BlueVenn considers delivering operational excellence through continuous improvement to be a core value. For that reason, we keep an ear to the ground to make sure we understand the common problems our customers are running up against and the functions they’d find it useful to have. Our updates are not made simply for the sake of it, they’re there to make users’ lives easier and to help them maximize their profits. BlueVenn Engage is our module designed to activate data from the Customer Data Platform, to help users to analyze and segment their customer data for perfectly targeted campaigns across every channel – and it just got better. Here’s how.
New analysis charts
We have new charts available to allow you to view your data in different ways. Now you can build a vertical, stacked vertical or horizontal bar chart, a line, column line or scatter graph, or even a clear, impactful pie chart to lay out your customer data for all to see. Not only will you be able to see that data, you can activate it too by dragging it from visualizations directly into an audience or drilling into it for deeper insights.
Campaign time zone support
You’re planning to automate a three month campaign at a UK audience from Los Angeles and you want to time the delivery of a social advert or push notification for 5pm, when your target audience will be finishing work and starting to run mobile searches or check social media. Seems pretty straightforward, right? But what if, halfway through the campaign, the UK changes from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time? Or your own time changes from Pacific Standard Time to Pacific Daylight Time? Will your team realize this is going to happen early enough to alter their scheduling, or will your timings, and potentially your whole campaign, go awry? Not anymore. Set the location you want to target and let BlueVenn Engage manage the time zones for you.
Enhanced campaign history management
You’ve been stockpiling customer data like a dutiful squirrel getting ready for winter, but there comes a time when even the largest storage tree will be all filled up. You could then move onto another tree, but do you really need that many nuts? Knowing that you sent Bob an email and he opened it on a Thursday afternoon at 3pm is brilliant – but two, three, or ten years down the line, will it help you to target Bob?! A lot of our customers store billions of pieces of campaign information daily and retaining data they really don’t need, and won’t use, can ramp up storage costs. Plus, when it comes to GDPR, this could be regarded as unreasonable data usage (and potentially cost the company even more)! This feature will let you selectively erase outdated or useless information, to effectively spring clean your databank.
Search improvements
One of our retail customers told us they had a lot of similarly named files within their large database and were having difficulties finding the type of information they needed. Say the search term is “Christmas” and they want to check what cascade segmentations were used in last year's campaign.
All well and good, but not if the search brings up a deluge of old analysis data and campaign models, none of which give any clue about the segmentation of that campaign. Now our client (and you) can set a filter of “campaigns: cascade segmentations”, “models: geographic fields”, “analysis: pivots”, or a whole host of other combinations, to help improve the result ordering and find precisely what is called for, quickly and easily.
Custom codes
Speaking of Christmas campaigns, what if you want to create a special code, “Christmas 2019”, to give your customers a discount of 20% or a free gift (cuddly toy!) in honor of the season?
Before you would have to go out of the campaign, create the code, then load it back into that campaign. Now, as requested by many of our customers, we have enabled the creation of codes right then and there within the platform. A little present from us to you!
Right to be forgotten
It’s in the name; our Omnichannel Marketing Hub can integrate with many channels and platforms. Don’t believe us? Here’s our full list of integrations and connectors. Yes, thank you, we think it’s pretty impressive too! So where does the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” fit in with this ability? Simple. There’s now a “right to be forgotten” setting that allows you to type in the details of any customer who asks to be removed from your database, and automatically delete their information from each and every channel that BlueVenn Engage connects into. Handy, no?
Multi-level mapping
It’s always been possible to pinpoint your customers by postal code, zip code or using longitude and latitude coordinates, so as to visualize a heat map of your customers and prospects to help you make campaign selections or decisions. But a customer asked us, “What happens if I want to build a heat map around stores?” We took this on board, and have now made it possible to build heat maps by location, or customer, or a combination of the two.
For instance, one of our customers runs hotels in 16 cities across the UK. It may be that the largest number of customers comes from Bristol, but the most popular hotel might be in London. So, rather than just mapping customers and targeting Bristol to advertise its hotels, the company will be able to map locations and see that it might be worth advertising its London branch to the whole customer database, not just Bristol. They could also then run cross campaigns, perhaps, advertising the London location especially hard to business people who often visit London. All the different possibilities will allow the chain to spend its budget promoting the right branches and targeting the right people.
Emergency stop functionality
No offence to the Spice Girls, but sometimes it’s better if “stop right now, thank you very much” DOES NOT require a human touch! For example, when you’re doing a mailing to eight million email addresses and receive an error message for every one of the first thousand sent out. Yes, someone might spot the problem brewing and halt the campaign – but what if this happens out of hours or while the team is in a day of meetings? Our emergency stop functionality lets you set an automatic trigger limit to stop a malfunctioning campaign, so that if the worst comes to the worst, you won’t send all eight million messages before realizing you’re flushing your budget down the drain.
Making campaign response information available to email channels
Every time you run a campaign, bits of metadata will be stored recording how each customer has been targeted. For example, if you’ve sent a person three emails so far and they’ve ignored all of them, that information will be stored within the campaign platform. Now it will also be made available to your ESP, so when you’re about to send a fourth email out you can note that the last ones have gone unopened and say, “I see you’ve received three emails before,” or send a tempting code to better engage the customer and personalize the communication. If customers feel you know them, they’re far more likely to take your messages seriously and think twice before hitting the delete button!
(Beta) advance preview of BlueVenn’s new email marketing and HTML designer
In advance of the launch of BlueVenn’s integrated email marketing channel in 2020, we’re offering exclusive access to our new HTML designer that will enable you to build email designs and Facebook, Instagram or SMS creatives within BlueVenn Engage, right where you need them to be.
Note that this is an advanced preview of the email marketing and HTML designer and is in Beta. To access this functionality you will need to put in a request with your BlueVenn Account Manager.
Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions about the latest 2019.4 BlueVenn Engage release, or would like to speak to a member of our team, then contact us here.
