Prima and DotDigital
Integration Agency & Consultants
Marketing campaigns lose their edge when the data behind them is stale. When customer segments are built on snapshots rather than live order history from Prima, engagement drops and the link between spend and revenue weakens. This usually becomes painful when marketing tries to move beyond general broadcasts to granular targeting based on actual purchase behaviour.
We integrate Prima and DotDigital to ensure customer records and transactional data stay in step. By treating Prima as the system of record for order history and syncing that data to DotDigital, teams can build segments that reflect true customer value and purchase frequency. The focus is on data fidelity, ensuring that marketing activity is grounded in accurate, transactional truth from the ERP.
Audit and diagnostic of system inefficiencies
Cogent2 will connect your Prima and DotDigital integration swiftly, ensuring your ERP and ESP platforms work together efficiently. Our consulting services are invaluable, with our system audit uncovering inefficiencies between Prima, DotDigital, ERP, and ESP systems. This enables our consultants and your team to take decisive action, helping your technology ecosystem run smoothly. By addressing integration gaps and workflow issues, we support you in delivering a great customer experience and maximising the value of your Prima and DotDigital investments.
Solution Design
We treat Prima as the system of record for customer and order data, synchronising it to DotDigital to drive segmentation and campaign execution. Our design prioritises data fidelity for marketing ROI, typically synchronising transactional data on a defined schedule to ensure DotDigital segments reflect accurate purchase history without compromising ERP stability. We make a conscious trade-off by favouring data consistency over immediate updates for complex order attributes, which simplifies reconciliation but requires marketing to work from refreshed data intervals. This ensures that when a campaign is sent, the targeting is grounded in verified financial records. The operating model allows marketing teams to trust their segments while finance maintains Prima as the authoritative source for customer value and sales attribution.
Synchronising order history and contact records
This integration establishes Prima as the system of record for customer identities and order history. Contact details and purchase behaviour flow to DotDigital to maintain accurate segments and trigger automated workflows. We prioritise data fidelity by validating records during the transfer, ensuring engagement data is captured without creating duplicate contact records. Monitoring is embedded at each sync point to detect failed exports or schema mismatches early. This ensures marketing execution is grounded in ERP transactional truth, allowing for granular targeting and direct sales attribution.
Orchestrating workflows via secure IPaaS middleware
Using an IPaaS platform with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations, Prima and DotDigital integrations are delivered securely and efficiently. Connecting ERP and ESP systems, IPaaS simplifies data flow between Prima, DotDigital, ERP, and ESP, reducing manual effort and risk. This approach ensures robust compliance, data protection, and reliability, making integration projects faster and safer for businesses needing Prima and DotDigital connectivity.
Surfacing record level sync exceptions
Standard dashboards confirm that a sync attempt occurred, but they rarely validate the accuracy of the data. Hidden issues, such as mismatched contact IDs or orders that fail to associate with a customer record, compound over time and erode campaign ROI. Our platform surfaces these operational exceptions at the record level. By monitoring the specific flow between Prima and DotDigital, we identify synchronisation delays or validation errors before they impact marketing automation. This granular visibility ensures your segmentation remains built on reliable data.
Managing the bridge between data systems
Handover focuses on how your marketing and operations teams manage the data bridge between Prima and DotDigital. We equip your eCommerce and marketing teams to own the daily health of contact synchronisation and campaign attribution. Training covers where customer records and order histories live, how to interpret sync alerts, and who is responsible for resolving data exceptions. We provide operational documentation designed for the people running your business, not for an IT department. This ensures your team knows exactly what to check weekly to confirm that campaign segments accurately reflect the transactional reality stored in your systems. Documentation remains a live reference for maintaining data fidelity long after launch.
Monitoring sync health and data mapping
Post-launch, we provide ongoing monitoring to ensure data flow between Prima and DotDigital remains consistent. We track sync delays and failure logs that could degrade segmentation accuracy or marketing attribution. When a synchronisation error occurs, we handle the resolution, maintaining the health of the integration layer so internal teams can focus on campaign strategy. Regular reviews identify where data mapping needs to evolve alongside your Prima configuration, ensuring the bridge between transactional records and marketing execution remains stable.
Common failures
Incomplete customer record synchronisation
Operational impact: Marketing teams build segments in DotDigital using incomplete data from Prima. For example, a campaign targeting 'active trade accounts' might include contacts from accounts on credit hold because the parent company status was not synced. This leads to mis-segmented campaigns, irrelevant communications, and a failure to track marketing effectiveness against actual sales.
Prevention / Action: Define Prima as the source-of-truth for all customer and contact data, including parent company relationships and critical account status fields. The integration logic must ensure a contact record is always synced with its associated company record and key identifiers. Implement scheduled reconciliations to verify data integrity and handle exceptions for contacts that fail to link correctly in DotDigital.
Delayed order data for marketing automation
Operational impact: Post-purchase automations in DotDigital are triggered with a delay or based on incomplete order information. This corrupts RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) models used for segmentation, meaning 'best customer' segments become inaccurate. It also makes ROI attribution against Prima's sales order data impossible for the finance and marketing teams.
Prevention / Action: Ensure the integration captures the complete sales order payload from Prima as soon as it reaches a defined 'complete' or 'invoiced' status. The process must be designed to queue and retry any failed order syncs to DotDigital. A daily reconciliation process should cross-reference Prima sales orders against DotDigital's Insight data to identify and repair discrepancies.
Creation of duplicate contact records
Operational impact: A single business contact exists as multiple records in DotDigital; one from an initial website enquiry and another from a formal account created in Prima. This splits their engagement history, preventing a true picture of their activity and leading to conflicting messages. This also inflates contact list sizes, increasing DotDigital subscription costs, and frustrates CX teams who see a fragmented customer history.
Prevention / Action: The integration logic must include a robust de-duplication step before creating any new contact in DotDigital, typically using the email address as a unique key. If a match is found, the integration should enrich the existing DotDigital contact record with new information from Prima, rather than creating a duplicate. This centralises the customer's data into a single record.
Mismatched contact preferences and suppressions
Operational impact: A contact who unsubscribes via a DotDigital email is not marked as opted-out in Prima's contact record. The sales team, seeing the contact as active in their ERP, may then manually re-add them to a marketing list during a subsequent data upload. This risks breaching compliance regulations and damages brand reputation by emailing users who have explicitly opted out.
Prevention / Action: Establish a clear bi-directional synchronisation for marketing preferences, with DotDigital acting as the source of truth for email opt-out status. The integration must be configured to check and apply opt-out status changes from DotDigital back to the corresponding contact record in Prima on a frequent, scheduled basis. This prevents unsubscribed contacts from being accidentally re-enrolled into campaigns.
Frequently asked questions
Which system is the source of truth for customer information?
Prima is treated as the definitive source of truth for all core customer records and their associated transactional history. DotDigital holds a synchronised copy of this data for marketing purposes, but any primary updates, such as a change in company name or contact details, should be made in Prima. This ensures all teams are working from the same foundational data and prevents inconsistencies.
How do we ensure our DotDigital segments are based on actual sales history?
The integration synchronises Sales Order and customer data from Prima to DotDigital, typically on a defined schedule. This allows your marketing team to build valuable segments based on real purchase behaviour, such as 'customers who bought product X in the last 90 days'. Without this, you risk sending irrelevant offers and cannot accurately segment based on customer lifetime value.
If a contact unsubscribes in DotDigital, is our main Prima database updated?
This is a critical function for compliance that must be configured correctly, as it often fails in standard setups. The integration should be configured to pass marketing consent changes, like an 'opt-out', from DotDigital back to the master customer record in Prima. If this fails, your sales team might inadvertently contact someone who has unsubscribed, creating a poor customer experience and a compliance risk.
Can I prove the ROI of a specific DotDigital campaign?
Yes, connecting marketing activity to financial outcomes is a core goal of this integration. By linking campaign engagement data from DotDigital back to the customer record, we can analyse which touchpoints influenced the creation of new Sales Orders in Prima. This provides the data needed to attribute revenue directly to marketing campaigns and justify future spend.
Why might some of our contacts from Prima not appear in DotDigital?
A common configuration issue occurs when the integration is set to only synchronise contact records that are explicitly linked to a 'Company' record in Prima. This means any contacts that exist independently, without being assigned to a parent company account, will not be sent to DotDigital. This can lead to significant gaps in your marketing audience if not identified and resolved.