Release Notes - Archive

The default new template for the VCE email editor has been updated with some improvements:

• More responsive on all mobile clients.
• More variables, making it easy to customize.
• Examples of frequently used block variations and advanced blocks. 
• Images are marked with size requirements, so that you know easily what size of image to upload.

Custom Data Export (known in pilot form as Open Data) is a Google BigQuery plug-in that enables you to query and export all the email, web, sms and mobile app behavior and response data that you have stored in your  Emarsys account. You can create custom reports with third-party reporting solutions, or feed data to a wide range of BI tools, such as Tableau and Data Studio, without any implementation effort.

Read more:

• Custom Data Export- Overview

Our new Magento 2 plug-in automates most of the integration steps which previously required manual configuration on your part. It connects your store and automatically syncs customers, events and orders to Emarsys. Then you will be able to use your Magento data in Emarsys for creating smart contact segments, personalizing your messages, building event-based programs and automating retention marketing.

The app also automatically installs our Web Extend data collection scripts on your Magento 2 store, which will allow you to deliver personalized product recommendations both on your website and in emails or to track revenue from your campaigns.

Read more:

• Magento 2 integration manual

The Design Advisor automatically checks your AC programs and offers ways to improve them. When a potential improvement is detected, a notification is displayed.

We are now checking for two improvements, with more to follow soon:

• Create a combined segment from sequentially placed segments, for better performance.

• Avoid relying on the same segment as exit criteria for multiple programs by copying it.

Read more:

• Automation Center Design Advisor

Further to our earlier improvement, where you could use template variables to modify a template on campaign level, it is now possible to have block-level variables as well.

These allow you to have high-level variables that can be modified within each block. For example, if you use seasonal colors for your CTA blocks, you do not need separate blocks for each season: just have one with a block-level variable and make your changes on block level.

Make the desired settings, then check the results. If not satisfied, you can use the Reset button to restore the original state.

Drag the same block into your campaign as many times as you want and you can have different settings for each.

Read more:

• Email Style Settings 

Previously, when you wanted to use CRM Ads in Automation Center programs, you could only select from already existing audiences, which you had to create in a separate menu. Now you can create a new audience directly in the CRM Ads – add to audience node.

Read more:

• Using Automation Center audiences

We have added a new variable type: Image.

After you upload an image from your Media Database, this will then be available for selection as the background image in the Style Settings of the emails created with this template.

Learn more:

• Setting up template variables

We have started with a series of minor changes to the navigation in the Platform that will consolidate our functionality in a way that is more relevant and targeted towards our different customer personas. The first of these changes affect two features: Relational Data and Auto-imports.

• Relational Data has been moved from the Campaigns menu, Personalization to Add-ons > Relational Data.

• The Data Imports page (Contacts menu) now has three new tabs showing Current Imports, History and Auto-imports. Auto-imports no longer have their own menu entry.

There will be a changeover period of one month during which the old menu items will still be visible but point you in the direction of the new pages. After this month they will be deleted.

You can now choose which page of the Platform displays after you log in, by selecting from a list of available pages on your My Profile page.

The available pages will depend on your current Access role.

We added a new preview type, Contact preview, to the Visual Content Editor (VCE). You can select an individual contact in your Emarsys database and preview the email content exactly as it would be for that person.

There are two updates to Send Time Optimization:

• When using A/B Testing in Advanced Scheduling, STO is available for the final (winning) version.
• When using the BCC feature, the campaign is copied to the BCC address(es) for the first launch only. 

Web Channel now has a visual content editor (based on the email VCE) for you to design and build your own campaigns.

When creating a campaign you can choose between this and the HTML editor, in case you have a file from an external agency that just needs to be uploaded.

After feedback from our customers, we have now added country selection for geo-location segments. You simply enter the country in the Location field and it will be automatically highlighted on the map. Now all contacts whose responses can be tracked to that country will be added to the segment.

We have added two new connectors for Relational Data: Microsoft Azure and Microsoft SQL.

We have also added three new tabs to make it much easier for you to monitor and troubleshoot your connections:

• A Dashboard with a visual overview of your databases.
• Import history, showing status of past imports and highlighting any errors.
• API errors, listing any issues we have identified with your API calls.

Read more:

• Troubleshooting your Relational Data uploads

There are two updates to Incentive Recommendation:

• Offering alternative content to the incentives is now optional rather than mandatory. This makes your incentives strategy more flexible, allowing you to send discounts to every contact and maximize conversions, for example in a birthday campaign.
• Incentive Recommendation is now available for Triggered Email.

In addition to this, an issue has been addressed that was preventing IR from being used in conjunction with STO for Automation Center programs. Both features can now be used in the same program emails.

Our new direct mail channel, Offline Mail, is now on general release for customers based in the UK and in Germany/Austria/Switzerland.

Create and send print mail campaigns directly from within the Platform as part of your omnichannel strategy.

Read more:

• Offline Mail - Overview

Reply mails from your customers contain personal data and therefore fall under data protection legislation such as GDPR.

From August 14, 2018, we will be implementing a new feature that automatically purges all reply mails that are older than 30 days. If you require an export of all your existing reply mails you will have to request that from Emarsys Support before this date.

For more details on this and how to archive your reply mails yourself, see:

• Reply Management

We'd like to give you advanced warning of some planned changes to the navigation in the Platform. This is the first in a series of improvements that will consolidate our functionality in a way that is more relevant and targeted towards our different customer personas. The first of these changes will affect two features: Relational Data and Auto-imports.

• Relational Data will be moved from the Campaigns menu, Personalization to Add-ons > Relational Data.  
• The Data Imports page (Contacts menu) will have three new tabs showing Current Imports, History and Auto-imports. Auto-imports will no longer have their own menu entry.

These changes are planned for our next release (August), and there will be a changeover period of one month during which the old menu items will still be visible but point you in the direction of the new pages.

You can now enable a  Deduplicate recipient numbers check when generating your launch list. This will identify contacts with the same mobile phone number, keep the first one in the launch list, and exclude the rest. 

Excluded numbers can be saved as a contact list and deleted or merged.

For more information, see: Deduplicating contacts. 

The Web Channel is the first of our channels to use our new personalization service.

This gives you even greater opportunities to engage with your customers using 1-to-1 tailored content. 

This new feature in the VCE email editor lets campaign managers easily make style changes to an email without having to make any changes to the template it is based on. 

Each setting is linked to a template variable and gives you even greater flexibility in your email design.

The option to use Send Time Optimization for batch emails in automated programs is now available for all accounts.

Web Channel transforms your website into a channel of your Marketing Platform.

You can identify visitors and selectively insert or replace content on your site, display entry or exit-recovery overlays based on segments using your CRM data, and even include them as part of Automation Center programs. Strengthen your customer conversion and retention capabilities.

This feature also comes with two new Automation Center nodes: 

• Web Channel - add - Adds the contact to the selected Web Channel campaign.
• Web Channel - remove - Removes the contact from the selected Web Channel campaign.

Read more: 

• Web Channel - Overview
• Web Channel - End-User Guide

With our latest development, users of block-based campaigns in VCE will be able to use vouchers from the personalization pop-up.

Read more:

• Adding vouchers to an email campaign

It is possible that with time, some changes are applied to the template of a campaign. With our latest improvement, you don't have to rebuild the campaign from scratch again with the modified template.

When a template is changed after the campaign was created, the next time you open the campaign you will see the following:

Simply click Show updates to review and apply the changes to your campaign.

Read more:

• VCE - Updating a campaign with template changes

Two new nodes have been implemented, allowing you to push contacts from one program to another.

• Finish nodes now have a toggle to Transfer participants to another program. When this is enabled, the node name changes to Finish and transfer, and all contacts reaching this node are immediately pushed to the selected program.

• Entry from another program - This is a recurring program entry node that runs once a day. Programs that start with this node are available for selection in the Finish and transfer node.

Read more:

• Workspace node: Recurring entry points
• End-user guide: Adding contacts from one program to another
• Tips for working with programs: Connecting programs together

The Emarsys Platform has a new menu entry: Add-ons.

The first entry is a link that will take you straight to the Enhance marketplace. Below that you will see, and be able to access, any additional features that you have purchased from our partners, as well as add-on products such as Open Time Content and Incentive Recommendation.

CRM Ads has a new type of audience: Smart Audiences. These are audiences that Emarsys creates for you, using self-learning AI algorithms. Our first such audience is now available for creation on the Assets tab.

A Smart Reactivation audience will contain all the inactive contacts in your database that Emarsys has identified as still having a likelihood to purchase. Once created, all you need to do is set up the appropriate campaign in Facebook or Google and CRM Ads will take care of the rest. 

The audience is refreshed daily and contacts who make a purchase are removed.

Read more:

• Smart Audiences

When creating audiences, you can also define whether CRM Ads should match profiles on the network with contacts in your Emarsys database using the email address or the mobile phone number, or both. 

This will ensure that you can identify the social network profiles of your contacts even if they have only used their mobile phone numbers for verification.

Read more:

• What is an audience?

• External events to trigger multiple programs and emails
  You can use the same external event as the trigger for more than one program, or for both triggered emails and programs. This means you can, for example, trigger a purchase confirmation email and at the same time start a cross- or upsell program. This is also a useful way of including attachments, which are otherwise not supported in the Automation Center, see: Automation Center - Tips & Troubleshooting.
• Transactional opt-in applied to the first email in transactional programs
  The transactional opt-in setting will be applied to the first email node following an external event entry node.
• External data can used throughout the entire program
  If you have included a JSON package containing external data in the external event that triggers a program, we store that data for every contact. You can re-use it in other emails in the same program by using the original placeholder.

• Code validation when creating templates
  When you create your own template in the block-based editor, we validate your code structure and syntax and pick up errors that might result in the email not displaying properly.

• Multiple attachments supported
  You can attach up to 10 files to a triggered email. The total size of all attachments may not exceed 10MB, and the supported file types are: .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf.

• Download reports
  You can right-click on the charts on the CRM Dashboard and reporting pages and download them as an image, a PDF or a .csv file.
• ROAS is more clear
  We express your Return On Ad Spend as a multiplication of the total spend, rather than a percentage.

• Aggregated reporting overview
  We now show on the Overview page the aggregated reporting for the last 30 campaigns that used Value Control, giving you a more statistically relevant overview of the value of your email strategy.
• Longer monitoring of results
  We continue to update the results of experiments for seven days after they finish, to ensure that all responses collected during the duration of the experiment are correctly included in the reporting. This means that shorter experiments (e.g. for a single day) will no longer miss out on purchases that are synced back to Emarsys after the experiment has finished.
• More accurate test group figures
  We exclude contacts with opt-out from the test group total, so that the figures in Value Control match the Emails sent figure in the Results Summary page.  
• More accurate sub-segment figures
  When you drill down to calculate the results for a sub-segment of the test group, the results are refreshed every hour throughout the duration of the experiment so that they will always be accurate.
• Usability fix: error handling
  If the results are not displayed for an experiment we give the reason why not (e.g. calculation is still in progress).  

The following products and features are now on general release for all accounts.

We have a new addition to our products in pilot phase.

• Emarsys for Shopify
  A new connector for users of the Shopify ecommerce platform.

We have three new additions to our list of products in pilot phase:

• Smart Insight for Travel
  If you are in the travel industry, we can offer you a new report based on tailored persona metrics taken from your own data.
• Mobile First Email Creation
  Visualize the journey your message takes as it reaches a mobile device and optimize the content for every step.
• Smart Content
  Link directly to external databases to build smarted segments and personalize your content even further.
• CRM Ads - AIM Reactivation
  Target unengaged and defecting customers with automated ad campaigns. Let Emarsys make the decision who to target and when, based on your own CRM Ads data.