Blueshift: Channels

Blueshift's response to Questions on Channels in the RFP Guide

Overview: Blueshift natively supports the following digital channels:

  • Email
  • SMS
  • Mobile Push
  • In-App Messaging
  • Web Personalization

Beyond these native channels, Blueshift's Cloud App functionality allows you to extend these capabilities to include other any other channel or system that has a REST API.

Blueshift's Responses to Questions on Channels

Email

1. Describe your solution's ability to support email.

Blueshift provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for managing your email campaigns, from email template creation, design, personalization, audience segmentation, campaign execution, and campaign analysis. We support a number of different types of email campaigns including triggered sends based on customer behavior, recurring, transactional (i.e. order confirmations, password reset), one-time sends (i.e. seasonal announcements), and lifecycle campaigns (i.e., welcome series, re-engagement series, etc.). Each campaign workflow can include multiple steps, decision trees, and template variants with personalized content and recommendations for each customer. Full email template authoring and testing capabilities are also available within the Blueshift platform.


2. Are dedicated IPs available? Do you provide IP health monitoring?

Yes, Blueshift provides dedicated IP(s) to all customers. We do not put any customers on shared IPs. Moreover, Blueshift is focused on highly performant email delivery at scale, and dedicated IP infrastructure is the first step to building a positive ESP reputation. As part of our implementation services, Blueshift will assist with IP warming to initially build reputation with major ESPs in order to provide the best delivery results possible.

[Additional information on IP warming] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002759114-Email-Deliverability-Best-Practices#IP)


3. Does your solution provide deliverability reporting?

Yes, Blueshift provides deliverability reporting at the user level, individual campaign level, and campaign aggregate level. Our platform collects data on bounce rate, including cause analysis, through a webhook notification each time a user interacts with a marketing email. The notifications sent are open, click, unsubscribe, bounce, and delivered. Deliverability data can be viewed within Blueshift or easily exported for reporting.


4. Does your solution provide SPAM scores for email templates and messages?

On our near term product roadmap in 2023, we will have spam scores available within the Blueshift UI.


5. Does your solution have the ability to throttle send, and can you adjust throttle post deployment?

Yes, Blueshift allows marketers to setup and adjust campaign throttling, specifying the maximum number of messages to be sent as a part of a campaign.

[Additional information on campaign properties] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408718054291-Define-Campaign-Properties)


Mobile

6. Describe your solution's ability to support SMS messaging.

Blueshift provides comprehensive support for SMS messaging and integrates with leading SMS delivery partners, such as Sinch, Twilio, Attentive, Mobiniti, mPulse, Infobip, and Gupshup for message delivery. We provide an SMS visual editor for marketers to easily setup SMS message and SMS messages can be orchestrated within our journey builder. Statistics and metrics from SMS/MMS messages are displayed within the Blueshift dashboard to provide marketers with a clear understanding of the performance of their mobile campaigns.

[Additional information on our SMS editor] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4417922260115-SMS-Studio-overview)
[Additional information on our SMS partners] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/sections/360010508714-SMS)


7. Describe your solution's ability to support mobile push notifications.

Blueshift provides comprehensive support for creating and managing push campaigns. We support various mobile push notification types including simple text-only, messages with static images or content, and “rich push” that could include image carousels, action buttons, personalized recommendations, and deep-links. Blueshift also supports the capability to include dynamic content from external servers that is fetched “just in time” before sending a push notification.

[Additional information on the various rich push notification formats that we support] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002727534-Rich-Push-Studio#Rich)


8. Describe your solution's ability to support in-app messaging. Which in-app template types are supported?

The Blueshift In-App studio provides an easy-to-use interface for creating engaging in-app content. Once an in-app message has been created, it can be used in the campaign journey editor along with content for other channels like email, push, SMS, cloud apps etc. to execute a multi-channel engagement strategy. Blueshift supports a number of in-app message types, including slide in, modal, custom HTML, which can be customized using our visual editor without any coding. Blueshift’s In-App studio provides an easy-to-use, WYSIWYG interface for creating engaging in-app content.

[Additional information on our in-app message capability] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036978914-In-App-Studio)


Other Channels

9. Describe your solution's abilities to support personalized content and product recommendations on-site.

Blueshift provides a simple, intuitive way to apply personalized dynamic content and product recommendations on the website via our Live Content capability. It works the same way as you would personalize content across channels such as email and mobile. Within the Live Content template, you can easily personalize the web personalization content (i.e., title/headline) based on any user data attributes. Furthermore, you can control what content is shown based on any user data attributes by creating an audience segment with the user data attributes/browsing behavior and assigning that audience segment to a Live Content campaign. Hence, marketers can personalize on a 1:1 basis by recommending products based on user's browsing behaviour. For example, you may want to show different content based on the user's lifetime value (LTV). For users with a LTV > $500, you can setup a Live Content campaign that shows a Free Shipping offer, whereas for users with a LTV < $500, you can setup a different Live Content campaign that shows a 15% discount along with Free Shipping offer to provide additional incentive to purchase.

[Additional information on our Live Content capability] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002712373-Live-Content)


10. Describe your solution's abilities to create, update, and syndicate a custom audience to digital ad platforms such as Facebook, Google, etc.
Blueshift 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, to help marketers optimize their media budgets and improve their acquisition and reengagement campaigns by targeting precise audiences based on their first-party data (instead of simply using cookie or third-party data). More specifically, marketers can easily create highly-targeted audiences within Blueshift based on affinities, intents (predictive scores), website online behaviors, mobile app behavior, campaign engagement trends, and other attributes and automatically sync those audiences to their paid media partners for more precise targeting. Once synced, audiences automatically update as segment membership changes.

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


11. Describe your solution's ability to support consumer messaging apps.

Blueshift allows marketers to create campaigns and omnichannel user journeys that support messaging apps. Using our Cloud App channel, marketing teams can orchestrate messaging channels, including FB Messenger, WhatsApp, or any other systems 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 users across channels.

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


12. Describe your solution's ability to to support direct mail.

Blueshift has a direct integration with digital direct mail partners, Lob (https://lob.com/) and Inkit (https://www.inkit.com/) that allows marketers to orchestrate direct mailers with other channels within the same campaign workflow. To support your other direct mail fulfillment partners, Blueshift provides the ability to export and download any customer data from the Blueshift platform through file transfers (i.e. Amazon S3, secure FTP, etc.). These files can then be sent to your preferred direct mail partner for fulfillment.


13. Describe your solution's ability to support in-store touchpoints (e.g., digital signage, kiosks, point-of-sale terminals).

Our Cloud App capability allows your marketers to reach your customers within your in-store touchpoints and orchestrate these channels along with your other communication channels, such as email, SMS, push, in-app, and website, to ensure a consistent experience for your users regardless of channel. [Additional information on our Cloud App channel] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418387740307-Cloud-App-Studio-overview)

In addition, Blueshift offers an API (i.e., Live Content API) for developers to programmatically retrieve 1:1 personalized product and content recommendations for each customer via our Live Content capability that can then be delivered to your in-store touchpoints at the right time. [Additional information on Live Content] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001548894-Live-Content) . The product and content recommendations retrieved from Live Content can then be used to personalize any customer communication channels, including website, chatbot, internal consumer messaging app, OTT, digital signage, kiosks, POS terminals, etc.

Furthermore, data from your offline data sources, such as POS, can be sent to us in batch mode via flat file transfers (i.e. Amazon S3, secure FTP, etc.) that can be setup one-time as recurring, automated import jobs. As part of onboarding, we can use this same approach to setup a one-time import job to ingest your users' past historical transactional data (i.e., purchases, subscriptions, etc.) so that you have a complete view of your users. With Blueshift, you have visibility of both the users' past and present behavior. Once data is ingested into Blueshift, this data is immediately available for use by marketers to drive downstream marketing processes, such as segmentation, campaign orchestration, and personalized recommendations and is accessible to other business users. [Additional information on how Blueshift ingests data] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405429180947-Data-Ingestion)


14. Describe your solution's ability to add new channels.

Blueshift’s Cloud App channel allows marketing teams to seamlessly integrate additional channels and new marketing/web technologies and orchestrate these additional channels within their omnichannel customer journeys.

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