May Updates

To help you create the right user experience and avoid messaging users with conflicting content on the same day, we now enable Campaign Prioritization for one-time and recurring campaigns. This feature ensures that if you have multiple one-time and recurring campaigns running concurrently, a user that qualifies for multiple campaigns will receive only one message per day from the highest priority campaign they are eligible for that day.

Blueshift determines the priority of a campaign based on the priority of the segment targeted by the campaign. That means to use this feature you first need to assign priority to your segments under the ‘Segments’ index screen. You’ll also need to specify a daily blackout window with your CSM for when Blueshift will compute campaign priority. You’ll want to avoid scheduling campaigns to trigger during this window. Blueshift will then run campaign prioritization on a daily basis. Any campaign that is not selected on a given day will not be queued for messaging the next day, and a fresh prioritization exercise will be run the next day using the campaigns the user is eligible for that day.

Note that this feature does not apply to triggered campaigns. Campaigns with unprioritized segments will work just like any normal campaign. These campaigns will be subject to your account-level, channel-specific messaging limits.

To help improve brand recognition and reduce unsubscribes and spam reports, SMS messages sent through Twilio now support short codes and alphanumeric sender IDs in addition to phone numbers. Now you can use your brand name, instead of a random phone number, when sending out one-way text messages to your customers so they immediately know who the message is from even before reading its content, and are more likely to read and respond to the message.

On the Twilio SMS adapter screen ( Setup → Channels → SMS → Twilio), we have replaced the ‘Phone Number’ field with the ‘From’ field. In this field you can specify a phone number, a short code, or an alphanumeric sender ID.

We now have a direct integration with Facebook Lead Ads so that you can sync newly generated leads from your Facebook Lead Ads with Blueshift and immediately take action on those leads through omnichannel campaigns.

With this integration, you choose which of your Facebook pages to collect leads from. Then when a new lead is submitted from any of the campaigns running on those pages, Blueshift will capture that data with appropriate source value and you can start engaging that user through campaigns orchestrated within the Blueshift platform.

To help you deliver your messages at specific times, we now enable Day Parting for one time and recurring campaigns in addition to event and segment triggered campaigns. Day Parting allows you to specify the times of the day and the days of a week you want your messages to be delivered to your customers. Time slots can be set at either the account time zone (so that every customer will receive the message at the same time) or in the customer’s time zone (so that every customer receives the message at the same time of day based on their time zone).

Note:

For recurring campaigns it is important to understand the difference between execution schedules and delivery schedules. Execution schedule is the frequency with which you want Blueshift to execute your campaigns (e.g. daily, weekly, 1st Monday of the month, last day of the month etc). Delivery schedule is the time of day (or day of the week) you want the customer to receive the message as determined by your day parting schedule.

One-time and recurring campaigns only support single level journeys. If you need to set up multiple touch points in the same journey, you will need to use segment or event triggered campaigns.

To provide you with more options for how to assess the impact of your campaigns, we have introduced a new attribution model called ‘any engagement’. If you choose this option within Account Settings, we will attribute a goal event to a campaign based on any engagement activity we observe. This means that:

• For the email channel, we will attribute a goal event if we observe an open or a click
• For the mobile channels (push, SMS and in-app), we will attribute a goal event if we observe any click since opens aren’t tracked for mobile channels.

With the introduction of this attribution model, you will now have the following attribution models to choose from when setting up your account:

• Any view
• Any click
• Any engagement
• Last click

We have added support for SHA-256 encryption for verification of events coming into Blueshift using event API. You now have the option to use either SHA-256 or the MD5 algorithm for generating signatures for event verification. Existing customers who are using MD5 can continue to use MD5 encryption.

New customers who start using event verification now will all be using SHA-256 by default, and they can switch to MD5 if desired. You can change the encryption algorithm for your account in the Account Settings on the ‘API Keys’ screen.