After the thrill of Black Friday and Cyber Monday there’s yet one more occasion within the calendar that all of us sit up for, Hackweek.
Our engineering groups spend most of their time ensuring the software program we construct is performant, scalable, and bug free. Hackweek is totally different. Our purpose is to construct quick, skip the testing, and anything which will gradual us down.
This helps us to discover new and rising applied sciences or concepts that we expect might be nice options sooner or later. The concepts might be wild like producing Dotdigital applications from AI utilizing GPT4 and RAG strategies and many them flip into consumer going through options like supercharging our segmentation engine by surfacing RFM knowledge.
Within the lead as much as Hackweek, everyone seems to be invited to submit concepts and strategies, then arrange into groups to implement them. What follows is every week of speedy prototyping and implementation with an opportunity to flex some artistic muscle by making a video demonstrating the thought. There’s an awards ceremony the place the concepts are showcased and prizes on supply for a number of classes together with the a lot coveted Finest Video and Finest Crew Identify.
Most needed
Hack identify: Ship frequency capping
Crew identify: Communication Cappers
Probably the most needed hack does precisely what it says on the tin: it caps the variety of advertising emails a contact can obtain in a specified time period. It is a hotly requested function from each Dotdigital prospects and our in-house Deliverability consultants; sending too many advertising emails to contacts could cause inbox exhaustion and decrease engagement, risking emails touchdown within the spam folder in the event that they’re perceived as undesirable by mailbox suppliers attributable to lack of engagement.
The hack additionally included some considerate touches, comparable to surfacing which campaigns had been skipped for a recipient, and never making use of the cap to transactional emails (issues like receipts, password reset emails and so forth).
Finest video
Hack identify: AI picture generator
Crew identify: Swat Kats
This hack was all about enabling Dotdigital customers to rapidly create custom-made AI-generated photographs to make use of of their digital advertising campaigns. Use prompts to create a collection of photographs, refine your immediate, and save your favorites in your picture library to be used in emails, MMS messages, and extra. The video created by the staff was slick and punchy, defined and demoed the function actually clearly, and was aptly created utilizing AI – plus it featured an lovely hamster pilot which actually received over the judges.
Most progressive
Hack identify: Liquid Gold
Crew identify: Smartinis
Dotdigital has extremely highly effective personalization options for any entrepreneurs accustomed to Liquid scripting. This hack allowed customers to create complicated personalization guidelines utilizing a easy UI to create personalization logic guidelines based mostly on values in knowledge fields. It then robotically generates the Liquid syntax, making subtle personalization out there to all entrepreneurs no matter technical potential.
CPTO particular award
Hack identify: Unicode, the place àrt thoú?
Crew identify: Unicode Unravelers
One of many (enjoyable?) challenges of SMS advertising is determining be impactful with messaging whereas additionally being very temporary. Unicode characters might be actually difficult – they will sneak in once you least count on it (taking a look at you, copying and pasting from a Phrase doc) and instantly a single phase message has a number of components.
This extremely considerate hack actually caught the eye of the judges and our CPTO, Steve Shaw. The staff created a easy however gorgeous UI enhancement that highlights unicode in-line within the messages, in addition to just a little button that with a single click on replaces all unicode characters with smaller (cheaper) customary characters.
They demonstrated how this might be added not only for Dotdigital prospects within the modifying instruments, but in addition in inside platform areas utilized by our Assist and Cellular Messaging Operations groups to assist them troubleshoot. They usually threw in an inside logging enhancement in addition – what legends.
Individuals’s selection: Finest hack 2024 (and greatest staff identify)
Hack identify: Sneak Peak
Crew identify: Covert preheader collective
These two awards had been voted on by all of the employees at Dotdigital – and the resounding winner of each Finest Hack and bragging rights for Finest Crew Identify went to the Covert Preheader Collective. Preheader textual content in emails is a vital hook to get your contacts opening, clicking, and fascinating together with your model. This hack added a easy pre-header textual content editor to our marketing campaign designer UI. The response from everybody: how can we NOT have already got this?
If engaged on a platform that processes thousands and thousands of items of knowledge every single day for among the world’s largest corporations sounds attention-grabbing to you, we’re hiring. Try our careers web page for extra data. We’re hiring for a number of roles and a number of disciplines too.
