The BlueVenn Marketing Hub combines two powerful omnichannel marketing tools - the powerful BlueVenn UNIFY Customer Data Platform to unify customer data into a single view of the customer, and BlueVenn ENGAGE for customer analytics, segmentation and advanced omnichannel marketing automation.
Each year, BlueVenn releases 4 major software updates and we’re delighted to announce a range of new and updated functionality in version 2020.2 to help our customers on their path towards personalized, 1-to-1 marketing.
BlueVenn 2020.2 Release Video
BlueVenn Engage 2020.2
Multi-Select Venn Diagrams
“A time-saver when creating a more complex audience for a campaign”
The Venn diagram is a highly used component in BlueVenn Engage, and an incredibly useful data visualization tool for analysing patterns across large data sets to create a campaign audience, or to save for segmentation and further analysis.
In the 2020.2 update, we’ve enabled the ability to select multiple sections or overlaps within the Venn diagram at once by holding down the Ctrl button as you click on them. This is a timesaving capability that gives you more flexibility in the campaign audiences you can create using the Venn diagram.
Linked Actions for complex customer journey planning
“Enhancing the true helicopter view of our campaigns and journeys”
In 2020.2 we have added new options to the Campaign Builder in BlueVenn Engage to automate a ‘Linked Action’ when a campaign ends. This could be to trigger the execution of other campaigns, delete records, clear campaign history, initiate a campaign data refresh or run some trial campaign options.
For example, you can ‘Add a Linked Action’ using the campaign properties window to tell BlueVenn Engage to trigger a subsequent campaign of your choice when the current campaign has completed. This could be to automate a chronological sequence of campaigns or to restrict the delivery of specific offers or promotions that you don’t want to overlap at any point.
For complex customer journey orchestration, this ensures that it is easier than ever to schedule many linked campaigns and make sure that they execute in the right order and at the right time.
Linked campaigns can be used in conjunction with those observed and managed via the journey optimization viewer.
New Automatic Campaign Refresh Function
A new option in the Schedule tab of a campaign now provides enhanced functionality for when and how you schedule a refresh of campaign responses to make your campaigns truly dynamic and enable faster triggers and optimized campaign performance.
In BlueVenn Engage 2020.2 you have options to choose to refresh campaign results based on an allotted amount of time or for a given amount of responses. For example, in an inbound triggered campaign where volumes of customers flowing through the system are sparse, you could schedule a refresh every time you get a response, and for bulk campaigns you could choose to refresh after every 1,000 reponses. Similarly, you can choose to refresh at specific intervals during the campaign, perhaps every 5 minutes.
New Campaign Pruning
For Big Data systems like BlueVenn, it is common that customers after time may store unrequired campaign history data that can affect refresh times and overall system performance.. As with any true Customer Data Platform, all the data is stored and timestamped. This means every step, decision split or logic in a journey is stored against every single customer record, however, in time customers are commonly only interested in details about the audience, the communication, the responses and how the customer exits a campaign. The new ‘Campaign Pruning’ functionality therefore is an easy way to maintain the fast performance of your BlueVenn Engage system by enabling the removal of non-essential campaign data from the underlying Analytical Data Server.
For customers with huge campaign volumes and a history that has built up significantly over time, and who want to ensure that campaign and system refreshes are optimized, this tool will be a handy one that system administrators and super users can gain access to.
‘Campaign Pruning’ can also now be automated with the new ability to tell BlueVenn Engage to only retain non-essential campaign response history for a set amount of days. This removes the need to manually maintain the system and set rules for the system to optimize itself.
New Scheduled Data Exports
Another handy feature added to the 2020.2 release of BlueVenn Enagge is the ability to export and output any list of data to a desired location, and automate the process to run at set intervals. This could be to send a particular list of customers to an SFTP area or data bucket. An example might be to output a list of high value customers with high propensity to purchase from direct mail, to a direct mailing house, or to automate the export of a call list to a call center. Similarly, other use cases might be to send to a reporting suite, 3rd party or other department for analysis. Previously this would need to occur directly within a campaign but you now have the flexibility to run this on an ad-hoc basis for any given list of data in the BlueVenn Engage system.
HTML Creative Support
Following on from the release of the BlueVenn Engage email marketing module in the 2020.1 update earlier this year, we’ve now added some new functionality, and will be doing so in each major release moving forward.
The email creative editor now provides the ability to paste bespoke HTML from an external source for the creation of an email. For customers that rely on designers or creative agencies, or commonly build email creatives in 3rd party platforms this enables you to use these without needing to rebuild them in BlueVenn Engage.
BlueVenn Unify 2020.2
New Password and Account Expiry Admin Controls
As part of continuous improvements to the security and accessibility of BlueVenn Unify we’ve added the ability to control the expiry of user passwords and user accounts. For giving someone, or a team, temporary access to your BlueVenn Unify system this can be a handy way to limit the time that they have access, but also will send out reminders to these users that their account or password is due to expire.
ETL Enhancements
Within BlueVenn Unify loading transactional data that needs to join to a unique customer record may have required the use of the Post Processing functionality to join together Parent and Child records. In 2020.2, the ETL enhancements mean that users can now load parent and child records in sequential order and the system will automate the joining of these parent and child relationships without needing to use any Post Processing scripts. These Parent and Child relationships are now also indicated within the BlueVenn Unify User Interface.
Bulk Merge Performance Improvements
Before BlueVenn Unify 2020.2 a BulkMerge process could take more time than was acceptable for some organizations with extra large bulk merge requirements. There is no change to the user experience, but under the bonnet of the system we have made substantial improvements to take the BulkMerge match rate from circa 150 per minute to 5000 per minute resulting in a 33X improvement to the speed of upload.
New Enhanced Address Profiling
Dynamic profiling for household or business addresses was previously not possible in BlueVenn Unify but is now available in 2020.2. There is no new UI to understand, but simply now works in the same way as adding dynamic profiling fields to other parts of the system. These can be bulk filled using the ETL tools, and any new fields can be added to the UI for all, or specific, users.
New Custom styling for Conversation Manager, Forms and Preference Centers
The Conversation Manager within BlueVenn Unify is a handy tool for creating forms that can be embedded into websites and eCommerce platforms to collect data and insert it directly into Unify. As part of this feature, you can also use the form builder to create a multi-channel preference center. Until now this has relied upon existing styles and CSS to transform the forms to look the way you want them to. Within Unify, this can now all be controlled in the system, by applying your own HTML and then mapping it to the fields in Unify. It supports both custom HTML and customer CSS.
As well as the updates discussed here, we have also added API improvements, RFV modelling updates, new connectors via the BlueVenn Unify DataSync tool, a new SMS channel integration to dotdigital CPaas and an updated Salesforce Marketing Cloud channel connector.
For more information and to see some of the new functionality in action watch the BlueVenn Marketing Hub 2020.2 Update video, or speak to your Account Director to discuss a demo of any new or existing functionality.
BlueVenn 2020.2 Release Video
