Omnichannel platform, email, 360 profile view, etc. : discover all our H1 2023 new features

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.

Email automations, unified 360 profile view to centralise all your user data, Web Push iOS 16.4 support, etc.

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

• Profile: to centralise all your customer data that enables personalised communications on each CRM channel.
• Engage: to help you manage all your customer engagement scenarios on all channels efficiently.
• Messaging: to enable you to activate all your channels from the same interface under the best possible conditions.

To meet the omnichannel CRM requirements, we restructured our teams into dedicated multidisciplinary teams called squads. To get this restructuration's behind the scene, read our CTO Hervé Lourdin dedicated blog post.

New Profile Features

Before going further, let’s remember the Profile Squad’s core mission: centralising all your customer data to enable personalised communications on each CRM channel.

For the first half of 2023, all the new Profiles features are:

• New omnichannel data model;
• New profiles concept;
• Profile view on the dashboard;
• Targeting for the email channel;
• Automatic deletion of inactive profiles.

Batch's new data model, the cornerstone of our omnichannel platform

Before we walk you through all the new Profile features, let’s take a step back.

To make Batch’s omnichannel pivot strategy a reality, our tech and product teams had to completely overhaul our data model.

This model was incredibly relevant for our previous mobile-centric engagement platform as it established a clear separation between Android, iOS and web users, by storing their data in silos. But we had to completely transform this data model.

Integrating a new channel like emailing was not the only challenge we faced. We sought to break down these data silos, enabling unified user data exploitation, regardless of their collection source or the CRM channel.

And that is how we came up with the Profile concept.

Profile to centralise all your user data

In the Batch platform, a Profile is the compilation of user data and events from several sources (apps, websites, APIs) that is enriched and updated in real time.

Each profile also stores emails and email subscriptions associated with a user. Profiles thus enable the Batch platform to operate complex and cross-channel scenarios.

All user actions are consolidated within these profiles whether they come from a mobile phone, the back-end via our APIs, or from your other marketing tools via connectors.

Use cases and customer benefits

Concretely, our profiles enable you to:

• manage very large volumes of data in real time – from collection to activation through reconciliation and ingestion, meaning you can quickly react to events and user behaviours;
• create multi-touch user journeys. Let's take the abandoned cart scenario as an example. With Batch, if a customer adds an item to their online cart and doesn't purchase it immediately, you can schedule an email reminder two days later. However, if they buy the item on the web, mobile or in store in the meantime, our omnichannel data model automatically cancels the reminder. That means, only relevant reminders are sent.

Note 1: The very first Batch channel to benefit from this new feature is emailing.

Note 2: If you’re a Batch client and you have already sent us data via our APIs and/or SDKs to manage your push notification and in-app scenarios, this data feeds the profiles and can be used to manage your email scenarios.

New dashboard profile view

Our product and tech teams executed this major Profile innovation on the Batch dashboard with the dashboard profile view, the 360° view of these unique profiles.

The profile view includes:

• all user attributes;
• all information about a user’s email subscription status;
• all tracked event history for a user.

Email targeting

Reconciling all this data in the pursuit of one goal: empowering your marketing scenarios with automation and personalisation capabilities.

All attributes stored on profiles are available for email targeting.

You can already select an entry and exit event for email automation (see the new Engage features section below).

You can now add one or more filters: subscription status, newsletter topic, loyalty points, etc.

Automatic deletion of inactive profiles

We can’t talk about data storage and activation without addressing data privacy and GDPR compliance.

Batch has always provided GDPR compliance tools via dedicated APIs, SDK methods or interfaces on the dashboard. In particular, these tools mean you can delete user data.

Data can be deleted at the explicit request of an end user, or when our clients consider that it’s no longer necessary to collect this data. Many of our clients have implemented a data purging process based on custom criteria determined with their technical teams.

Thanks to data centralisation (explained above), we have a holistic view of user activity. We want to make the most of this unified vision to facilitate the data purging process.

Our clients can simply put a period of inactivity after which a profile will be deleted from the Batch platform, without the need for any additional intervention from their technical teams.

This enables our clients to:

• retain profile data for a reasonable period;
• provide relevant statistics based on profiles.

New Engage features

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.).

The new Messaging features

The Messaging Squad’s aim is to enable you to activate all your channels from the same interface under the best possible conditions.

By conditions, we don’t just mean ensuring your productivity and efficiency as Batch platform users. We also want to provide the best experience for your customers who interact with your brand and your universe.

Our new Messaging products since the start of the year (listed below) are mostly focused on the email channel:

• Email composer;
• Email personalisation;
• Email routing;
• Email reporting;
• iOS 16.4 web push notification support.

Email composer

When we launched the email channel last year, we collected a lot of customer feedback. Our clients asked us to provide them with a feature where they could create and compose an email from the Batch platform.

And so, the Batch email composer brings together all the essential conditions to ensure an optimal composition experience that combines creativity and productivity and enables you to:

• design templates from start to finish, using drag & drop, without the need to code a single line;
• create responsive emails, compatible with all email media;
• manage and create pre-saved blocks to save time when creating emails;
• properly preview and test its final content.

All these actions are now possible on the Batch interface, whether you design your emails within Batch or elsewhere.

One of the strengths of this email composer is design flexibility. It unleashes your creativity and makes you stand out from the crown with your email formats and content.

Our clients can enjoy creative freedom on two counts:

• the variety of components available;
• the ability to create interactive emails.

To gain in speed and expand the functional scope of our composition brick, Batch's product and tech teams worked on major technical components in email editing and display compatibility with different email inboxes.

After exhaustive benchmark testing and the assessment of multiple tools, our teams ultimately decided to integrate Stripo, a technology that meets all our criteria. This technology produces clean HTML code in a single email template, meaning you can adapt to different email inboxes.

Email personalisation

Email content is incredibly rich. And that opens up endless possibilities when it comes to personalisation scenarios.

With Batch's Email composer, you can now add all data platform personalisation variables to the email content: name, country, age, order number, etc.

One of the legitimate fears our clients may have that is the personalisation scenarios on the email channel are too complex. At Batch, we strive to break down those entry barriers, thus keeping the use of email channels as simple as our other push notification and in-app channels.

As such, you will very soon be able to create conditional blocks from Batch’s email composer and thus easily add personalisation variables: links, images, text, and so on. In fact, that’s what our clients already do on push notification and in-app channels.

Email routing

Yes, it’s a less visible, but it’s still a key part of our product. Email routing is essential to support your transactional use cases and the email sending experience.

For a little context: like many email service providers (ESP) on the market, Batch works with a router called Sparkpost for the last part of email sending.

With this technology, our platform manages:

• connections to receiving servers;
• deliverability challenges;
• sending infrastructure scaling: from IPs distribution to bandwidth and traffic management.

Over the first half of the year, we have reviewed our entire integration with this router and have streamlined and automated our processes, meaning more control.

As for bandwidth and speed, we have also optimised our sending chain to anticipate the higher volumes of email campaigns mentioned earlier in the new Engage features section.

Email reporting

We have also released new features so you can analyse and compare all your email campaigns statistics, in an exportable formats so that you can rework them on your own tools.

We are also working on an interface so you can view all your statistics using attractive data visualisation. In this interface, you will also find exports for messages sent, received, opened, clicks, etc.

iOS 16.4 web push notifications

It's a feature release that we absolutely had to share and our clients are already benefiting from it in terms of reach and open rates.

Since Apple's beta release, we’ve been able to provide web push notification support for a few months now on Safari Mobile.

You can target this additional audience directly from the Campaign Builder, the brand-new centralised interface mentioned in the new Engage features section above.