Fulfil and DotDigital
Integration Agency & Consultants
Marketing campaigns often lose velocity when segments rely on stale data. This becomes painful when customer communications are out of sync with their actual purchase history in Fulfil. As volume increases, the gap between operational truth and marketing execution creates friction. We connect Fulfil to DotDigital to ensure customer segments and campaign triggers are powered by accurate order data, protecting your sender reputation and marketing ROI.
Audit of ERP and ESP architecture
We connect your Fulfil and DotDigital integration swiftly, ensuring your ERP and ESP platforms work together efficiently. Our consulting services are invaluable, with our system audit services providing a thorough review of your Fulfil and DotDigital integrations, ERP, and ESP set-up. This enables both our consultants and your team to take decisive action, resolving inefficiencies and supporting a tech ecosystem that runs smoothly. The result: your business delivers a consistently excellent experience to your customers.
Solution Design
Design for Fulfil and DotDigital prioritises data integrity over immediate synchronisation. Fulfil typically acts as the source of truth for customer records and purchase history, while DotDigital owns engagement status. We often sequence customer and order history first, ensuring marketing segments are built on verified operational data. A common trade-off involves synchronising order data in defined intervals; while real-time triggers offer speed, interval-based processing ensures that only orders passing fulfilment validation in Fulfil trigger post-purchase campaigns. This prevents the risk of sending marketing emails for orders that may fail initial operational checks. The operating impact is clear: Marketing runs campaigns off confirmed revenue, while Operations maintains control over the order lifecycle before data reaches the marketing platform.
Synchronising customer attributes and order history
This integration establishes Fulfil as the source of truth for customer attributes and order history, while DotDigital executes the communication layer. Customer records synchronise to ensure purchase behaviour in Fulfil correctly updates DotDigital segments. Order data flows into DotDigital to trigger transactional programmes and post-purchase sequences, using logic that ensures triggers fire when order records update. To prevent data gaps, we monitor the flow at the record level, flagging validation errors or failed profile updates before they impact your automated workflows.
Orchestration via secure integration platforms
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations enables secure, efficient integration between Fulfil (ERP) and DotDigital (ESP). This approach simplifies connecting Fulfil with other ERP systems and DotDigital with other ESP platforms, ensuring data protection and compliance. IPaaS platforms reduce manual effort, automate processes, and provide a centralised, secure environment for managing integrations, making complex connections straightforward and reliable.
Monitoring record level exceptions and gaps
Standard marketing dashboards often miss operational failures, such as order data failing to sync because of missing information at the source. We provide visibility into these gaps by monitoring the integration layer for record-level exceptions. Instead of discovering a sync failure when a campaign underperforms, the system surfaces issues such as record mismatches before they distort your reporting. This ensures that the numbers in the marketing platform match the operational reality in the ERP, allowing teams to trust their attribution and segmentation.
Operational handover for shared data boundaries
Training focuses on how internal teams manage the shared data boundary between Fulfil and DotDigital. We hand over an operating model where teams learn to identify whether a data mismatch originates in a Fulfil customer record or a marketing sync rule. Teams typically take ownership of list health and the flow of purchase triggers. Routine checks involve reviewing sync exception logs and reconciling active customer counts across both platforms. Handover documentation is purely operational, detailing how to resolve common record mismatches and how to read alerts from the integration layer. This ensures that the people running campaigns can diagnose data gaps without relying on constant technical support.
Post go-live governance and integrity checks
Post-launch, support focuses on maintaining the integrity of customer and order data as it flows from Fulfil to DotDigital. We monitor for operational exceptions that standard connectivity alerts often miss, such as failed contact record synchronisations or purchase history data that fails to trigger automated flows. Issues are handled within an agreed support model, where the priority is resolving data-level discrepancies before they lead to misaligned marketing segments or incorrect attribution. This reduces the risk of sending irrelevant content to high-value customers or missing re-engagement triggers due to stale order data. Using the Cogent platform, we surface these exceptions to ensure the marketing team makes decisions based on accurate operational facts.
Common failures
Duplicate customer records from guest checkouts.
Operational impact: Marketing teams work with fragmented customer data, leading to skewed lifetime value calculations and duplicated campaign sends. Customer service agents cannot see a unified view of a customer's order history, complicating support queries and frustrating customers who may have unsubscribed on one of their contact records.
Prevention / Action: Establish Fulfil as the definitive source of truth for customer records. The integration logic must include a robust lookup step, checking for an existing DotDigital contact by email address before creating a new one. Design a clear process for consolidating guest orders under a single master customer record in Fulfil when an account is eventually created.
Delayed order data synchronisation.
Operational impact: Key post-purchase automations in DotDigital, like welcome series or review requests, are triggered inconsistently or too late. This delay degrades the customer experience and reduces the effectiveness of campaigns designed to secure repeat purchases when the customer's enthusiasm is highest.
Prevention / Action: Configure the integration to use event-driven triggers, pushing new Sales Orders from Fulfil to DotDigital as they are created or have been paid. For high-volume environments, use a queue to buffer these events, with automated retries and alerting to ensure that transient API issues do not cause permanent data loss or extended delays.
Marketing preference and opt-out sync failure.
Operational impact: A customer unsubscribes in DotDigital, but the change is not reflected back in Fulfil's master customer record. This creates a serious compliance risk if Fulfil is used to generate other marketing lists, as the business may contact customers who have opted out. This erodes customer trust and can lead to formal complaints and brand damage.
Prevention / Action: Ensure the integration includes a bidirectional sync for marketing consent flags. Use webhooks or frequent scheduled jobs to pull updated subscription statuses from DotDigital into the customer record in Fulfil. All audience generation for any marketing channel should source its lists directly from Fulfil to ensure it uses the most current consent information.
Inaccurate data for customer segmentation.
Operational impact: The marketing team is unable to build effective segments in DotDigital based on lifetime value, product category preference, or purchase frequency. This leads to generic campaigns with lower engagement and return on ad spend, as valuable groups like 'high-spend VIPs' or 'lapsed customers' cannot be accurately identified from Fulfil data.
Prevention / Action: Before development, map the specific data fields required for marketing segmentation from Fulfil objects to DotDigital data fields. The integration may need to calculate some data, such as 'first order date' or 'lifetime spend'. Plan for this data mapping to be reviewed quarterly by operational and marketing teams to align with evolving strategy.
Frequently asked questions
Which system should be our source of truth for customer data, Fulfil or DotDigital?
For a robust operating model, Fulfil should act as the source of truth for the primary customer record. This ensures that all marketing segmentation in DotDigital is based on verified operational data, like order history and fulfilment status. Keeping Fulfil as the master record prevents discrepancies where a customer's details are updated in one system but not the other, ensuring marketing campaigns are targeted accurately.
Why are we seeing duplicate contacts in DotDigital after connecting our systems?
This commonly occurs if a consistent unique identifier is not mapped correctly between Fulfil and DotDigital, especially for guest checkouts. If a new guest order in Fulfil creates a temporary customer record without matching it to an existing DotDigital contact, a duplicate is created. This fragments the customer's history and leads to inaccurate campaign reporting and potentially sending customers the wrong messages.
Our post-purchase campaigns aren't timely. How does this integration fix that?
The integration uses operational triggers from Fulfil, such as the creation of an Item Fulfilment record, to update DotDigital in near real-time. This means 'your order has shipped' or 'review your purchase' campaigns are triggered by the actual fulfilment event, not just the initial Sales Order. This avoids the common problem where marketing messages are delayed and disconnected from the customer's real-world delivery experience.
How do we make sure a marketing opt-out in DotDigital is respected in Fulfil?
A common failure is a one-way synchronisation that doesn't pass the 'Opt-out' status from DotDigital back to the master customer record in Fulfil. A correct integration establishes a two-way sync for this specific field, ensuring that if a customer unsubscribes from a campaign, their central record is immediately updated. This prevents them from being accidentally added back into marketing lists during a subsequent data sync.
Can we trigger campaigns based on specific fulfilment events from Fulfil?
Yes, by mapping Fulfil's operational data objects to DotDigital you can create highly specific campaign triggers. For example, a campaign could be initiated when an Item Fulfilment record's status changes to 'shipped', or even if a particular SKU is part of a returns process. This ensures marketing is directly tied to the customer's live order journey, moving beyond simple 'order created' triggers.