Access your contact profiles more quickly – Hub UI Release v.2.0.0

From July 1st, 2020 the new Hub version is available.
The release is planned between 11.00 am and 11.30 am CEST.

What does this release enable you to do?

The project of the platform interface evolution has not stopped even in the moment of health emergency and continues its run. We have been working for several months to improve our customers’ customer experience and we have now come to another new step. We are moving together towards a renewed Contactlab Marketing Cloud UI in order to build and review it together and create the most suitable, agile and streamlined working environment for users. A work that by its nature is constantly active.

 

New Hub UI

 

It’s now the turn of the Hub access page, the feature dedicated to the creation and management of unique integrated profiles for each contact. By typing the direct link now you can decide whether to browse the previous stand-alone version of Hub or enter the complete platform. From the release, the only option available will be the Contactlab Marketing Cloud UI.

What does this mean?

With this release you’ll be able to work in an integrated environment and navigate through the various platform features in a contextually, without changing applications and leaving the environment. The different work areas are all conveniently presented in a side menu that will allow you to create your campaigns more easily, intuitively and immediately.

Moreover, thanks to this release, the Admin of your company will be able to enable new colleagues in the team to use the Contactlab Marketing Cloud, in full autonomy directly on the platform and without the Customer Service support.

 

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One automation, many flows – Flow UI Release v.2.27 and API v.2.20.0-837

From May 5th, 2020, a new Flow version is available.
The release is planned between noon and 12:30 pm CEST.

What does this release enable you to do?

It becomes possible to express conditions based on relative dates on the attributes of the profile date and events date within the source or in the checks of your journey

Let’s try to see it better with an example.

Two traveler friends have both entered your automation after subscribing to the new newsletter that you have designed to support your contacts in the post lockdown. An appointment that newsletter after newsletter helps them to understand the good practices to implement and the warnings to follow, in order to leave safely and compliant.

Flow: relative datesOne of them, however, is an old contact, a customer for years who already follows you on many communication channels. You know that he is a skilled climber, he often stays in mountain villages and travels a lot on his own during the weekend. The other one is a new entry and you know that he is a friend of the first one because the subscription to the newsletter was suggested by him through “share” CTA. In filling out the subscription form he was accurate and left you a lot of information: he loves long distance trips, his favorite destinations are the tropical seas and above all he always travels with his family composed of two adults and two children under 6 years old.

You are therefore faced with two people who have subscribed to the same service – the post-lockdown newsletter – and therefore left for them the same journey but:

  • They’ve been among your contacts for a different time, from different dates.
  • They have different interests.

You can therefore prepare the same automation for them but once they have started, you can plan different actions and/or communications, in different times and ways, all depending on the fact that they have entered your db at different dates.

The same logic could be applied to many other scenarios basing the condition for example on the moment of the first purchase or the date of a future departure or other data that could be relevant for your goal.

How it works

Let’s take our example. Suppose we choose, as we said, the date of the subscription in the db for creating the condition and deciding in which branch of the automation each contact enters.

In the profile the DATA_INSCRIPTION attribute collects the information you need and then in the source or in the flow checks you can enter a condition of this type:

“DATA_SUBSCRIPTION” “greater than” “(today) -6 months”.

which means that, in order to be verified, the condition requires that at the time of its evaluation – i.e. today – the customer has been subscribed for less than 6 months.

Flow: source Flow: conditions

 

As the first friend, the climber, has been in your db since February 2015, he does not respect the above condition. He will continue in your automation in the B branch, will receive important information for the post lockdown dedicated to all but also specific content reserved only for the most obsolete contacts such as a survey to qualify and update all his data perhaps in exchange for coupons on his next trip.

The sea lover, on the other hand, only entered your db in March 2020. He responds perfectly to the condition set. His journey will continue in branch A, he will receive the same information as his friend on the post lockdown but among the proposed content he will find a box dedicated to the stories of customers who have already experienced the thrill of traveling with you in exotic destinations and a welcome coupon to be used within 6 months after the end of the lockdown.

What does this mean?

Further increase the quality of your flows by refining the conditions that allow you to better manage time and content. You can also customize the travel of each contact according to when an action has been taken or an event has occurred.

 

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Change the delivery name whenever you want – Send v.6.10.5 Release

From April 9th, 2020 a new version of Send is available.
The release is planned from 11.00 am to 11.30 am CEST.

What does this release enable you to do?

Did you forget to give a title to your email delivery? Do you want to change the name because you have noticed that it is not easily recognizable in the list of all your deliveries or you do not immediately identify it in your reports or statistics?

You can now change or add a title to an email delivery as soon as it has been sent.

Go to the Analyse section in Send and select your delivery.
In the Summary tab you can make the changes you are interested in.

What does this mean?

You will always be able to find your email delivery among the many that you have made, choosing for each of them a title that is easily recognizable and that uniquely identifies it.

 

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Improve the personalization of your automations – Flow UI Release v.2.26 and API v.2.20.0-806

From April 7th, 2020, a new Flow version is available. The release is planned between 11.00 am and 11:30 am CET.

What does this release enable you to do?

Improve the quality of your journeys by increasing the amount of variables you can use to differentiate your customers’ experience within the same flow.

Thanks to this release you can use the attributes saved from the event triggering the automation not only for the customization of the actions e.g. the content of the email or of the SMS, but you can also use them as variables to decide in which branch to insert the customer after a proper check step.

Flow v2.26Think of a journey activated for example by a purchase made on a multi-language site or by the completion of a form in which you can choose the preferred language.

If the event contains the language information as a property, you can save this information as an attribute for customization – let’s call it lang – and immediately after the source step, use it in a step check inserting conditions like “lang=IT”, “lang=EN”, “lang=FR” and so on to have different branches, each with a different action – let’s say send email or SMS – configured in the correct language for the individual customer.

To which properties is it applicable?

You can express conditions on scalar attributes like strings, dates and numbers, or arrays of these.

It is not applicable to more complex properties such as objects or arrays of objects, for example the ‘products’ block from purchase events. This property won’t therefore be available in the drop-down list for adding conditions in step checks. It remains always possible to save as a personalization attribute a single property of the ‘products’ block of the initial purchase event, e.g. products.name – the name of the product – and express conditions on it during the whole journey.

How to do

In  the edit condition box that appears in the branches coming out of a step check, you will find the new option Conditions on attributes for personalization. The drop-down list will show you the keys you have defined as the name of the personalization attribute and then the possible operators consistent with the type of data you saved from the event.

In the drop-down list, only the personalization attributes that are string, number, date or array of these will be displayed.

What does this mean?

Let’s take as an example a journey activated by a sale, with the aim of bringing the customer to a second purchase. During the automation you could suppose to send an email to the customer and then, through a step check, verify the opening or not. In the same step check you could add branches related not only to the fact that he opened the email but also differentiated according to information on the first purchase for example depending on the product purchased or the category or price, and so on. This release opens up the possibility to use the information of the entry event to express conditions at any point of the journey, even within checks based on other events.

 

 

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Your deliveries affect your customers’ purchases, but how much?

For some time now, there have been tools and dashboard available on the platform that allow you to understand how your email campaigns are influencing your customers’ purchases.

You can access the Influenced purchases dashboard, analyze if your campaigns are impacting sales and compare the results of two different mailings. Increase the effectiveness of your initiatives and business results.

You have the opportunity to get, per single delivery or as a comparison between two different deliveries:

  • The number of customers contacted by the campaign.
  • The number of customers who received or interacted with your campaign and concluded a purchase in the selected timeframe.
  • The total amount of influenced purchases.
  • A graph showing the distribution of purchases during the defined timeframe.
  • The top five products that have been purchased during the defined timeframe.

Influenced revenuesIn addition, you can visualize data with the following options:

  • Influenced by click.
  • Influenced by view.
  • Who purchased after receiving the delivery

or simply the value of the purchases done by customers who did not receive the campaign.

The platform provides self-service tools to know the returns on your deliveries. But it also offers ideas for further analysis. Contactlab can help you with top-level technology and a team of data experts to read them in depth and discover more information. You can find out what’s not immediately visible and set up contact plans that make the most of your customer relationship.

Call us now and let’s work together to support your business even at this time when we are all being put to the test.

 

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See what your customers did last month – Hub UI v1.43 Release

From March 25th, 2020 the new Hub version is available. The release is planned between 10.30 am and 11.00 am CET.

What does this release enable you to do?

Do you want to view all the events of a single contact only for a certain time period or maybe for a specific day? You can now.

timeline data rangeWith two new filters on the timeline, you can select the analysis time horizon of your interest. Use start-date and end-date. By entering:

  • Start-date only will display events from start-date onwards.
  • End-date only will display events that happened up to the end-date.
  • Start-date and end-date will display events that happened in the range.
  • The same start-date and end-date will only display events happened that day.

What does this mean?

Try to imagine when your Customer Service receives a request and has to verify all the events for a specific period of time. In a few seconds he can get in front of him the timeline of what happened and give all the necessary support.

 

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Segmenting becomes even more immediate – Plan Release UI v.1.22.9

From March 19th, 2020, new versions of Plan. The release is planned between 10.30 am and 11.00 am CET.

What does this release enable you to do?

Segmenting your audiences with Marketing Cloud has been simple and intuitive so far but now it’s even more immediate. With a few small updates to the interface, we have made the operations of your Plan configuration easier and faster.

  • Plan: new UINew column labels to make the meaning of the option clearer.
  • Additional explanations of the fields available with the mouse over.
  • With a simple checkbox, decide which fields to have immediately displayed for the creation of a new audience.
  • Immediately select the category of data on which you want to change the configuration.

 

What does this mean?

Contactlab renews its commitment to offer a platform within everyone’s reach, for the use of which no technical expertise is required.

Thanks to a user-friendly interface, you can build your campaign targets simply and free time to take care of your customers by offering them an unforgettable customer experience.

 

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A top-notch e-mail reputation to bring deliverability at the highest levels!

Domain Authentication: limits and developments

A new message!The authentication of the sender’s domain is increasingly important in the world of e-mail. Threats such as domain spoofing, phishing and spear phishing have encouraged the development of stronger authentication strategies for brands. Protocols such as SPF – Sender Policy Framework and DKIM – DomainKeys Identified Mail, have started showing some pitfalls. It becomes fundamental to think about adding new check methods, first of all DMARC.

 

Why DMARC?

Based on SPF and DKIM usage, DMARC extends their value:

  • to safeguard brand’s reputation and its customers
  • to protect the business
  • to enable the GDPR compliance

Furthermore DMARC brings benefits to deliverability. It is now clear that the adoption of DMARC with a restrictive policy positively influences the score of the major mailbox providers, starting from Gmail which explicitly suggests it in the bulk senders guidelines.

A restrictive DMARC policy is also necessary for the implementation of the BIMI – Brand Indicators for Message Identification – i.e. showing the official brand logo directly in the inbox. BIMI is actively adopted by Verizon (Yahoo !, AOL) and will be implemented in the coming months by Gmail and Microsoft.

SPF and DKIM

SPF is the e-mail authentication protocol based on the origin IP. SPF is a DNS record of the sending domain and contains the reference to all the IPs that are enabled to send e-mails. If the e-mail receiving service recognizes the IP as valid, the e-mail is forwarded to the recipient’s inbox. Otherwise, the communication is labeled as spam. In a nutshell, it certifies that a specific IP is really authorized to send e-mails and there has not been an inappropriate use. The SPF record is validated on the envelope from domain and not on the domain visible to the final customer.

DKIM signature is instead a cryptographic signature that guarantees the integrity of the message from the moment it is sent till the inbox. Brands can sign their e-mails with their domain name and guarantee the integrity of the content of the message. For example in Send, the default DKIM is contactlab.it. This ensures that all e-mails sent via Send are properly signed with a domain that has a good reputation.

SPF and DKIM are fundamental requirements to legitimize the sender domain but they may not be enough and sometimes can be subject to false positives. In some cases, the SPF and DKIM checks could highlight problems even in totally legitimate contexts. Think about when an e-mail is forwarded or conveyed through a maling list.

What happens in these cases? When the SPF or DKIM check fails, the receiver mailbox provider – MBP has the right to decide whether the message is legitimate and therefore harmless, or potentially harmful to the mailbox user.

And this is where DMARC – Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance comes into play, a protocol providing brand with the option to indicate to the mailbox provider how to distinguish false positives from spoofing and phishing threats and what actions to take in each possible scenario.

How DMARC works

DMARC is a notification system thanks to which the brand acquires visibility on the traffic of its domain. In fact, in addition to reporting the result of the check on SPF and DKIM, this method creates a link between the domain visible to the reader (header FROM – RFC 5322) and the technical domains (Envelope From domain RFC 5321 and DKIM domain).

If the visible domain – from – is the same as the SPF or DKIM domain, then the DMARC Alignment occurs and the e-mail is delivered correctly.

 

DKIMFig. 1: Contactlab applies a DKIM linked to the contactlab.com domain to its service e-mails

 

In the event that DMARC detects a misalignment between the domains, it is the brand that indicates to the mailbox provider receiver such as Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo! …, how to manage the non-aligned e-mail. And it does it using a progressive severity logic which requires the MBP to:

  • p=none → do not apply any policies and do not take any actions with the e-mail in error
  • p=quarantine → mark the non-aligned e-mail as spam
  • p=reject → reject the e-mail

Note that the above policies also influence BIMI, in particular the requirements to activate it are:

  • Quarantine DMARC policy or reject.
  • DNS BIMI records and compatible logo.
  • Good domain reputation.

It appears immediate that with the spread of DMARC, the customization of the DKIM domain and its alignment with the sender’s domain or subdomain is increasingly required.

Said that, what does Send offer?

Send provides the tools to achieve full compliance with the DMARC requirements and enables you to take advantage of the benefits offered by its adoption.

In particular, it is possible to manage customized DKIMs on a domain basis within a single Send account, ensuring for each domain the alignment with the brand’s sending domains.

In this way, the brand can use different domains for different newsletters (product mailings, commercial communications, etc.), always comply with DMARC and ensure the highest level of deliverability.

To find out the requirements for multi-DKIM activation, contact Contactlab representative or our Customer Service. In addition, the Contactlab Deliverability Team is available to help you in the correct implementation of the DMARC policy, with technical and strategic suggestions.

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Multiple DKIM on a single Send account – Send v6.10.0 Release

From February 21th, 2020 a new version of Send is available. The release is planned from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm CET.

What does this release enable you to do?

To improve the quality of an email sender domain authentication, alongside the SPF and DKIM protocols, DMARC is increasingly gaining ground. Based on the first two, DMARC is able to exploit their potential and extend their value.

For this reason Send functionalities have been enhanced in order to provide the tools to achieve full compliance with the requirements that DMARC imposes and allow to take full advantage of the benefits offered by its adoption.

In particular, Send allows you to manage on a single Send account, customized DKIMs on domain basis, ensuring alignment with the sending domains of the brand.

 

DKIM: Send message

In this way your brand can:

  • Use different domains for different newsletters (product mailings, commercial communications, etc.).
  • Always be DMARC compliant and improve the service offered by SPF and DKIM.
  • Ensure maximum levels of deliverability.

What does this mean?

Thanks to this release you can get all that DMARC offers in order to:

  • Enhance your deliverability.
  • Safeguard your reputation and customers.
  • Protect your business.
  • Support you GDPR compliance process.

For more details, pls see the guide: email group / email deliveries

 

 

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End an automation with the same event condition as it was started – Flow UI Release v. 2.17.0

Now with Flow v. 2.17.0, you can configure a contact to leave an automation, with exactly the same event condition that was used to insert them.

Of course, the same functionality is available in the Automations section of the Marketing Cloud UI.

What does this release enable you to do?

Imagine a contact is added to a Real-time source when they purchase something worth more than €100, and so trigger a Completed order insertion event with the associated condition. As a result, the automation sends an email, or perhaps an SMS, to encourage them to make a further purchase. When they do, the customer completes the automation’s aim and so triggers the Removing event, which is also Completed order.

Of course, the automation can be far more complex, but this simple example serves to illustrate just one of the many possibilities. A summary of the steps is:

  1. Select a Real-time source for a new automation.
  2. As a Triggering event, select Completed order.
  3. Under Event rules, select amount – revenue, followed by Equal to or greater than and 100.
  4. Under Removing event, choose Completed order, then select the checkbox to force removing the customer if both events are satisfied.
  5. Define the required automation, with the appropriate Action steps and similar.

For further details, see the Flow guide.

What does this mean in everyday use?

Now, contacts can be removed from a flow after completing the desired activity, even when the triggering and removing events appear to be exactly the same… while in reality, the removing event takes place as the result of completing one or more automation steps.

 

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