Here you can find a history of past release notes for the Emarsys Platform.
Updates to the Platform
New VCE template
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.
New Products
Updates to the Platform
Custom Data Export
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:
Magento 2 plug-in - new version
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:
The changes to this plug-in relate only to the installation, not to any of the supported features. If you already have a working Magento 2 integration, you do not need to upgrade it.
Automation Center - Design Advisor
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:
Email VCE - Block-level variables
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:
CRM Ads - Create audiences in the Automation Center
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:
This month we have two small enhancements to the Platform:
New VCE template variable: background image
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:
Updates to the Platform:
- Select your own home page
- Mobile Engage updates
- Email VCE - contact preview
- Send Time Optimization
- Web Channel
- Geo-segmentation
- Relational Data
- Incentive Recommendation
New product (currently UK customers only)
Important information for customers:
Select your own home page
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.

Mobile Engage updates

Email VCE - contact preview
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.
Send Time Optimization
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
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.
Geo-segmentation
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.

Relational Data
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:
Incentive Recommendation
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.
Offline Mail
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:
New API docs for developers
We have moved all our API documentation to a new portal, built by developers, for developers. This includes built-in testing functionality for all endpoints.
New articles around GDPR and Data Protection
We have written up a number of articles on the new GDPR legislation affecting data protection in the EU.
Web Channel
- We added a new campaign type, Ribbon campaigns, to the Web Channel.
New products on General Release
Updates to the Emarsys Platform
- My Profile page - Date/time format
- SMS - Deduplicate mobile phone numbers
- Content personalization available on Web Channel
- Better management of style variables in email templates
- STO available in Automation Center programs
You can also find our full list of pilot features here.
Updates to the Emarsys Platform
My Profile page - Date/time format
You can choose between European (14.04.2018) and U.S. (04-14-2018) formatting when dates and times are displayed in the application. This setting is configurable in the Regional details of your My Profile page.

SMS - Deduplicate mobile phone numbers
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.
Web Channel personalization
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.
Email Style Settings
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.
STO available in Automation Center programs
The option to use Send Time Optimization for batch emails in automated programs is now available for all accounts.
New products on General Release
Updates to the Emarsys Platform
Web Channel
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.
VCE - Vouchers in personalization
With our latest development, users of block-based campaigns in VCE will be able to use vouchers from the personalization pop-up.

Read more:
VCE - Update campaign with template changes
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.
Automation Center
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:
CRM Ads - Smart Audiences
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:
CRM Ads - Improved audience match rate
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:
Automation Center
- 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.
VCE Email Editor
- 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.
Triggered Email
- 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.
CRM Ads
- 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.
Value Control
- 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).
New products on General Release
Updates to the Emarsys Platform
New products on General Release
The following products and features are now on general release for all accounts.
Triggered Email
Our solution for time-critical triggered emails is now on general release.
If you are interested in this feature, please contact Emarsys Support.
Send Time Optimization
Solve the age-old question of when to launch your email campaigns with our AIM-driven solution. Our algorithm analyzes your email responses to calculate the optimal launch time for each individual contact.
Unified Customer Profile
Get to know your online customers better than you would in real life, by matching all their activities in a single, comprehensive overview.
A new tab has been added to the contact properties page for each contact, showing their engagement history and comparing them to typical contacts in their lifecycle stage.

Updates to the Emarsys Platform
Visual Content Email Editor (VCE)
We have added a package of improvements to the VCE, so that it now includes:
- Support for Predict Email Recommendations
- Support for Incentive Recommendations (this feature is still in pilot phase)
- The ability to show/hide content within blocks
- Emojis in the subject line
- Better configuration of image properties
- Support for Emarsys Scripting Language snippets
- The template used to create the email (shown on the Content Creation page).
Mobile first email creation
We also have a new, mobile first email creation workflow, with live previews showing you every step of the message journey on mobile devices.
New pilots
We have a new addition to our products in pilot phase.
- Emarsys for Shopify
A new connector for users of the Shopify ecommerce platform.
New functionality on General Release
Our new block-based editor is now available! Email creation has never been easier, and you can even create your own template right in the application.
You can read all about this feature in our new end-user guides:
We also have some short tutorial videos to introduce you to the functionality.
We have new tools to help get your emails straight into the inbox every time.
Deliverability Advisor
Our Deliverability Advisor is an easy, new step in the email content creation workflow that identifies potential issues before you click send.

Emarsys runs a series of detailed checks on the email structure and content before you send it, and flags potential issues in plenty of time so you can fix them.
Your engagement rates are also checked against our global averages so you know where you are doing well and where you need to improve.

Deliverability Reporting
We are replacing the Domain Reporting tab in the email reporting screen with a more intelligent report that not only breaks down your response metrics by your 10 largest ISPs but also analyzes these responses for you. Any issues that might mean you have a problem with one or more of the ISPs are highlighted so you can deal with them in a timely way.
Mobile Engage has several enhancements to help you push mobile to the forefront of your marketing strategy. Boost your marketing ROI by adding mobile messaging to the customer experience and reach customers through their most trusted device.
Mobile Engage SDK
It has never been easier to implement Emarsys Mobile Engage. We now have an SDK available for you to integrate Mobile Engage directly into your apps, making onboarding faster and more flexible.
The Emarsys Mobile Engage SDK allows you to track mobile app downloads, mobile events, and in-app user behavior. By embedding the SDK, you can instantly send push messages and collect valuable and actionable CRM data about your mobile app customers.
Read about it here:
Emarsys Open Time Content delivers dynamic content in real time to emails, personalized to the customer’s environment or behavior at the time of opening.
This feature is now on general release and available for all customers.
New pilot features
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.
Products And Features Available
- Facebook Lead Ads
- Visual Content Editor
- Mobile Engage Segmentation
- Mobile Engage Scheduling
- SMS Reporting
- Inbox Preview
Pilot Products
- Triggered Emails
- Send Time Optimization
- Incentive Recommendations
- Third-party Integrations
- Magento 2
- Salesforce
- Hybris
- Oxid
- Deliverability tools
- Predict Instant Search
- Mobile Discovery
- Data Sources
General improvements
- Search field default setting
- New filter for Automation Center programs
- Opt-in status column for Display Contacts
- Advanced scheduling
- Export time range limitation
Improvements in Smart Insight and Predict
- Improved sales data onboarding
- Zooming on the charts
- Mobile Engage – Self-service onboarding for new apps
- Mobile Engage – API v2
- Mobile Engage – New endpoint: ‘login’
- SMS performance improvements
General improvements to the B2C Cloud
- New Automation Center node: Save Contact List
- New status for Automation Center programs: Freeze
- Mobile Engage – Custom data fields for deep links
- CRM Ads – Multiple Ads account support
- Predict – Google Product Feed catalogs
Features moved from pilot phase to general release
- Smart Insight product search – wildcards available
Features in pilot phase
- Send Time Optimization
- Incentives recommendations
- Emarsys Live Email
- Inbox Preview
- Deliverability – reporting by domain
- Deliverability – email content checks
General improvements
- Subject line emojis – Selected unicode emojis are now available for inclusion in email subject lines.
- Imports – Better notification for failed imports.
- Mobile Engage – Send directly to segments and better personalization.
Features moved from pilot phase to general release
- Geolocation segmentation criteria
New products
- CRM Ads – our new web advertising channel
- Demandware – an integration for users of the e-commerce platform
General improvements to the B2C Cloud
- Web Extend – revenue attribution window extended to 7 days
- Web Extend – Google formatting supported for the product catalog
- Exports – better notification for failed exports
- API – new segmentation endpoints
Features in pilot phase
- Geolocation segmentation criteria
- Value Control
- Deliverability Advisor
- Mobile Engage – Our new channel for in-app notifications.
- Emarsys Trust – A new web service providing up-to-the-minute information on our uptime.
- Emarsys SMS – Define your own SMS Keywords without the need for technical assistance.
- Trend Reporting – New revenue reporting tab on the Trends page.
- Automation Center improvements – Pre-launch checks and modifying launched programs.
- Key-based SFTP Auto-imports – Set up auto-imports your own SFTP servers.
And finally, you can also check out What’s new in the Emarsys API as well as the features we currently have in Pilot phase:
- Value Control
- Geolocation segmentation criteria
- Deliverability Advisor
- Value Control
- Major improvements
- Minor improvements
- Performance improvements
- Updates to the Emarsys API
- Pilot features
Faster imports, faster segmentation!
At Emarsys we’re not just working to keep the features in the B2C Marketing Cloud at the forefront of digital marketing strategies, we’re also continually working to ensure our hardware and infrastructure can cope with your growing business demands.
With continuous deployment, you don’t have to wait long for the latest software upgrades to speed up your daily tasks in the B2CMC, but that’s not so easy when it comes to the hardware. Recently we have completed a major upgrade to our databases which affected two areas where the database structure and speed are important factors: contact imports and segmentation.
This upgrade has greatly improved the overall read/write capacity of our databases, but please remember that performance can still vary during the day depending on the number of other jobs are running concurrently.
You probably didn’t even notice the switch, but we still want to give you an idea of the scale of the changes with a few before & after comparisons. These graphs show the typical duration for imports and segmentation over different ranges of volumes. Duration is displayed on the vertical axis in seconds for segmentation and minutes for imports.
- Predict - New widget
- Smart Insight - New screens
- Emarsys SMS - Inbound messages
- General Improvements to the B2C MC - Improved link tracking
- General Improvements
- Content editor – browser support
- Automation Center – new participation settings
- Multiple campaign search in Trend reporting
- Domain reporting
- Improved mobile reporting
- Predict
- Page views added to Site Traffic
- New User Management
- Domain restrictions
- IP whitelisting
- New Content Editor
- Miscellaneous improvements
- Social Ads – connection alerts
- Auto-imports – contact list naming convention
- Copy combined segments
- Improved behavior criteria for segments
- Automation Center
- On Auto-import node
- Combined segments supported
- Improvements to the Wait node
- Exit criteria
- SMS Dashboard
- Smart Insight - Channel Revenue Impact
- Predict - File upload checker