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Blueshift: Campaign Automation

Blueshift's response to Questions on Campaign Automation in the RFP Guide

Overview: Blueshift offers a Visual Campaign Builder for cross-channel campaigns. Key differentiators of the solution include:

  • Real-time decisioning and non-linear journeys: Trigger journeys based on real-time segments and events. Filter customers at each step using event attributes to create non-linear journeys
  • Linked to cross-channel identities: Known and anonymous customer behavior brought together coupled with cross-channel identity (email address, mobile, etc.)
  • AI powered: Machine learning based recommendations and predictive scores included
    Visual Campaign Orchestration: Marketers can orchestrate cross-channel journeys visually
  • Custom-Goal tracking with Attribution: Track the entire journey in one place. Go beyond opens and clicks and track conversion metrics that are custom to your business.
  • Timing optimization: Advanced controls for day-parting & AI powered engagement time optimization built-in

Blueshift's Responses to Questions on Campaign Automation

Campaign Orchestration

1. Does your solution provide visual customer journey mapping to orchestrate multi-stage, multi-logic sequence of messages that execute across channels?

Yes, Blueshift provides a visual campaign journey builder where marketers can easily create anything from a single-message, one-time send to sophisticated, automated lifecycle journeys. For example, marketers can quickly create and launch recurring campaigns, such as a weekly newsletter, as well as sophisticated multi-stage, multi-condition, multi-template variant lifecycle campaigns that incorporate multiple channels and adapt the subsequent message a user receives in response to their affinities and most recent behaviors.

As an example, let's take a look at how you can build a sophisticated multi-stage, multi-condition lifecycle campaign, such as a re-engagement/win-back campaign series, using our visual campaign journey builder. You can start by designing a journey flow, where the eligible audience segment consists of at-risk users (i.e., users that haven't interacted with the brand or campaigns within the past 30 days). As users enter this segment in real-time, they will automatically flow into this re-engagement/win-back campaign series. You can easily set up multiple, distinct paths/branches with business logic for each branch that looks at the user's channel affinity so that a user is automatically sent down the path with communications in the user's highest engaged channel (i.e., email, SMS, push, in-app, etc.). Within each path/branch, you can also use the previous channel interaction data (i.e., open, click) to adapt and dictate how many follow-up touchpoints the user should receive. For example, if the user has already received 2 re-engagement messages without any user's interaction, you can either remove this user from this user journey or test a different message offer for the next re-engagement touchpoint. Similarly, if the user has received 2 re-engagement messages and has viewed/clicked on these messages, the previous engagement data shows the user's interest/intent and you can then immediately act on this intent by sending a follow up re-engagement touchpoint with an enticing offer that will hopefully get the user to take action on this offer.

Let's take a look at another example of a sophisticated, multi-step, multi-condition, multi-channel post purchase campaign series. In this campaign series, you will initially send an order confirmation email. After a few days have elapsed, you can send a follow up post purchase email that includes recommended products to upsell/cross sell that are derived from using a recommendation scheme that is built using our AI-based recommendation studio. After a delay of a few more days, if the user has not interacted (i.e., open, click, or purchase) with the previous post purchase email, then email channel may not be the right channel for the user and you can use this opportunity to test alternative channels. Thus, for the next touchpoint in this post purchase campaign series, you can setup 3 different branches, with each branch representing a different channel (i.e., SMS, push, in-app). Within each branch, you can apply business logic to check which of these alternative channels that the user is mostly likely to engage with so that for the next touchpoint in this user journey, the user automatically receives a message based on the user's channel of choice to drive high engagement.

[Additional information on campaign journeys] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002722374-Campaigns)

2. Can your solution trigger messages across multiple channels simultaneously from one journey, including across email, mobile, web, in-app, push, messaging, customer support, and offline channels?

Yes, Blueshift offers a truly omnichannel orchestration and execution platform. Blueshift's intuitive, visual journey builder allows marketers to easily design campaigns and users journeys that can incorporate every marketing channel as well as other customer experience (CX) channels and applications. Our App Hub and Cloud Apps allow marketers to integrate Blueshift with their existing tech stack, extend into any existing channels that the marketers already use, and activate their customer data and AI-powered, personalized messaging (predictive scores and content recommendations) across all of their touchpoints within a unified user journey. This allows marketers to design omnichannel user journeys that go beyond email, push, SMS, website, and in-app to include other apps and channels across the customer's tech ecosystem, including messaging, customer support, chat, direct mail, IVR, CRM, analytics and BI tools, and in-house apps.

[Additional information on our Cloud App Studio] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418387740307-Cloud-App-Studio-overview)

Blueshift also integrates with digital advertising paid media channels such as Facebook, Google, Criteo, and numerous other partners across display, social, paid search, mobile, video, and OTT. Using Blueshift, marketers can better optimize their media budgets and improve their acquisition and reengagement campaigns by creating highly-targeted, higher converting audiences based on their first-party data (instead of simply using cookie or third-party data) and automatically syncing those audiences to their paid media partners for more precise targeting. More specifically, marketers can easily create and sync precise audiences based on affinities, intents (predictive scores), website online behaviors, mobile app behavior, campaign engagement trends, and other attributes.

[Additional information on audience syndications] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002727814-Syndications)

3. Can journeys dynamically adapt subsequent messages in response to customer interactions, including interactions on other channels?

Yes. Blueshift provides an intuitive visual journey builder which allows marketers to have full access to user data at the individual level, including CRM user attributes, previous channel engagement data, online and mobile behavioral data, previous user interactions with the brand, and real-time interactions from across channels. By leveraging this data, marketers can design a more intelligent and adaptive user journey, that takes place across more channels, and where a user can go down different paths based on their data attributes, previous behavior, and/or campaign/brand interactions and where the next touchpoint is adapted to them based on this data.

[Additional information on our campaign journey builder] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408703877523-Overview)

4. Can your workflow trigger a webhook or an API call to another solution? Describe how that is done.

Yes, Blueshift gives your external and internal systems real-time access to any data in the user profiles and those systems can also be triggered through a set of robust web services REST API. More specifically, your external and internal systems can query our user profiles using our User API. And, using our our event webhook capability, user campaign engagement data (i.e. delivered, opened, clicked) can be easily accessed by your external systems in real-time. Additionally, Blueshift’s Cloud App channel allows marketers to integrate other channels and new marketing/web technologies and orchestrate these additional channels within their unified, omnichannel customer journeys. For example, using our Cloud App channel, marketers can orchestrate messaging in messaging app channels, such as FB Messenger and WhatsApp, support channels, such as Zendesk and Slack, or any other marketing or CX apps that has an external REST API that we can access, along with their email, SMS, push, in-app, and website to ensure a consistent experience for your users regardless of channel.

Additional information on our Webhook and Cloud Apps capability:
https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408365258131-Email-via-Webhook
https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408373459859-SMS-via-Webhook
https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418387740307-Cloud-App-Studio-overview

Campaign Management

5. Describe your solutions abilities to schedule messages and recurring campaigns. Can campaigns be paused, rescheduled, and/or modified?

Yes, Blueshift provides a visual campaign journey builder where marketers can easily create anything from a single one time campaign, scheduled and recurring campaigns, or more sophisticated, automated customer lifecycle journeys based on dynamic segments or user behavior (i.e., event). For example, marketers can quickly create and launch recurring campaigns, such as a weekly newsletter, as well as sophisticated multi-stage, multi-condition, multi-template variant lifecycle campaigns that incorporate multiple channels and adapt the subsequent message a user receives in response to their affinities and most recent behaviors. All campaigns can be paused, rescheduled, edited/modified, and cloned for reusability.

[Additional information on our campaign journey builder] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408703877523-Overview)

6. Does your solution enable frequency capping? Can you limit the total number of communications sent globally and/or by user in certain timeframe?

Yes. Blueshift provides various options for controlling the cadence and frequency of messages that can be sent to an individual user to prevent over-messaging and "message fatigue". At the account level, we support global frequency capping settings. [Additional information on account settings] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002653434-Account-Settings#h_01EKWVQQ1HXRBK0WH500BE08PJ)

Blueshift also provides the flexibility to control message frequency settings at the individual campaign level, to override the global frequency settings. Finally, marketers can also use the previous messaging frequency as a way to determine if a user should be included or excluded from a campaign.

7. Does your solution provide support for day-parting (i.e. limiting triggered messages to go out only on certain days and times)?

Yes, Blueshift provides day-parting, allowing marketers to specify which times of the day to send triggered campaigns so that users aren't messaged at undesirable times. Day-parting can be set for the user or account time zone.

[Additional information on Blueshift's day-parting capability] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002745213-Dayparting)

8. Does your solution allow you to set priority level at the campaign level and at the message level?

Yes, Blueshift provides campaign prioritization capability allowing marketers to prioritize campaigns and campaign messages to reach their customers at the right time on the right channel with highly relevant and personalized campaign messages when the customer is actively in market. When you have multiple campaigns running concurrently where a single user may be eligible for more than one campaign on any given day, you can use the 'campaign prioritization' feature in Blueshift to ensure that a user only receives one campaign that day: the one with the highest ROI. With this feature you can eliminate user confusion and frustration arising from similar messages with slightly different content.

[Additional information on our campaign prioritization capability] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500003878802-Campaign-Prioritization)

9. Does your solution provide a calendar view of all past and future campaigns?

Yes, Blueshift provides a comprehensive calendar view of your upcoming and past campaigns across channels. Marketers can view a calendar by campaign status, author, tags, channels, and campaign types. They will have visibility to see all upcoming campaigns that are scheduled to be launched in the future as well as sorting based on near-term campaigns that will run in the next scheduled run.

Additional information on our campaign calendar] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500012687882-Campaign-calendar)

Triggered Automations

10. Describe what rules and triggers exist to automate lifecycle and transactional campaigns within the campaign workflow.

Blueshift provides an intuitive visual journey builder for marketers to easily create, launch, and refine any number of automated, intelligent, multi-touch, omnichannel lifecycle campaigns, including welcome/onboarding, retention/win-back, promotional, transactional, and other engagement and purchase driving omnichannel experiences. For building rules and triggers, Blueshift allows marketers to have full access to user data at the individual level, including CRM user attributes, previous channel engagement data, online and mobile behavioral data, previous user interactions with the brand, and real-time interactions from across channels. Thus, marketers can design a more intelligent and adaptive user journey, that takes place across more channels, and where a user can go down different paths based on the user's data attributes, previous behavior, or campaign/brand interaction and where the next touchpoint can similarly be dictated based on this data.

[Additional information on our visual builder] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408703877523-Overview)

11. Describe your solution's abilities to trigger responses and communications across channels based on user behaviors, events, states, and other defined criteria as well as changes in product data, status, and pricing.

Blueshift offers advanced capabilities to trigger communications across channels -- including email, SMS, mobile push, in-app and other channels via Cloud Apps -- based on any user behaviors, user state changes, events, transactional status changes, and more. Segment triggered campaigns can trigger in real-time a single communication or series of communications when a user enters the segment by meeting the segment definition. Alternatively, Blueshift has the ability to auto-generate and trigger communications based on real-time user behavior or changes in product data, status, state, pricing, or any other product catalog changes. For example, we can identify any changes in the product catalog and use these product status changes to automatically trigger communications for scenarios such as price drop, back in stock, customer feedback/survey, etc., where there are real-time changes in the product catalog.

[Additional information on segment triggered campaigns] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408704090003#h_01FJ3VS5T7F35QJW9AV457YQNB)

[Additional information on how to trigger communications based on product catalog changes] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010962093-Derived-Events)

12. Can your solution trigger a response to buyer behavior in real time, not just based on the campaign schedule?

Yes, event triggered campaigns are initiated based on a specific real-time buyer behavior (e.g., sign_up, purchase, etc.). For example, a sign_up event can trigger a series of welcome messages that are spread out over time (days, weeks, etc.). Similarly, a purchase event can trigger an order confirmation message with subsequent follow up messages that include cross sell/upsell offers and/or product recommendations (i.e., recommended products that you may like, etc.) using our recommendation studio to drive an additional purchase.

[Additional information on event triggered campaigns] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002723334-Event-Triggered)

13. Can your solution trigger campaign workflows from a specific event? Can you trigger from a specific property in an event?

Yes. Blueshift offers advanced capabilities to trigger campaign workflows across multiple channels, including email, mobile push, in-app, SMS, onsite, 3rd-party applications, and paid media channels. With Blueshift, marketers can automatically trigger contextually relevant, timely messages in any channel in response to customers’ behaviors in another channel (i.e. an onsite transaction can trigger an order confirmation email and SMS). More specifically, our platform uses a combination of user metadata, transactions, browsing behaviors, and catalog/content changes to trigger messages based on the set criteria as soon as a desired event occurs. Marketers then have the ability to define the event (i.e. sign up, add to cart, etc.) that triggers the campaign, the sequence of messages that will be triggered, the content included, which channels the messages will be delivered on, and any other parameter needed.

In addition, marketers have total flexibility in using event properties as triggers e.g. trigger a follow-up message only if the add_to_cart event contains a specific product_id. You can be get as granular and as specific as you want while using event properties as triggers. Event-triggered campaigns can then be built using Blueshift's visual campaign builder and can include multiple stages, multiple branchings that span across multiple channels to provide a consistent, personalized omnichannel user experience.

[Additional information on event triggers as well as other types of campaigns] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002723334-Event-Triggered)

Updated over 1 year ago