Engage features: what’s new on the Batch platform (H1 2023)

The first half of 2023 is coming to an end and it’s time to share with you all the new Batch platform features since the start of the year.

With Batch’s new positioning as a 360 customer engagement platform, our teams divided these new features into three key areas: Profile, Engage and Messaging.

To meet the omnichannel CRM requirements, we restructured our teams into dedicated multidisciplinary teams called squads.

This article covers all the new features in H1 2023 from the Engage Squad. Read on to find out about other major innovations on the Batch platform: new profile and messagingfeatures.

The Engage Squad’s aim is simple: to help you manage all your customer engagement scenarios on all channels efficiently.

For this first half of 2023, we very much focused on the email channel. As such, the new Engage features are:

• Email automation;
• Email campaigns;
• Recurring emails;
• New dashboard.

Email automations

This feature is a major innovation for this first half of 2023, and it’s no understatement when we say just how proud our teams are of this feature!

Here at Batch, automations are scenarios that enable you to listen to an event and potentially wait for a set time, before sending a message. In other words, they are event-based scenarios that listen to an event and react in a personalised way.

For our omnichannel CRM platform, it was essential to equip the email channel with trigger automation as soon as possible. But we also had to maintain high UI standards to ensure ease of use and operational autonomy for our clients, without the need to rely on their technical teams.

To give you this orchestration power, we provide you with several key features on the email channel.

These features are already the strength of the push orchestrations, acclaimed by our clients, and enabling them to closely control and filter the messages to be sent:

1. Filtering: You can apply a filter for an event field (for example, a product category) to avoid listening to all events.
2. Grace period: Prevents a person from receiving messages too frequently. This potentially means that a person cannot receive an abandoned cart message more than once every three days.
3. Cancel events: Essential in deciding not to send a message to anyone who is on the fence. Why so? Because other events may have taken place in their customer journey, making the message useless and potentially damaging the customer relationship. In the case of an abandoned cart scenario, the cancel event will be a purchase, which will cancel the reminder to the person given that they placed a purchase in the meantime.
4. Timer: You can set up a simple timer such as wait one day, but you can also look for a date in the event and give the command: “Take this date and wait one more day” or “One day less than this date” to refine the waiting time.
5. Capping: Limits the number of messages an individual will receive.

Of the many email automations use cases, there are marketing optimisation campaigns in particular. However, there are also transactional/service messages, such as order confirmations.

These use cases that are covered in the Batch interface because there is a toggle that enables you to specify whether you want to send the messages to:

• Opt-in individuals, as is most commonly the case;
• Opt-in and opt-out individuals still in your customer database, for these transactional/service use cases.

Our clients who currently use automations on the push notifications channels will see that this interface is not the same as the one they currently have. This new interface is called automation builder.

In terms of functionality, the interface is similar to what you can have with push notifications, but it paves the way for future omnichannel use cases and multi-step scenarios.

Email campaigns

The second orchestration feature in the first half of 2023 is email campaigns. It enables you to send immediate or scheduled email campaigns that target individuals.

Among the numerous key use cases covered by email campaigns, you have:

• Special offers;
• Key shopping events such as sales, Black Friday-Cyber Monday, or Mother's Day;
• Critical events where emails are sent to the entire database — including opt-outs — for special communications that concern everyone (for example, database leaks, updates to general conditions of sale, etc.).

In addition to managing these use cases, some other specificities related to email targeting include:

• Profile targeting. Profiles can contain multiple profiles with the same email address depending on imports. We talk more about this in a special article.

• Of course, you shouldn’t send the same email several times to the same person. So to address this issue, we manage data deduplication natively in the Batch platform.

• Email domain targeting. Here, the key use case is in the context of degraded deliverability on an inbox provider such as Gmail. The aim being to lower the volume of messages sent to people with Gmail addresses. We will thus exclude them from certain campaigns to lower the volume, before gradually increasing this it. The opposite use case would be to target Gmail addresses because Gmail allows special interactions in emails that only work on Gmail.

Recurring emails

Together with campaigns, we also enable recurring emails, which are similar from a technical standpoint.

Like their equivalents on push notification channels, automated recurring emails work in a very similar way to campaigns. The difference, however, is that we will configure the campaign to send the email at a given frequency: every day, every week, with a start date, end date, etc.

In terms of use cases, our clients use it a lot right now for credit card expirations, expired subscriptions, etc.

New dashboard

Our dashboard is currently divided up into applications, with the list of applications in the top-left of the image below.

The new dashboard breaks down this list of applications, grouping them into coherent blocks called projects.

Let’s take the example of Prisma Media (shown above). It uses Batch’s interface and divides its projects up by media brands (Cuisine Actuelle, Télé-loisirs, Voici, etc.).