Hello everyone! Welcome back to the Net-Results blog, the home of the latest-and-greatest platform updates and exciting announcements from yours truly, Adam, Director of Product.
We’ve accomplished so much in the last few weeks and we’re excited to announce new features, enhancements, and resolved issues. Let’s get to it!
Did you miss our last Platform Update from November 2020? Have no fear, click here!
Here are some of the highlights:
- Multi-Tabbed Excel Campaign Report
- Campaign Goals
- More Improvements to Campaigns
- A Plethora of Platform Enhancements
- Issues Resolved
Multi-Tabbed Excel Campaign Report
We’ve had many requests to provide a more thorough set of information in campaign reports. It has pained us to hear how some of you had to download a .csv of contacts who opened an email, another of those that clicked, etc., only to then compile all of that together for your internal reporting needs.
Today we rolled out a new report – an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs – that should go a long way toward eliminating that tedious effort.
At the upper right on the Campaign Performance Dashboard, there’s a button labeled “Download Excel.” The report behind this button now delivers a pretty comprehensive set of data about your campaign.
You’ll find that the spreadsheet (which opens just as well in Google Sheets as it does in Microsoft Excel) contains the following tabs:
- Summary (mirrors the high-level data you see on the Campaign Performance Dashboard)
- My List (if you sent your campaign to the members of multiple lists, this tab breaks down campaign performance for each of those lists. FYI: If a contact is a member of > 1 of those lists, they will be counted on each of those lists on this tab)
- By Domain (a breakdown of stats by domain—and no longer limited to just the top 10 domains, this shows them all)
- By Branch
- Links Clicked (a summary of the click activity of each link in your email)
- Qualified (details for each individual that qualified for your campaign)
- Sent
- Opens
- Clicks
- Unsubscribes
- Bounces
- Spam Reports
We’re now working to attach this Excel Spreadsheet to the campaign reports you can schedule to run daily, weekly, monthly, or run “Immediately” on demand.
Longer-term, we’ll be proving the ability for you to choose which standard and custom fields appear in the spreadsheet.
More Improvements to Campaigns
Form Action: Remove from Campaign
Building on the recently released ability to remove contacts from a campaign when a Campaign Goal is achieved, you are now able to remove contacts from a campaign when a form is submitted.
Goal Action: Add to Campaign
If you want to leverage automation to help move prospects along in your marketing and sales funnels, this announcement is for you.
Last week we announced Campaign Goals, a new feature that allows you to remove prospects from Drip and Nurture campaigns when they achieve any of the “goals” of that Campaign. Today we’re happy to announce a new capability for Campaign Goals: Add to Campaign.
As of today, when a lead achieves one of your goals you can both remove them from that campaign and simultaneously add them to the next campaign. This makes it super easy to model your workflows to real customer journeys.
Have you checked out the excellent Customer Journey Worksheets we just released? Map your Customer Journey and gain a better understanding of what your leads are looking for. Download here.
Add to Campaign API Call
We’ve also made the new Add to Campaign capability available as a method in the JSON API. Contact::addToCampaign, in combination with Contact::removeFromCampaign, gives your technical team the ability to map your internal processes to marketing workflows with ease!
Ability to “Wait” Before Taking Initial Actions in Nurturing Campaigns
Until now, a workaround has been required in order to delay the actions in the first branch of a nurturing campaign. We’re happy to let you know that such workarounds are no longer required.
You’ll find that the option to “wait” now appears for the initial branch as it always has with other branches.
Campaign Goals
We’re quite excited to announce the addition of Campaign Goals to the platform. Campaign Goals allow you to remove contacts from a campaign when they meet conditions of your choosing!
You may now create Goals, decide which conditions must be met for your Goals to be “achieved”, and have Net-Results take various actions automatically when a Goal is achieved.
We’re launching this feature with 2 Goal Actions: Remove from Campaign and Add to List. And we’ve already made great progress toward an additional Goal Action – we expect to release “Add to Campaign” in short order!
Campaign Goals are a fantastic addition that will enable you to automate workflows with greater ease and clarity.
Campaign Branches
Here’s a great new feature to make your life easier: the ability to move campaign branches!
This enables you to add new branches and insert them where you choose when creating a nurturing campaign. Re-order branches and shift them around! No need to backtrack if requirements change. Get all the details about moving campaign branches in the Knowledge Base.
Dynamic Email Content from Custom Objects
You can now inject or “mail merge” values from fields in Custom Objects into your emails that leverage dynamic content!
The dynamic content feature already allows you to evaluate contacts based on fields in custom objects. Now you can leverage values from the custom object that caused your contact to qualify to dynamically change the text in your emails.
A Refresh of the Net-Results Theme
You may have noticed some visual changes when you signed into Net-Results today! We made several changes to enhance clarity and usability. We would be honored to hear your feedback.
Enhancements:
Campaign Interface Usability
Continuing our focus on enhancing campaign capabilities and experience, today we de-stupified something that needed to go.
When adding branches (or Campaign Goals, which dropped a week or so ago), the interface would insist that you provide a “timeframe” even when in some cases it clearly didn’t make sense to ask you for one. This is now toasted. We also cleaned up the language when timeframes are required to ensure a higher level of clarity.
Faster Campaign Notifications
We sped up the delivery of Campaign Notifications. If you’ve asked a campaign to notify you when Contacts qualify for campaign branch, those notifications will now arrive ~3x faster!
Enhanced Wait Time Options in Nurturing Campaigns
We expanded the options available to you when configuring waits. Where in the past you could choose between hours and days, we’ve added minutes (0 – 59).
We also expanded your choices when waiting for “Days” from 0 – 30 to 0 – 90.
Campaign Report Email Template
We updated the email template used for Campaign Reports.
In the oven: This will soon be followed by substantial enhancements in the data included in Campaign Reports.
Personalized Fields in Test Emails
When you use “Personalized Fields” in your email subject lines, from, or reply-to settings, your personalized values will now be injected when sending test emails using the “Send Test” button in the email builder.
Handling Large Emailed Reports
We added a limit on attachment sizes for Conversation reports (as most email clients reject attachments larger than 20mb—some of you send lots of Conversation emails!)
We added language (and a link) clarifying that these large reports may be retrieved via the Download Center.
LeadScoreOverlay API Method
The LeadScoreOverlay::getAdjustments method allows technical people to retrieve all lead score adjustments made during a given timeframe.
We made several enhancements to this method to make it easier to use:
- The number of records that may be retrieved with a single request was increased to 1,000
- Passing a Segment ID is now optional, allowing you to retrieve all lead score adjustments easily
- The method now includes sensible defaults for sorting so that you do not have to specify result sorting if you don’t care to
Increased Security
We made some changes that increase the security with which connections are made from Net-Results to SendGrid, our email delivery partner.
Hosted Links
All hosted links are now SSL.
Processing of Reports
We completed a backend project to move the processing of reports to our fancy new infrastructure. You can’t directly see the outcome of this, but our engineers are geek-excited about having this one in the bag!
The “new infrastructure” is part of a long-term effort, underway for over a year now, that will culminate in 2021 with a completely new look and interface and a steady stream of new capabilities and enhancements!
Subscription Management Field
If you do not use your own Subscription Management landing page, your visitors will be directed to an attractive, default preference center.
We made a change such that “Select All” and “Select None” buttons in the default subscription preference center are not displayed if you do not leverage Net-Results Subscriptions.
Added Email_id to returned API Method Values
In response to customer requests, we made several API calls related to campaign emails more useful. Specifically, we ensured that the email_id is returned when asking the API who a campaign email was sent to, who opened, clicked. etc.
The API methods enhanced in this update include:
- Campaign::getCampaignSends
- Campaign::getCampaignOpens
- Campaign::getCampaignClicks
- Campaign::getCampaignVisits
- Campaign::getCampaignBounces
- Campaign::getCampaignUnsubscribes
Forms Improved to Accommodate the Latest Browser Privacy Updates
Many popular browsers have recently updated how they handle referring URLs. These changes enhance privacy on the web. We have enhanced Net-Results forms to work in harmony with these changes. This ensures uninterrupted functionality in keeping up-to-date with the latest browser trends!
Tags Now Included in Conversation Report
“Conversations” are one-to-one emails sent via Net-Results. They are commonly triggered via API and used to send transactional emails. Sends, opens, and clicks are all tracked and appear in the Activity Stream for the applicable Contact. Conversation emails may be “tagged” so you can group them for reporting purposes. In this enhancement, the .csv file that comes attached to any Conversation Report now includes a “Tags” column.
Re-Subscribe a Contact via Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and SugarCRM
For Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and SugarCRM: Marking a lead/contact as mailable in your CRM will now re-subscribe the corresponding Contact in Net-Results. Conversely, if we resubscribe a Contact for you, the flag in CRM will be updated as well. The Activity Stream will reflect these updates in each case. This had been seen as a compliance issue in the past. A change in legal interpretation allowed us to bring you this enhancement!
Issues Resolved:
- We resolved an issue that, in rare circumstances, could delay the execution of some campaign actions.
- The data that displays on the Contacts Dashboard is compiled once every 24 hours. We resolved an issue that could cause the dashboard to show “0 Contacts” while that compilation job is running.
- We resolved an issue that could prevent merging of the value from a custom fields of the type “drop down” into an email. The default value was merged rather than the actual value reflected on the contact record.
- We resolved an issue that prevented the use of some relatively new “top level domains” like .agency when subscribing to reports and campaign notifications.
- We resolved an issue that prevented Segments leveraging Custom Objects from being cloned properly.
Downloads Dashboard
A customer reported that the count of downloads for a given asset in the Downloads Dashboard could differ depending on whether a filter was applied to view data for just that asset vs. when viewing data for all assets.
We found that a query was failing to adjust download times based on your local timezone in one of those cases. This meant the timeframe varied across these different views and accounted for the difference. This was resolved and the data is now consistent.
Re-Queue Of Email Events to Salesforce
You may have opted to have email sends, opens, or clicks show up in Salesforce as Tasks/Activities (a capability we added in Q3 2020). Sometimes Salesforce is unable to record those events due to record-locking issues. We’ve made it so that these events are automatically re-queued to be added to Salesforce ensuring they appear once the record is no longer locked.
Lead Scores
We resolve an issue that caused inaccurate lead scores to be reflected in the platform. This impacted ~0.5% of lead contact scores. The issue was eliminated and lead scores adjusted retroactively.
Thank you so much for stopping by! We hope you enjoy these new updates and enhancements!
While we’re at it, please don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to get the latest Net-Results platform updates, marketing tips, marketing automation news, and more!
Happy New Year,
Adam Field
