Blueshift: Platform

Overview: Blueshift is built for Enterprise companies with multiple users and multiple websites or apps. We support multiple user roles and maintain audit trails for every action. If you operate in multiple countries or have multiple apps, you will find our ability to link multiple sub-accounts within Blueshift useful.

Blueshift's Responses to Questions on Platform

Data Management

1. How is customer data stored and protected?

Blueshift stores data in our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS. This provides network level isolation, so data cannot be sniffed or tapped between other AWS clients. Blueshift also maintains data isolation between different customers’ data at multiple levels as defined below so that each Blueshift account will be isolated and siloed from each other to ensure data privacy.

Indexed user data is maintained in a separate index data store per client
Data at rest in S3 is maintained in separate folders with appropriate access controls

2. How does your solution keep data? What is the policy regarding retention of data beyond this limit?

Blueshift never deletes your raw data. We have a data limits and retention policy for “customer indexed data” to optimize the speed and performance of segments. Our standard policy for data retention for indexing is outlined below:

Campaign response (i.e.. email open, click, conversion etc): 180 days
User attributes and opt-in/out data: Indexed forever
Transaction events: 10 years
Behavioral events related to items in your catalog (e.g. view product, purchase product): 180 days
Other behaviors (i.e. a blog page view): 31 days

Based on specific customer requirements and needs, the data limits and retention policy is flexible and can be adjusted and extended, if needed.

[Additional information on our data retention policy] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002719594-Segment-Filters#section-default-data-limits-and-retention-policy)

3. Describe how your solution manages subscription and communications preferences?

Blueshift supports channel, real-time response management (i.e., subscriber opt-in/opt-out status) via our integrations with email and SMS delivery partners. Subscribe/unsubscribe data is updated at the user level in real-time. Blueshift automatically unsubscribes users when they click on the unsubscribe link in footers or headers in the email. However, there may be scenarios where you may want to manually unsubscribe users. [Additional information on how to best manage your unsubscribes within Blueshift] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002745253-Managing-Unsubscribes)

In addition, many of our customers have a user preference center to manage user opt-in/opt-out for specific types of notifications (i.e., daily drop alerts, weekly promotions, sales alerts, etc.) so that users can better control the types of notifications that they want to receive. [Additional information on how to manage your communication/notification preferences form within Blueshift] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020079313-Customer-Preference-Forms)

4. How can your platform data be transferred and exported back to our internal systems (i.e., data warehouse, BI/analytics tools, etc.)?

Blueshift’s approach is to provide a central repository for both user-level and campaign-level user engagement and aggregate performance data, where the data can be easily exported for further analysis within other internal systems. Campaign-level user engagement and performance data is continuously updated as users interact with the campaigns in a Amazon S3 folder, where our customers can setup automated, recurring jobs to export this bulk data into their data warehouse application as frequently as needed. If needed, we can also provide pre-built Snowflake tables as an option for DIY analysis with the same data, which can then be easily imported into your existing analytics platforms, BI or visualization solutions so that your data science and analytics teams can then perform deeper analysis.

User-level data can be exported back to your data warehouse as segment exports. Using our segmentation engine, marketers can query our platform and define hyper targeted user audience segments (i.e., at-risk users, high value users, new users, etc.). You can then export these segments from Blueshift on a regular cadence into AWS S3 or an SFTP server as flat files for use in your custom workflows or for integration with your data warehouse. The exported segment file can include user attributes, as well as content and product recommendations.

[Additional information on the available campaign-level user engagement and performance data] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002712633-Campaign-Metrics)
[Additional information on our segment exports capability] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002713333-Segment-Exports#h_01EPRZVR3H67MHJR8NG25KWSWZ)

5. Can your solution handle transactional data (i.e., orders) and model the various transactional states (i.e., purchase, delivered, completed, canceled, etc.) of a transaction? Can your solution handle and distinguish multiple transactions (i.e., orders) for a given customer to ensure that the right message and communication is sent to the right customer?

In comparison to other solutions, Blueshift is uniquely able to model and track the different status of the transaction (i.e., order placed, shipped, delivered, returned, etc.) via our transaction modeling capability. By having the ability to capture both the customer's actions and track/model the “state” of the transaction, Blueshift gives our clients the ability to better understand the customer's journey and move the customer more quickly through the buying cycle to drive higher engagement, increase conversion, and ultimately higher revenue.
In addition, Blueshift natively supports the ability to track the subscription status of your users.

[Additional information on transactions] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002714273-Transactions)
[Additional information on subscription status modeling] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009448133-Subscription-Data-Integration)

Integrations

6. Does your solution support rapid and seamless integration through existing connectors to other vendors' products? Describe your library of off-the-shelf integrations.

Yes, Blueshift has pre-built, 3rd party integrations, including Google Tag Manager, mParticle, Segment, Tealium, Snowflake, and more to make it easier to send data into Blueshift, as well as to execute campaigns across different channels. This significantly streamlines the implementation process and reduces the time to value. Blueshift also has native integrations with leading eCommerce solutions, such as Magento and Shopify, to easily ingest customer, product catalog, and transactional data. Our pre-built integrations are easy to set up and simply require adding and validating the vendor's authentication credentials in the integration settings within the Blueshift UI to enable these integrations. Once the authentication credentials are validated, you can immediately take advantage of these integrations throughout the Blueshift platform.

For mobile integration, Blueshift provides a mobile SDK that is very easy to install for integrating your Android and iOS mobile app(s) with Blueshift’s event processing platform. Additional information on our 3rd party integrations, E-commerce integrations, and mobile SDKs:

7. Does your solution integrate with e-commerce systems?

Yes, Blueshift has native integrations with leading e-Commerce solutions, such as Magento and Shopify, to easily ingest customer, product catalog, and transactional data. Blueshift constantly updates its integrations stack with systems based on industry and customer needs.

・[Additional information on our Shopify integration] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041754073-Shopify-E-commerce)
・[Additional information on our Magento integration] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041559554-Magento-E-commerce)

8. Do you provide Mobile APIs or SDKs for Android and iOS?

Yes, Blueshift provides a mobile SDK, that is very easy to install, for integrating your Android and iOS mobile app(s) with Blueshift’s event processing platform. Additional information about our mobile SDKs:

・[iOS] (https://developer.blueshift.com/docs/about-the-blueshift-ios-sdk)
・[Android] (https://developer.blueshift.com/docs/about-blueshifts-android-sdk)

If your mobile app is built using React Native's mobile application development framework, we have created a bridge to integrate your React Native mobile app with our mobile SDK. [Additional information on this bridge integration] (https://developer.blueshift.com/docs/react-native-bridge-for-android)

If your mobile app is built using the Cordova mobile development framework, we have created a Blueshift Cordova Plugin. [Additional information on this plugin] (https://developer.blueshift.com/docs/blueshifts-cordova-plugin)

9. Does your solution offer support for multiple websites or apps to be linked within a single account?

Yes, Blueshift is architected to be multi-tenant and can support multiple brands/websites. If your multiple websites/brands share the same data, all that data can be pushed into a single Blueshift account instance and we provide tagging capability (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007710654-Tagging) to organize your resources by business unit, teams, websites, or brands. In addition, Blueshift supports multiple domain names to account for different brands and marketers can select different domains when sending.

Blueshift also supports multiple mobile apps within a single Blueshift account instance. [Additional information on supporting multiple apps] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048972194-Manage-campaigns-for-multiple-mobile-apps)

Scalability

10. Describe how your solution offers the flexibility, customizability, and scalability to support current and future business needs and volume.

Blueshift is highly flexible and scalable. Since the Blueshift platform is hosted on AWS, there are no data storage limitations, whereas traditional companies and marketing clouds have data storage limitations becaus of their existing hardware investments. Blueshift also has unmatched flexibility with how we handle data modeling. We use a combination of noSQL databases that scales linearly to terabytes (TBs) of data managed per customer, while our real-time event processing and personalization latencies are sub-second.

Blueshift has a dedicated Ops team that helps run our infrastructure on AWS. We have Ops personnel placed in USA as well as Asia to give us a 24/7 coverage. We work with expert DBAs to manage our production databases and ensure backup, availability and high reliability. As part of our seasonal infrastructure planning, we scale our infrastructure to support our customers' need during the peak seasons.

In conclusion, Blueshift’s platform has been proven within some of the most demanding environments in terms of both scale and volume with some customers sending over 1+ billion email sends per year, 100+M monthly active user, and over 10M personalized messages per hour. Our platform is hosted on Amazon AWS allowing us to easily and automatically scale linearly with our customers, so speed and scale are no issue for us.

11. Describe how your solution is extensible to new channels, systems, and data sources as our needs and tech partners evolve.
Blueshift has been architected as an open and extensible platform that is both data and vendor agnostic that allows our customers to seamlessly integrate with their existing tech stack, thereby streamlining the implementation process and reducing the time to value. Through our pre-built integrations, we make it easy to both ingest data from your various data sources into Blueshift and export data back to your tech stack so that you can use this data further to optimize the user experience across every touchpoint with the brand. We also have a number of our customers that export the data from Blueshift and import that data back into their analytics platforms, BI visualization, or data warehouse, such as Looker and BigQuery, for their data science and analytics teams to leverage with further analysis.

Moreover, Blueshift provides an extensive library of over 80 native off-the-shelf integrations with marketing channels and platforms, data management systems, and enterprise technologies that help our customers to seamlessly integrate with their existing technologies and deliver personalized experiences across all user touchpoints. [Additional information on the available off-the-shelf integrations] (https://blueshift.com/integration-partners)

For new channels, technologies, systems, and data sources that we do not currently support via a direct, pre-built integration, we offer many flexible integration options, including but are not limited to webhooks, APIs, CSVs, S3/FTP buckets. Blueshift also provides a flexible Cloud App framework so that our customers can easily integrate with their preferred enterprise technologies and channels in the cloud that has an available REST API that we can access.

Furthermore, Blueshift is a very agile, fast moving company and we are constantly upgrading our capabilities and take customer requests very seriously. We are always open to new channels, integrations or partnerships that drive success for our customers. In summary, Blueshift is a flexible and extensible platform that meets your current and future marketing needs and allows our customers to scale, grow, and extend with us into new channels, systems, and data sources, while leveraging these existing tech stack.

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

12. Describe the reliability of your platform and your down-time. Do you provide continuous uptime monitoring? Please provide reporting.

Blueshift's uptime/SLAs are audited by 3rd party vendors and our uptime for API's and dashboard is 99.95%. Uptime for message delivery is 99.98%. Here is a link to the Blueshift platform current status: http://status.blueshift.com/.

We have automated alerting in place based on service level metrics to notify relevant support teams, and rules setup to take automatic corrective actions for common scenarios. Furthermore, Blueshift’s uptime and metrics are verifiable through 3rd party services, and we can discuss specific required SLAs that meet your requirements.

Furthermore, Blueshift has a dedicated Ops team that helps run our infrastructure. We have Ops personnels placed in USA as well as Asia to give us a 24/7 ops coverage. We work with our expert DBAs to manage our production databases and ensure backup, availability and high reliability.

13. Describe how your solution processes large volumes of data and campaign workloads without interference or latency.

Blueshift has unmatched flexibility with how we handle data modeling. We use a combination of noSQL databases that scales linearly to TBs of data managed per customer. Blueshift’s platform has also been proven within some of the most demanding environments in terms of both scale and volume. We have customers that are sending over 1+ billion email sends per year, have 100+M monthly active users, and sending over 10M personalized messages per hour.

Our event processing and personalization latencies are sub-second.