Messaging 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 Messaging Squad. Read on to find out about the other major innovations on the Batch platform: new profile and engage 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 article.

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 article.