Mandatory Requirements

To ensure verified integrations perform great, are robust and reliable for our mutual customers, we require the following criteria to be met by any integration that wishes to be verified:

To acquire and store API credentials securely

Your integration must ensure that the Dotdigital API user credentials are captured and stored securely, which includes at least doing the following:

• Ensuring the password field in any UI does not reveal the whole of the entered password.
• Ensure entered credentials are stored encrypted at rest in a secure non public facing data store.

Automatically detect the correct Dotdigital region

Dotdigital has 3 region specific instances , so it is important that any integration automatically determines which regional domain it needs to use when making API calls for a mutual customer. To do this we recommend the following approach.

In your integration setup flow when a user enters their API credentials, you should call the Get account information call to both determine if the credentials entered are valid and if so the regional endpoint you should use for future API calls for this account. When calling the Get account information you should use the region 1 endpoint (r1-api.dotdigital.com), and if the call succeeds you can determine the correct regional endpoint to use by reading the returned value ApiEndpoint e.g. https://r1-api.dotdigital.com/

Use tiered rate limiting

To ensure your integration can utilize the best possible API call rates we require that your integration fully supports our tiered call rate limiting including the recommended back off behavior should call rates be exceeded.

Accommodate our error handling

Please ensure the integration understands our Error handling strategy for the API calls it is making, so that it can detect and handle errors gracefully, and provide any necessary information back to our mutual customer to resolve the problem.

Use our Unified Contacts API

If syncing contact data and or channel subscription statuses we expect verified integrations to take advantage of our Unified contacts API. This API works with all identifier types and channels, and is more efficient and simpler to utilize.

Implemented integration installation tracking

So that we can track and show mutual customer what integrations are enabled on their account in Dotdigital we require all verified integrations to pass an installation tracking token as detailed here.

Provided quality documentation for the integration

We require all verified integrations to be fully documented so that mutual customers can easily understand the functionality and how to configure the integration. We would expect the following to be covered:

• An comprehensive overview of the functionality and features the integration provides.
• Clear guidance on how to setup the integration, ideally with screen shots.
• Clear guidance on any options or settings the integration has.
• A reference guide to any data or fields created within Dotdigital by the integration.
  • Any marketing preferences being mapped across and how are these being managed in the integration.
  • This should include contact field names.
  • What data is synced in what direction.
  • Insight data collections schema if used.

Comply with our brand guidelines

Please ensure that whenever referring to Dotdigital that you comply with our brand guidelines and use the correct logo .

Desirable features

The following features and concepts are highly encouraged for adoption by our partners where applicable, however are not mandatory:

Support for Easy Editor Extensions

We believe making any integrations as simple as possible to quickly realize the potential and opportunities they provide is key to their success. Many integrations do a great job of bringing contact data and insight data into Dotdigital, however do little to help Dotdigital users use it and realize the benefits.

We would encourage partners creating integrations to consider the use cases for the data they are adding to Dotdigital and using our EasyEditor Extensions create drag and dropable content blocks that can reduce the time to value for our mutual customers.

Program templates

Dotdigital's program builder offers a powerful way to create automations to create personalized and engaging communication and marketing strategies. If you create program templates that provide great examples of how to get value from your integration within Dotdigital please reach out to your assigned partner engineer to discuss their inclusion in our platform templates.

Campaign templates

Dotdigital offers a global set of campaign templates as well as account specific templates to create personalized and engaging communication and marketing campaigns. If you create campaign templates that provide great examples of how to get value from your integration within Dotdigital please reach out to your assigned partner engineer to discuss their inclusion in our global templates, or use our Create template API to create examples in our mutual users accounts automatically. This is a great option when the content is specific to that user.