Do your communications affect your customers’ purchases? Plan release v. 1.17.7

A new version of Contactplan is available from February 28th, 2019.
The release is planned between 2:15 pm and 3:15 pm CET.

 

What does this release enable you to do?

You can access a new Influenced purchases dashboard, which helps you better understand whether your plans affect your customers’ purchases, and to compare the results of two different plans.

 

Dashboard Plan

 

For each individual plan, or while comparing two, you can see:

  • The number of customers contacted through the plan.
  • The number  of customers that opened your message in the defined time frame and bought at least one product.
  • The total number of influenced purchases.
  • A graph that shows the distribution of purchases during the defined time frame.
  • The top five products that have been purchased during the defined time frame.

 

The new Plan dashboard enables you to understand the returns that you realize from your plans.
See the Changelog for more details, or contact our Customer Service.

 

 

Changelog
Guide
Resources
Support

 

 

 

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UCS-2 characters available for your SMS deliveries – Send release v.6.6.2

The new Contactsend version is available from February 27th, 2019, and it includes some new features that enhance the module.
The release is planned between 10:00 pm and 10:30 pm CET.

 

What does this release enable you to do?

You can compose SMS messages using a larger character set and communicate with your contacts in many more modern languages, ​​including Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and similar.

You can rely on the UCS-2 encoding standard, defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in ISO 10646.

A message with UCS-2 encoding can have a maximum of 70 characters in an individual SMS, or up to 67 in each part of a chained one.

 

How can you see if you are using UCS-2 characters?

 

 

 

 

Changelog
Guide
Resources
Support

 

 

 

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Email Designer in action

Email Designer is the new editor that, thanks to its intuitive interface, the drag & drop functionality and many other features, makes it fast and easy to create beautiful, personalized and responsive design compliant emails.

Watch this video to view Email Designer in action! There’s a lot more to see, but for now you can start learning how to edit a template, change images and text, and position new content blocks as required. If you make any mistakes, you can easily correct them using the undo button. You can also preview your message at any time, to see it as it would be displayed on a desktop or a mobile screen.

Ask for Email Designer to be activated on your company account and try it out for yourself.

 

 

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Design multipath journeys with Flow, for outstanding customer experience personalization

The year is coming to an end, but the Contactlab news keeps on coming! Today, we present two new Flow features, which will enable you to design and execute Customer Journeys that are even closer to your needs, and your customers’ expectations.

1. The CHECK step now extends to all Hub events

Why only automate customer journeys based on whether they open an email or click a link? With Flow, you can now use any Hub-based event to trigger the next step, as soon as it is added to a contact’s individual profile. It may result in sending an email or a text message, or perhaps activating a webhook to start, for instance, a push notification, or to communicate with an external app.

 

You can decide, for example, to send an email to a customer who has visited a page on your web site, or someone who added a product to their cart, but did not complete the order. You can even send a request to your warehouse to process the order, as soon as the purchase is concluded.

But that is not all that is new…

2. Create MULTIPATH journeys

When a particular event takes place, Flow now enables you to differentiate the paths a contact can follow, and the subsequent communications they will receive, based on pre-set conditions. 

But just what does that mean in practice? Imagine that customers who have been included in a journey because they satisfy the entry condition, now complete purchases on your e-commerce site. You can, for instance, decide to split the communication channels and the message content you send them, according to the product they purchased. For example, you can send a special offer e-mail when contacts buy product A, a reminder SMS for product B, and a push notification – by activating a webhook – for product C, and so on. And of course, you can still send a completely different message to contacts who do not complete a purchase at all.

 

After your contacts carry out defined activities, decide if, how and when to respond to them, with the most appropriate communications. Create diverse channels and messages within the same journey, while being confident that from today, you can define more than just two paths… enough, in fact, to effectively create differentiated journeys and truly personalized experiences.

 

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Analytics arrives and your data takes shape

Why analyze data? Because analysis often answers questions not yet asked … and in a world where shoppers are becoming increasingly demanding and looking for unique customer experiences, this is becoming a key success factor for brands.

Assessing data thoroughly enables you to extract hidden value, while truly understanding it reveals results. But above all, it provides key indicators for the future. A future where every day, data will become more and more important for a company. Being able to query it in a structured and speedy way, allowing the data to be readily understood and transformed into actions… activating marketing campaigns as a result, and making effective business decisions across the board.

And it is precisely in this direction that Contactlab has moved in recent months. Now, today, we are making a new platform module available – presenting the latest big news for 2018: Analytics.

Analytics is the Contactlab Marketing Cloud module that allows you to access all data, to explore and use it effectively, while receiving accurate visual representations of vital information in near real-time… enabling you to decide and influence the future of your business in a highly informed way. With Analytics, you can get structured data in pre-configured business views, then examine it with the visualization tool that is closest to your needs.

The data you collect every day has immense value. It tells many stories and allows you to envisage a path for the future. But people require easy, fast access to data, in just the way they need. Data tells us things that are not always easy to see. But now, thanks to Analytics, you can get deep inside the data, to understand it better and use it immediately.

Analytics in action

What kind of data do we mean? With Analytics, you can access all the data you collect during your daily activity, through every communication channel and each contact occasion. Every interaction enables you to learn something more about your customers:

  • Online, on the web, through social media or mobile apps.
  • But don’t forget, for example, in-store visits or phone conversations with Customer Service.

Today, the Contactlab Marketing Cloud platform enables you to get to know your contacts even better, by creating unique profiles in which you collect and integrate all the available information… individual customer views that you can enrich with KPIs and forecasts of their behavior. Analytics adds to all this – it gives you access to the vast amounts of data you’ll encounter and allows you to browse and translate it into easily understandable visuals, which are intuitive and quick to read.

 

 

What could be worse than not being able to collect customer data? Almost certainly, not being able to analyze and understand it, quickly and easily.

Benefits of adopting Analytics

To briefly summarize the new platform module, you could say that ‘Analytics provides all the data in a structured way, to be able to query it independently, and obtain clear, quick and actionable results, in one place’. That is the new module functionality in a nutshell.

Access all data from a single point.
The whole story of every contact, which can be queried with just a few clicks: Facts, purchase preferences, digital and non-digital habits, KPIs and predictive analysis of behaviors, readily available in profiles that are enriched by processing all the acquired information.

From macro to micro queries.
View the aggregated data, or drill down until you reach the finest details.

Many systems combined in a single visualization tool.
Choose the tool that best suits your needs. Browse and explore the data and discover the relationships that exist: For example, from stock to context data, to sales results analysis.

Guided, simple and fast navigation with the support of blueprints for static and dynamic visualizations.
You can go straight to the heart of the data you need. With the wide range of blueprints that Contactlab provides, you can immediately start browsing to get the answers you are looking for, without investing additional time in creating dashboards and reports.

With Analytics, you make easy to understand data available to anyone who needs it. And understanding data better means more knowledge, increased loyalty, more conversions and enhanced results.

For more details, call Customer Service or get in touch with your usual contact at Contactlab. Better still, request a demo and discover the enormous potential that the platform offers to your business.

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Chat on WhatsApp with your customers: Up to 5 IM channels in One!

Thanks to One,  you can now converse with your customers on WhatsApp!

You could already count on Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram and WeChat, but now you can chat with your contacts through one of the most popular instant messaging apps, which is already used by millions of people around the world. From today, you can offer your Sales Associates another channel to communicate with their customers, and what a channel!

WhatsApp and One make Contactlab even more multi-channel!

 

By accessing their own account and selecting the appropriate contacts, a Sales Associate can choose when and how to reach each one, carrying out every conversation from a single point, regardless of the channel. They can send dedicated promotions, tell customer’s about today’s offers and the latest brand news, and let a shopper know when that special something is back in store … It’s so easy for an SA to create and send messages, establishing and managing direct, personal and tailored relationships that truly make a difference.

Today, you can combine the more traditional asynchronous communication channels like email and SMS, with instant messaging features that open the way to real dialogues in real-time.

Your brand and your Sales Associates can count on One, the clienteling application designed to create and manage long-lasting multi-channel conversations. Find out how to get an official WhatsApp Business account and start using the application now.

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Discover contact behavior over time in Plan

The platform has been enhanced with a new feature: By querying the data available in Plan, you can discover the behavior of your contacts in the time frame that interests you most. You can search for information:

  • Within a time and date range.
  • From a selected point until today.
    For example, during the last month, in the last two years and so on.
  • From the date when the contact appeared in Plan.
    Note:
    Contacts in your database may not necessarily be available in Plan. For example, those in a suppression list may be excluded, or basic filters may be set.

Query your data and get snapshots that provide compelling information about your contacts’ actions:

  • For your entire database.
    or:
  • For a particular segment that you want to understand better.

And do it for the time period you require.


Discover all your contacts’ behavior
 


Know a particular segment better
 

Collect and integrate information about your contacts from multiple sources, then analyze it to define dedicated engagement campaigns and make data-supported business decisions.

Please contact our Customer Care for more details.

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Why limit your text messages, when there is concatenated SMS?

Deliver concatenated SMS through the platform and send your contacts all the information they need. Ensure truly effective and successful communications, without having to worry about the length of the text.

Recent research shows that text messages have an opening rate of more than 98%, and 90% of those take place within three minutes of delivery (source: Forbes). In addition, 74% of the people who read an SMS, go on to interact with the brand (source: SMS Advantage Report). It is clear that SMS continues to be an attractive channel for contacting prospects, especially if you can rely on concatenated SMS.

Which is why the Contactlab Marketing Cloud platform has enhanced its concatenated SMS capabilities, in support of multi-channel digital marketing campaigns.

You can depend on our service, which enables you to send more text messages, concatenated as if they were a single one, without any interruption for the recipient. A service that easily and simply overcomes the limit to the maximum number of usable characters imposed by a single SMS.

 

But the Contactlab platform offers much more. Besides enabling you to take advantage of concatenated SMS for:

  • One-shot deliveries in Send.

You can also use it:

  • In Plan, when planning deliveries to selectively targeted segments.

or:

  • In Flow, while creating personalized and automated customer journeys, which attract your contacts with memorable experiences.

Get to know the Contactlab Marketing Cloud platform and find out how it can help you communicate with your customers on a one-to-one basis. And if you are already a platform user, ask our Customer Service to enable SMS for your company. Learn how to use the system and start to entice your contacts with longer messages and individual, personalized content.

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Use text messages in your customer journeys, and reach them anywhere

It’s not just emails you can use in your engagement plans, but text messages too! Today there are many ways for brands to interact with their customers, communicate promotional offers, or respond to requests for assistance and so on. But what is most important, is being able to do so at the right time, in just the right way.

The text message channel can guarantee opening rates in excess of 98%. In addition, 90% of openings take place within three minutes of message delivery (source: Forbes). It has also been reported that 74% of those who read a text message, then interact with the brand (source: SMS Advantage Report-SAP).

The Send module has always offered you the ability to create and send text message communications. But to provide you with a multi-channel environment that meets your needs through a choice of options, the Contactlab Marketing Cloud platform will be enriched in just a few days, with two new and important features. These will make it possible to leverage the power of text messages and create even more effective marketing campaigns, by:

  • Creating segments and scheduling text message deliveries directly, using the Plan module UI.
  • Enhancing your customer journeys in Flow, by selecting the text messages channel, and sending automatic, personalized communications when a previously identified event takes place.

 

SMS in action using the platform


Plan in action
 

Flow in action

 

By using text messages in your campaigns, you are using a mobile and real-time channel that can guarantee almost instant customer engagement. The text message is immediate, low cost, and does not require an internet connection. It is already present on mobile devices and no app needs to be downloaded. But above all, text messages have opening and conversion rates that are the envy of any other communication channel. Your contacts are used to receiving promotional emails, which unfortunately, often end up in the spam folder. But the curiosity to read a text message, as soon as the mobile phone rings is still very high and is frequently the best contact choice.

A pragmatic example

Imagine your customer is on his way to the airport in a taxi, but must change his flight at the last minute, because he is late. Just at that moment, he receives an SMS telling him the flight has been cancelled and he has been booked on the next one, one hour later. As a result, your customer can easily reach the airport on time, and catch the plane. Luckily, because the company used SMS, he was aware of the changes. Otherwise, he would not know his booking had been updated, as he had no internet connection where the taxi was located.

Conclusions 

The benefits of using text messages in communication strategies are obvious, although you do need to understand the best time to use them in a customer journey, rather than other communication channels. But you can also rely on our experts to help you with this too, by working together to identify personalized and customizable communications plans, according to the different habits and activities that your customers demonstrate over time – information you can now collect in individual and enriched profiles, which are readily accessible and actionable, as required.

Click here for the release notes: Plan and Flow

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[VIDEO] Contactlab and the Fresh Relevance platform – together for effective personalization of message content based on data

At the Contactlab Conference 2018, we interviewed Tom Smith, Fresh Relevance Co-founder & CRO.

He told us that, among all the features which make the Contactlab and Fresh Relevance integration extremely beneficial, there is also the ability to collect and save customer in-store transactions, in individual contact profiles. As the data is available in real-time, automatic, always up-to-date and highly personalized communications activities can readily be created.

Thanks to the unique customer views that Hub makes available, which are further enriched by applying Data’s, powerful algorithms, together with automatic, real-time dynamic content personalization and multi-channel communication tools, companies can readily enhance their marketing activities to reach new levels of direct communication.

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