So many news, so many activities, so many releases, with one common denominator: to invest in the future of our platform so that it continues to be the reference tool for many organizations that wish to invest in the world of digital marketing and take the experiences they offer to customers and their business to the next level.

Let’s take a look together at some of the many projects in 2022 that have helped make the Marketing Cloud even more unique.

Contactlab joins MailUp

We joined the Growens group and created the MailUp+Contactlab Business Unit. In the European market, together we form the most significant Italian company in the marketing technologies area. Digital Messaging, but also Marketing Cloud and Customer Data Platform. We are a team of over 200 experts who have already satisfied more than 10,000 customers worldwide, able now to support you even in your most challenging activities for an unparalleled engagement marketing.

CDP included in Quadrant Solutions’ SPARK Matrix™ for the third consecutive year

With a hint of pride we share that our Customer Data Platform has also received international recognition for 2022. The main features identified are: unique customer view and integration in one place of all data from digital and non-digital touchpoints; profiles enrichment with statistics and information including predictive elaboration such as RFM, CLV, email engagement, and customizable algorithms; advanced profiling and segmentation; and availability of data for real-time activation in automations, multichannel campaigns, transactional emails, customer service, etc.

A UI that can change the outcome

We strongly believe that brands can offer their customers an unforgettable customer experience partly through the choice of the right technology. With the support of a comprehensive, intuitive, easy-to-navigate and constantly updated interface, the user experience we promote allows us to design and create digital marketing campaigns capable of establishing and strengthening the relationship with consumers.

The 2022 was a year of major enhancements on the platform interface with focus on continuous improvement and evolution of the working environment. Among the many releases were:

• The overhaul of the Customer section for quick navigation of the database.
• The birth of a new area dedicated to KPI Events to explore key performance indicators and access business data.
• New functionalities for creating and editing customer journeys.
• The redistribution of elements across pages and an optimization of navigability.

A customer experience based on customers knowledge

Web surfers leave behind a huge amount of data. Connecting ecommerce to a digital marketing platform has become a compulsory choice for many brands with a first major benefit: the ability to know in real-time behaviors, habits and preferences told in first person. Think of the great value of knowing which pages of your portal have been visited, which products viewed, the preferred time of online presence, …

You can ensure you are sending the right communications to the right audience, and this is also thanks to new features in the segmentation area. Now for example in case of a plan gone wrong, you can decide whether to target contacts that have already been validated or ask for the extraction to be updated when you reopen it to activate the delivery.

And speaking of email, the inclusion of Google’s invisible recaptcha in your subscription systems gives you the opportunity to keep your reputation high by protecting your forms: you simplify their completion and further prevent subscription bombing attacks or massive sign-ups from non-existent addresses.

Access to the platform facilitated with the External Identity Provider

You no longer need to create additional accounts with specific credentials and permissions to access the platform. To join the Marketing Cloud, your users can use the same credentials able to access your domain resources in a completely transparent way. You thus gain significant benefits especially in terms of simplicity of systems and process management, operational savings, increased authentication security and scalability of the number of users that can be served.

Better sign your emails and push deliverability

The considerable increase in domain spoofing, phishing, and spear phishing are increasingly forcing companies to equip themselves with email authentication systems to ensure the best delivery rates, a high reputation, and being able to pass spam filters.

We then took action to allow you to manage on a single account, customized DKIMs on a domain basis, ensuring their alignment with your sender domains. You can use different domains for different newsletters such as product mailings or commercial communications, and still be DMARC compliant and ensure maximum deliverability.

In addition, you can set up 2048-bit keys for your account reaching high levels of security compared to standards and all at no additional cost.

Always ready to talk to your customers thanks to Marketing Automation

Take every contact opportunity to promote your offer, fulfill requests, support customers throughout their lifecycle. Generate new interest and increase conversions while reducing time and costs. With the Marketing Cloud you can do this and more. Now you can choose the behavior of your automations each time you suspend and reactivate deliveries, and select which enrollment system should record the unsubscribe event in case one of your contacts requests it. By combining Marketing Automation and highly qualified data, you create highly personalized customer experiences tailored to individual profiles with relevant communications sent at the best time and on the preferred channel.

Capture attention at the first shot with impactful emails

We said: right target, right channel, best time, message customization… but the eye wants its part too and so we have enriched Email Designer, the drag & drop responsive email editor that the platform offers you to work autonomously and in simplicity, but with amazing results. Lots of new features to improve the text experience and grab recipients’ attention with background images in emails. Improved mobile viewing of communications that also goes through optimization of email design, and many other new features for you such as the ability to search templates by tag or name and speed up daily operations. Or discover with A/B testing which communication works best with your audience, using templates created with Email Designer.

Concluding

So, we have already planned many innovations for the Marketing Cloud that is always at its best, complete to meet every need, keeping up with an ever-changing market and also trying to anticipate future trends. Our desire is to stand by your side and offer you a truly exceptional tool for customer engagement activities. Contact us and we will work together to identify the best strategies and activate the most effective campaigns for your results.

A few years ago, a UI/UX guru on the usability front said that customers navigation through the pages of an ecommerce site is like moving around a shopping centre. We now add: with one fundamental difference. Browsing on the website offers brands the opportunity to collect a huge amount of data on searches, preferences, interests that is still difficult to track in the store.

If on the one hand commitment and resources are required to create an ecommerce that is clear and simple to consult and interact with, respecting privacy regulations, on the other hand the effort is reciprocated by a significant increase in information on consumers, whether they are customers or prospects. Knowledge of their online behavior is of great value to the business and can become the key to success in your relationship, allowing you to deliver experiences and digital communications tailored to each individual, through retargeting campaigns.

More time spent online, more ecommerce purchases

Social distancing has given a boost to the digital transformation that leads people to spend more time online. Various analyses claim that in Italy at the beginning of 2021 there were around 50 million connected users, with a penetration of 82%.

Among the first reasons why consumers use the Internet, there is the search for products and services, as well as the purchase and use of the same. More and more people are buying online, preferring mobile over desktop, thus reducing the gap between the two modes of access.

Consumers are proving to feel comfortable online, they love to shop online, they move fast and while browsing here and there, they leave behind numerous traces, data and information that are crucial for brands.

It should be noted that these trends do not seem to be reversed in the future. On the contrary, the new shopping habits that place ecommerce alongside the store will remain even when all the restrictions due to the pandemic are overcome, reinforcing more and more omnichannel shopping experiences.

Web browsing data

However, the presence online of your contacts is not only confined to the moment of purchase, which ends with payment. To maximise the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you need to record consumer behavior before and after and use this information for activities that capture their attention, guide them in their searches and make purchases, reducing abandoned sessions and increasing conversions of visitors to customers.

For a successful digital marketing strategy, you have to collect web browsing data as well.

Monitor page views and understand who are repeat visitors and who are first-time visitors. Understand the entry points, which products or services they visit or how long they stay in. All this information is useful for immediate up-sell or cross-sell and for building and implementing personalised and differentiated contact plans or customer journeys over time, paying attention not only to content but also to timing and message delivery channels.

The Contactlab Marketing Cloud

Don’t let precious opportunities pass you by. The Marketing Cloud gives you the tools you need to track your online activities.

By appropriately configuring your website and a Javascript source in the platform, you can write the information on your unique profile automatically. And so you can, for example, decide to target all contacts who have viewed a particular page even more than once, over a certain period of time, but without completing any purchases. Or reserve a special birthday discount for the purchase of the product viewed in the previous month but not purchased. Or simply identify the campaign with which the contact landed online and monitor following behavior, measuring the effectiveness of initiatives and providing you with the data you need to refine future initiatives and maximise their returns. The values recorded are constantly updated.

All this with the certainty that your activities comply with privacy regulations simply by configuring the platform so that, if a contact has denied consent to the use of a particular piece of information, even if your ecommerce system notifies the action, it is not recorded on the profile.

So, if you still have doubts, please contact us. Together we will look at your needs, tell you industry best practices and guide you step by step through the collection of web information. Put your contacts at the heart of your strategies and empower your business.

The year 2022 has already begun at full speed, but we also like to slow down, to find the right moments to take some time and look back. We like to close our eyes and think about what has happened in the past year, at the many new developments in the platform, at the small and large results we have achieved, at the many features that have enriched our Marketing Cloud.

But this time we want to do it differently, starting from the end. So we say, contact us and together we will design the best path for your organisation towards successful communication campaigns that guarantee tangible business returns. How?

Prefer a simple and intuitive user experience

We have always aimed to provide you with a tool that is quick and easy to use, yet comprehensive. We have worked to ensure that the interface allows you to carry out your digital marketing activities without taking away precious time from your core activities. A renewed UI to move between the various areas of the platform in a coherent way. The choice of a clean and light design system, able to guide you in your work, in the check of scheduled operations and in the resolution of problems. An environment that allows you to choose what you want to see and offers you clearly what you need, with the use of logical navigation, elements and components that are the same in the various modules. The area dedicated to customers has been completely revamped: with the collection and tracking of customer data and behavior and the multiple points of contact and communication opportunities, you have a wealth of information. But not all of it is equally useful to your business. That’s why we’ve come up with a platform that gives you access to what you’re looking for or what you need in the shortest possible time and in the best possible way so that you can immediately activate your campaigns in a few steps, even automatically. We are moving in great strides towards a great interface.

Choosing the target audience of each communication carefully

We know how important it is to target every email, every SMS correctly and to make sure that they reach the right person, as well as at the right time and with the most interesting content. We are therefore constantly expanding the data on which you can build segments. For example, you can now decide to segment on the basis of the KPIs you get from the results of surveys you submit to your contacts, whether they are customers or prospects. You listen to them and, thanks to the feedback you collect, you design customer journeys or plan timely trigger campaigns. Or, with the introduction of the new other digital events rule, you collect events recorded on external systems in the platform and use this information to build lists of recipients for your deliveries, whether they are single items or more complex automations. Furthermore, with the recent search mode, it becomes faster to enter a list of values as a condition to be included or excluded from your audience. In short, start from the true knowledge of your customers for a micro-segmentation that will allow you to personalise your relationship with them and make it last.

Designing customer journeys with a wow effect for increasingly demanding customers

Great news also for Contactlab’s marketing automation. The year opened in the best possible way with the availability of the new UI, but the remaining months did not disappoint either. Referring to the refinement of the audience, you can now make a contact leave an automation system not only when an event occurs, such as a purchase or the opening of an email, but also when one or more pieces of personal data concerning him or her change, thus preventing him or her from continuing to receive attention from your brand on topics that are no longer relevant. In addition, you can now understand who used a particular coupon, for example, when, how and where, and set up follow-up activities based on what actually happened.

Convinced that automation is something that can no longer be lacking in digital marketing activities, not only to follow times and needs but above all to anticipate them, we have tried to go further. The platform has therefore been enriched with a series of pre-configured journeys from which to create your customer experiences. You can select one and use it as proposed, or modify it as you like and need to, saving time, freeing up resources and, last but not least, reducing errors in the design of flows that could affect the operation of the entire journey.

Amaze your audience with personalised and captivating messages

Content also plays its part: text, fonts, graphic elements, colours, components position… Even the weight of the images has a significant impact on the success of a digital marketing campaign! In 2021, we have continued with conviction the path we started in the past to offer HTML editors that are in step with the times, that allow for great customisation and differentiation of content according to the target audience and with the aim of reducing the time needed to create templates, thus again optimising your user experience.

Today you can benefit from an HTML editor that has the necessary functionalities to design and create attractive emails with just the movement of the mouse and with each element in the right place, able to attract attention exactly where you want it. You can design communications with sophisticated graphics and captivate your contacts, while relying on sending systems that ensure that the campaign content has not undergone unauthorised changes during the sending and receiving phases. We have further extended the support for security protocols – DMARC, DKIM, SPF, … – to better support your brand reputation and maximise deliverability.

Seize every contact opportunity with an email or text message

In times of pandemic we have all realised the value of email in staying close despite social distancing. Time ago someone suggested it was a dead tool… far from it given the numbers for 2021! The sheer volume of emails sent and received over the last few months must be the reason why we have to use this contact channel with particular care. We have put our finger on the pulse of our digital messaging platform, beginning a process of optimisation and performance improvement that will make your marketing campaigns easier to implement and safer to run. In addition, a special focus has been placed on further improving the email and SMS delivering applications in all areas: whether it is a question of mass or targeted emails, or even service or transactional ones, you will find an answer to all your needs.