How to Link Dotdigital and Distil

Dotdigital provides class-leading marketing automation and customer engagement solutions, along with a range of tools and features to help businesses effectively manage their marketing campaigns, connect with customers, and drive engagement. Pairing this execution capability with Distil's advanced Customer Data Platform and data enrichment features delivers better return on investment (ROI) due to the enhanced understanding and targeting of customers.

You can pull your Dotdigital Lists into Distil, capture a range of activities via Distil Tracking, target specific groups of Customers with our powerful Segmentation capability, and then push actionable insights back out into Dotdigital via Destinations. You can also combine Dotdigital's excellent email templates with Tracking IDs, and Customer, Product, Content and Order data from Distil to create marketing campaigns that are automatically tracked within Distil.

Step-by-Step Guide

We've created a series of step-by-step guides to get you up and running in no time:

1. Read the information below on Key Distil Concepts, Key Dotdigital Concepts - a skim will do for now as we'll come back to these topics later.
2. Create and test a new connection between Distil and Dotdigital.
3. Pull Customer data from Dotdigital into Distil.
4. Push the Customer data in your Segment into Dotdigital, including creating a Customer Segment.

Key Dotdigital Concepts

Where Distil has Customers, the equivalent concept in Dotdigital is Contacts. Dotdigital organises collections of Contacts into Lists.

When you pull Customer data from Dotdigital, Distil presents the Lists you have created in Dotdigital as Data Sources in the Settings > Integrations view. When you push Customer data into Dotdigital, you can choose whether to bring the data in as Customer Data or Insight Data.

Distil can also push Content, Product and Order data into Dotdigital. You can use this data within Dotdigital to populate email templates and create campaigns.

Also, it's important to note that both Distil and Dotdigital use the concept and term Segment. While the Segment concept is similar in both platforms, Distil only pulls Customer data from Lists in Dotdigital. Distil does not push or pull Customer data from Segments in Dotdigital. Whenever we refer to Segments, we mean Distil Segments (and not Dotdigital Segments).

Key Distil Concepts

Before you get started we recommend getting familiar with some key Distil concepts:

• Customer Tracking ID:
  • Each Customer in Distil (including those brought in from Dotdigital) is assigned a unique ID, this is explained in our article on Customers in Distil.
  • This Tracking ID is key to consolidating the Customer's activity across all of your marketing campaigns and platforms.
  • We recommend pushing this ID into Dotdigital and pairing it with our URL Identification Token to easily and accurately track marketing attribution.
• URL Identification Token:
  • Deploying Distil's URL Identification Token within your Dotdigital activities allows you to accurately track Customer activity without a login event.
  • The URL Identification Token uses the Customer Tracking ID covered in the section above.
• GDPR and Marketing Consent Consolidation
  • While you can manage GDPR and marketing consent within Dotdigital, this can be a complex process with many data sources...
  • Read our article on GDPR and Marketing Consent Consolidation, and make an informed decision about how to manage your obligations.

Next Step

Create a Connection to Dotdigital