There are quite a few feature releases and fixes as part of October ‘18 release. Lakshmi Iyer, Sqware Pegs’ Marketing Cloud Developer shares her favourite picks of the lot, and it’s all about Journey Builder.
The recent release has excellent features which will make the life of marketer a lot easier.
Journey Testing
I personally have been longing for this feature. Journey testing has always been tricky. This October feature release includes Journey Testing which makes everybody’s life lot easier.
So what is Journey Testing?
Journey testing allows you to select the contacts from the Data Extension, which is part of your Journey and lets you to decide between two scenarios; test the journey with the email being sent to test email address or test only the email interaction and not send the email.
We will now have the ability to test specific contacts, by seeing how each subscriber traverses through the Journey based on their attributes. This gives a lot of confidence when the Journey is activated and ensures it was configured correctly. You can be 100% sure about the real path your Contact went through. Please Note: This kind of testing is currently supported for Data Extension as the Entry Source and not for the Salesforce Data or any other Entry Source.
Editing emails in the journey
Email is something that a marketer always likes to play with to improve subscriber engagement. If the email content, which is part of the Active Journey needs to be edited, previously the marketer must edit the email in the Email Studio to update it. One would assume the Journey selects the latest email, right? But no, the email activity in the Journey then needs to be updated, to just select the same email again. What a waste of time.
The latest release has resolved this with an easy to use interface. The Email Send Activity can be edited, previewed and tested in the Journey Builder canvas itself. This will save a lot of time switching between the applications. This will also ensure the Journey Emails are always updated and current with the latest versions.
Email performance analytics
I am loving the user experience when I hover over the live Email Activity in the Journey and click on ‘View/Update Email’. There is a new Email Performance, which neatly displays in graphical mode all the engagement information. We don’t have to switch to Email Studio Tracking view the analytics.
Mobile SMS personalisation
Emails in the Journey allow you to use personalisation based on the Entry Source Data Extension with no hassle. With SMS, it was previously a whole new task, you would have to add any Fields that you would like to use as part of your SMS in the MobileConnect attribute which would have to be constantly updated through API and automation to reflect the latest value for the Subscriber. Only then, you could use them in your SMS.
This is all changed now, the SMS created or built for the Journey can now use the attributes directly from the Entry Source just like Email.
For full release notes click here. There are quite a few features in the new update that will improve and simplify marketing efforts.
