In June, London-based Dotdigital Group plc acquired Social Snowball for $35 million to integrate dedicated influencer and affiliate marketing capabilities into the core technology stack of its customer experience platform. The acquisition combines Dotdigital’s marketing automation with Social Snowball’s creator economy tools that serve more than 1,500 Shopify brands, including G-Fuel and True Classic.

“The creator economy has become a powerful driver of engagement and measurable ROI for brands. By acquiring Social Snowball, we enable marketers to easily integrate affiliate and influencer activity alongside existing high-ROI channels like email and SMS,” explains Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital. “This gives brands the tools to harness creator-led growth within one unified platform, and ultimately drive more meaningful, revenue-generating customer relationships.”

Founded in 1999 and publicly listed on the London Stock Exchange, Dotdigital has grown from an email marketing provider into a cross-channel marketing automation platform serving more than 4,000 brands across 150 countries.

Having joined Dotdigital as an accountant in 2007, Milan progressed through various roles in finance and operations before becoming CFO at the age of 28, making him one of the youngest executives on the London Stock Exchange at the time. After serving as CFO for nearly seven years, he was appointed CEO in January 2016, a position he has held for more than nine years.

“Dotdigital is a customer experience and marketing platform. We help businesses engage with customers and automate their marcomms [marketing communications] at scale using a cross-channel approach that spans web, email, SMS, and more,” Milan explains. “Our platform empowers marketers to create personalized, relevant campaigns rooted in data, which ultimately drive better customer engagement and loyalty.”

Several key milestones have shaped Dotdigital’s growth, including its reverse acquisition onto the public markets, which Milan describes as giving the company “the momentum and accountability to grow.”

Market Challenges Driving Acquisition

The Social Snowball acquisition addresses the specific challenges marketers face. iOS privacy updates have limited tracking capabilities on traditional paid channels, while paid media costs continue to rise. Simultaneously, younger consumers, particularly Gen Z, are projected to become the largest consumer segment by 2030, according to Bank of America, and are demanding more genuine engagement on the platforms they use most frequently.

“Social media and UGC [User Generated Content] have democratised content creation, allowing individuals to build powerful personal brands, foster genuine communities, and generate new revenue streams,” Milan observes. “What excites me is the shift towards micro-communities. People are increasingly seeking personal connection, not just slick marketing.”

This shift creates both challenges and opportunities for brands. While influencer marketing has grown, Milan notes that many businesses struggle to effectively incorporate it into their broader marketing strategy or measure its impact beyond surface-level metrics, such as views and likes.

“The increasing precision with which brands can personalize engagement is incredible when automated and powered by a brand’s own information,” Milan notes. “Marketers have the tools to create truly relevant experiences for each customer, raising the bar of personalization, which ultimately leads to loyalty.”

Why Social Snowball: Capabilities and Strategic Fit

Founded in 2020 by Noah Tucker, Social Snowball was built specifically to help e-commerce businesses transform customers, prospects, and influencers into brand advocates by offering incentives and rewards for promoting products, all while providing attribution and analytics that track actual revenue generated, not just engagement metrics.

“Whilst we reviewed high-growth businesses in other categories, Social Snowball quickly stood out within the influencer and affiliate SaaS [Software as a Service] industry due to some of the unique capabilities they built, particularly when it comes to giving merchants the ability to measure the revenue that’s coming in as a result of their affiliate marketing programs,” Milan explains.

The platform’s integration with Shopify also presents a strategic advantage for Dotdigital’s growth plans.

“Social Snowball is fully integrated within the Shopify marketplace, working with over 1,500 brands in this operating space, including True Classic and G-Fuel, which helps Dotdigital expand its reach within the e-commerce space,” says Milan. “The platform empowers brands to work with influencer advocates without major upfront investment, instead using rewards and incentives. What was once a blockade for businesses to get started is now an opportunity to grow customer bases through genuine partnerships.”

Through the acquisition, Dotdigital aims to address the need to integrate creator-driven content into marketing strategies that yield tangible results.

Milan explains, “Social Snowball brings an entirely new and highly complementary performance channel into our product stack, one that aligns fully with how smart marketers want to grow: through measurable ROI, cultural relevance, and direct connections to customer information. It enhances our market position as a one-stop shop for seamless, cross-channel marketing automation across each and every platform.”

Integration Plans and Customer Benefits

“While Social Snowball remains its own brand and platform, we are bolstering the integration between the Dotdigital and Social Snowball platforms,” Milan says. “Particularly for customers who are new to influencer marketing and affiliate program management, the relevant data will flow seamlessly between our platforms and make it easy to keep valuable influencer relations warm … and encourage them to amplify their favourite brands and products across their social networks in an exchange that is mutually beneficial for brand and influencer.”

This approach challenges the traditional separated structure of marketing departments, where influencer, affiliate, and referral marketing have typically been treated as entirely separate channels from other digital marketing efforts.

“In today’s marketing space, your influencer and affiliate programs should be in as much alignment with your channels,” Milan explains. “More and more brands are changing in this space as the world of micro influencers continues to grow and create opportunities for smaller but highly engaged audiences. Bringing all these elements together is the future, not just for Dotdigital, but the wider marketing industry, including the creators.”

Success and Vision

Dotdigital has established clear metrics for evaluating the success of this $35 million investment, focusing on both immediate performance indicators and longer-term strategic objectives.

“Social Snowball is an exciting, high-growth business that is leading the pack when it comes to influencer and affiliate marketing SaaS,” Milan notes. “As an established business, Dotdigital has helped them not only to disrupt that trajectory, but to support their continued growth with scale. With all that being said, revenue and new brands signed on are among the key things we continue to look for.”

The acquisition builds on Dotdigital’s previous strategic moves, including its 2023 acquisition of e-commerce personalization platform Fresh Relevance. Together, these investments reflect Milan’s vision for Dotdigital’s direction in digital marketing.

“We want to be the one-stop shop for marketers across the globe, offering a combination of all the martech [marketing technology] they need, whether that’s customer experience management, marketing automation, e-commerce personalization, or indeed influencer marketing,” he says. “These ingredients and more give marketers the tools they need to connect with customers in a way that is truly rooted in information, whilst not losing sight of creativity and human touch, which is what often makes us fall in love with a brand in the first place.”

This balance between precision and genuine human connection represents the core of Milan’s marketing philosophy. While he celebrates the increasing capabilities of personalization technology, he also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a human element.

“Going forward, I’d like to see marketers embrace a balance: using data as a foundation for campaigns, but also trusting their intuition. Most of us are still human at the end of the day and still susceptible to the occasional impulse buy. Ultimately, the best marketing combines insight with empathy, creating memorable moments that go beyond the numbers on a spreadsheet.”

The Social Snowball acquisition represents not just a business transaction, but also a response to shifts in how consumers engage with brands and how marketers must adapt to these changing expectations.

“I believe brands and platforms alike need to support creators with better tools and genuine partnership, ensuring creators and brands can thrive in this new economy,” Milan concludes.

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