Dotdigital Group plc Acquires Influencer, Affiliate and Referral Marketing Platform Social Snowball for USD $35m

• Dotdigital becomes the first customer experience and data platform to acquire and invest in an influencer and affiliate marketing platform, helping brands diversify acquisition channels and drive word of mouth growth at scale

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dotdigital Group plc (AIM: DOTD), the leading SaaS provider of customer experience and data platforms (CXDP), has acquired Social Snowball Holdings, Inc., a US-based influencer, affiliate, and referral marketing platform for e-commerce brands, for $35 million USD.

The investment brings together two fast growing technologies that until now have been distinct categories within the martech landscape. It will see influencer marketing treated as an integral part of Dotdigital’s product stack, enabling marketers to activate the power of word-of-mouth marketing, using their own customer data.

Addressing today’s biggest marketing challenges

With tracking on traditional paid channels increasingly limited, especially after iOS privacy updates, and paid media costs continuing to rise, many brands are shifting to more data-driven and cost-effective customer acquisition strategies. At the same time, Gen Z, who are expected to become the largest and most influential consumer segment by 2030 (Bank of America), are demanding more authentic, values-aligned engagement on the platforms they use most, and from the voices they trust: creators, peers, and online communities.

By uniting customer experience, data, and creator marketing, Dotdigital can empower brands to reach key audiences with trusted content and incentives. This helps diversify the marketing mix and transform influencer and affiliate partnerships into a scalable, performance-driven growth engine, powered by first-party data.

“The creator economy isn’t just about awareness anymore, it’s about revenue,” said Milan Patel, CEO of Dotdigital.

“Social Snowball brings an entirely new and highly complementary performance channel into our product stack, one that is fully aligned with how smart marketers want to grow - through measurable ROI, cultural authenticity, and direct connections to customer data. It enhances our market position as a one-stop-shop for seamless, cross-channel marketing automation and we’re thrilled to welcome Social Snowball into the Dotdigital family.”

Cultural and technological alignment to drive growth

Founded in 2020, Social Snowball empowers brands to activate prospects, customers, and creators as authentic advocates, offering incentives and rewards to promote products through trusted word-of-mouth, without requiring significant upfront investment. With sophisticated attribution and analytics built into the platform from day one, Social Snowball gives marketers full visibility into revenue generated, not just clicks or impressions.

With over 1,500 subscription-based Shopify customers including G Fuel, Brez, and True Classic, Social Snowball’s integration will accelerate Dotdigital’s reach in the fast-growing Shopify merchant ecosystem, aligning with its total addressable market expansion and product-led growth strategy.

Noah Tucker, Founder and CEO Social Snowball, commented: “We are super excited to be joining forces with Dotdigital. Together we'll enable brands to build influencer marketing programs at a scale that was never before possible, helping them turn influencer and creator partnerships into a powerful customer acquisition channel. From the start it was clear Dotdigital was the perfect fit for our team, our culture and our customers and I look forward to what the future holds.”

This news follows Dotdigital’s acquisition of e-commerce personalization platform Fresh Relevance in 2023.

About Social Snowball

Founded in 2020 by Noah Tucker, Social Snowball is an influencer management platform designed to help e-commerce businesses accelerate growth by turning prospects, customers, influencers and affiliates into brand advocates who promote products in exchange for commission or rewards. In doing so, brands can create a highly effective marketing channel that expands reach, builds trust through third-party advocacy, and drives measurable results without significant upfront investment.

Social Snowball automates the onboarding, tracking and payout processes for brand advocates, enabling scalable, performance-driven affiliate marketing programmes that drive new customer acquisition and revenue, all from a single control center. A key competitive advantage of Social Snowball is being built from the ground up with analytics at its core, enabling brands to measure and track when influencer, affiliate and referral activity converts to revenue, allowing clear ROI visibility beyond just clicks and views.

About Dotdigital

Dotdigital Group plc (AIM: DOTD) is a leading provider of cross-channel marketing automation technology to marketing professionals. Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform (CXDP) combines the power of automation and AI to help businesses deliver hyper-relevant customer experiences at scale. With Dotdigital, marketing teams can unify and enrich their customer data, identify valuable customer segments, and deliver personalized cross-channel customer journeys that result in engagements, conversions, and loyalty.

Founded in 1999, Dotdigital is headquartered in London with offices in Manchester, Southampton, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Cape Town. Dotdigital's solutions empower over 4,000 brands across 150 countries.
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