travel marketing sector will stay ahead of the competition by using technologies that many competitors may not even be aware of. This provides a unique opportunity to gain market share and establish a brand reputation as a forward-thinking business.

What Dotdigital can do

Generative AI content creation

• The subject line assistant helps create your subject lines by analyzing past engagement rates and generating inspiring suggestions for your next travel campaign

• The email campaign assistant not only offers alternative subject lines but also provides valuable feedback to refine your content. Get insights on tone evaluation and creative suggestions for your upcoming email campaigns

• Grammar and spell check assistant helps eliminate time-consuming manual proofreading by using WinstonAI’s grammar check for emails, SMS, landing pages, and forms

• One-click email to SMS generator saves time by repurposing valuable email content into SMS messages for subscribers who prefer text messages. WinstonAI achieves this with just one click

AI-driven insights and analytics

• Predictive analytics helps you anticipate your customers’ behavior and adapt your marketing strategies accordingly, ensuring continuous engagement throughout their journey

• Develop a deeper understanding of your customer base by integrating engagement scores with RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) ratings to create distinct personas

• Engage deeply with individual customer profiles using a single customer view and generate segments with similar traits to your ideal customers

AI marketing campaign

• Increase your outreach potential and check your messages land at just the right moment

• Increase engagement levels by using AI-driven send time optimization (STO) to deliver emails at the most opportune moment for the recipients.

• Improve campaign performance and sender reputation by employing top-quality data that WinstonAI continuously monitors and evaluates.

• Our data watchdog acts as a vigilant guardian of your sender reputation by safeguarding your delivery rates and thoroughly analyzing incoming email addresses.

• Filter out activity from security tools or bots that can skew marketing results, providing you with a more accurate assessment of your campaigns’ performance.

Integrations and data management

From your booking systems and CRM to ticketing and customer service software, tech stacks for travel brands are growingg. The only solution is to have a customer experience and data platform that connects and unifies all your systems into a single source of truth. This will help you provide seamless and personalized customer experiences, improve operations, and support relevant and timely marketing activity.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platforms (CDP)

CRM systems help you manage and analyze interactions with potential and existing customers. This helps to maintain and improve customer retention, satisfaction, and revenue generation. Integrating your CRM and marketing channel providers helps you to have all the data you need to provide data-driven marketing campaigns. 

Booking and reservation management

Integrations with booking platforms and reservation systems are important for managing traveler information, letting you personalize offers and communications based on booking history and preferences.

Ticketing and customer service systems

Ticketing systems are vital for travel brands as they help manage customer support inquiries, leading to better customer experiences. Integrating these into your marketing platform helps with cross-team collaboration, timely communication, and improves customer retention as every interaction is accessible for marketers and customer service teams alike. 

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs play a significant role in retaining customers and enhancing brand loyalty for travel brands. Integrating these systems into your marketing platform helps you tailor rewards and offers to customers based on their preferences, purchase history, loyalty points, and other relevant data. Personalized rewards lead to higher customer satisfaction and engagement, strengthening brand loyalty.

Review platforms

Integrations with review platforms such as TripAdvisor, Feefo, and Trustpilot help you to monitor customer feedback, identify areas for improvement, and showcase highlighted reviews to increase credibility and trust.

Key takeaways

Travel businesses need to understand the different types of marketing channels and tactics available to them to effectively promote their products, services, and experiences. By using fresh strategies, personalized promotions, and data-driven insights, travel businesses can stand out from the competition, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.

The travel industry is constantly changing, and you need to keep up with the latest trends and technologies to succeed in the highly competitive market. With the right marketing strategy in place, travel businesses can take advantage of the many opportunities available in the industry.

In this blog, we’ll walk through practical ways to improve your ecommerce email marketing, from the types of campaigns you should be using to how you can make them more effective.

What is ecommerce email marketing?

Ecommerce email marketing is the use of email to communicate with customers and promote an online store. It’s used to send messages at different stages of the customer journey, from welcoming new subscribers to encouraging repeat purchases.

For ecommerce brands, that means you can:

• Recover lost revenue from abandoned carts
• Turn first-time buyers into repeat customers
• Stay top of mind between purchases
• Personalize every interaction based on real data

Ecommerce email marketing typically includes two main types of messages:

Transactional emails

These are triggered by a customer’s action on your website. Examples include order confirmations, shipping updates, and password resets. They provide essential information related to a purchase or account activity.

Promotional emails

These are sent to drive engagement and sales. They can include product launches, offers, newsletters, and personalized recommendations, and are often sent to both customers and prospects.

Why email marketing matters in ecommerce

Email gives you something most other channels don’t and that is direct access to your audience. With email marketing, you’re not relying on algorithms or rising ad costs. You’re building a channel you own, where you can speak to customers one-to-one.

It supports the entire customer journey too. From the moment someone signs up to your list, you can guide them through discovery, purchase, and beyond. Whether it’s recovering an abandoned cart, recommending the right product, or re-engaging a lapsed customer, email helps you stay relevant at every stage.

It also connects your wider marketing efforts. Traffic from paid ads, social, or organic search doesn’t convert in isolation. Email helps you capture that interest, nurture it, and turn it into long-term value.

In ecommerce, where competition is high and attention is limited, that consistency matters. Email keeps your brand visible, builds familiarity, and gives customers a reason to come back.

Benefits of email marketing for ecommerce

When done well, email marketing can become one of your highest-performing channels.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Higher conversions – targeted emails reach people when they’re most likely to buy
• Stronger customer loyalty – consistent, relevant communication builds trust over time
• Better use of your data – every click, browse, and purchase helps you refine your targeting
• Cost-effective growth – you’re not paying for every interaction like you would with ads
• Scalable personalization – you can tailor messages to thousands of customers without extra manual effort

Types of email marketing campaigns ecommerce brands use

Ecommerce email marketing typically includes a mix of automated journeys and one-off campaigns. Together, they support the full customer lifecycle.

Key campaign types include:

• Welcome emails – introduce your brand and set expectations for new subscribers
• Abandoned cart emails – remind customers to complete their purchase
• Browse abandonment emails – re-engage visitors who viewed products but didn’t add to cart
• Promotional campaigns – share sales, product launches, and seasonal offers
• Post-purchase emails – confirm orders, recommend products, and encourage repeat purchases
• Re-engagement emails – win back inactive subscribers
• Loyalty and VIP emails – reward your most valuable customers

How to create high-performing ecommerce email campaigns

The best ecommerce emails feel relevant. That comes down to how well you use your data. When you understand what your customers are browsing, buying, and engaging with, you can send emails that actually make sense to them.

As you plan your campaigns, focus on some core areas that make the biggest difference:

1. Personalized product recommendations

Show people products they’re actually likely to care about. Use past purchases, browsing behavior, and preferences to guide what you include. This could be similar items, restocks, or products that complement something they’ve already bought.

If you’re using AI, it can help predict what someone might want next, so your emails feel less like marketing and more like a helpful nudge.

2. Exclusive deals

Create a sense of urgency by including exclusive deals in your email marketing campaigns, such as for VIP customers vs. new subscribers who haven’t purchased yet, to nurture them in a relevant way.

3. The power of storytelling

Whether it’s the journey of a product from idea to creation or customer success stories, storytelling adds a human touch, making your emails more engaging and memorable.

How to build loyalty with email marketing

Loyalty programs and personalized journeys take center stage in nurturing customer loyalty. The strategic use of emails to communicate exclusive benefits and perks, encourage customers to remain devoted to your brand, and deliver key messages at the right time for each subscriber is critical to improving your results.

1. Loyalty programs

Implement a customer loyalty program to reward repeat purchases. Use email marketing campaigns to communicate exclusive benefits, discounts, or early access to new products, incentivizing customers to remain loyal.

Every now and then, remind customers of their loyalty program status and highlight the rewards they can unlock with their continued engagement.

2. Surprise and delight with unexpected rewards

Go beyond the expected loyalty program benefits by occasionally surprising your customers with unexpected rewards. It could be an exclusive discount, early access to a sale, or a personalized thank-you gift. These unexpected gestures not only nurture loyalty but also create delightful moments that customers will remember and appreciate.

3. Personalized email journeys

Map out personalized customer journeys based on their interactions with your brand. Segment your audience to deliver targeted content, ensuring each customer receives messages aligned with their unique preferences and behaviors.

How to improve the customer experience with email

To create a seamless and memorable customer journey, consider employing the following tactics:

1. Interactive content and product showcases

Engage customers with interactive content such as quizzes, polls, or product showcases. Showcase new arrivals, bestsellers, or collections to provide a visually appealing and immersive shopping experience.

Use engaging visuals and compelling copy to entice customers to explore your brand further.

2. User-generated content and testimonials

Include user-generated content(UGC) and customer testimonials in your emails. Reviews and photos that are authentic create a sense of community, instilling confidence in potential customers and reinforcing loyalty among existing ones.

How to optimize your ecommerce email strategy

Optimization is something you build into your campaign process over time, from how your emails display on different devices to how you learn from each campaign you send.

Small improvements, made consistently, are what lead to better performance.

Here are a few areas to focus on:

1. Mobile optimization

Many people check emails on their phone, so your emails need to work well on smaller screens. Make sure your layouts are easy to read, buttons are easy to tap, and images load properly. What looks good on desktop should still feel smooth and usable on mobile.

It’s also worth testing your emails across different devices before sending, so you know the experience is consistent.

2. Email accessibility

Make sure that your emails are accessible to individuals with temporary, situational, and permanent disabilities. You can:

• Use clear, readable fonts
• Provide alt text for images
• Code for screen readers
• Structure your content logically. 

A more inclusive design not only broadens your audience reach but also aligns with ethical and user-friendly practices.

3. Strategic A/B testing

Try A/B testing on different elements of your email campaigns, including subject lines, visuals, content, and calls to action. Analyze the results to identify the most effective strategies for driving engagement and sales.

Key takeaways for your email marketing strategy

Email marketing works best when it feels relevant, timely, and useful to the person receiving it. When you combine the right campaigns with thoughtful personalization, you can drive sales while also building stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.

Focus on delivering value, meeting customer expectations, and improving over time, and you’ll create experiences that keep people coming back.