If you’re anything like Everlytic, you got a lot done last year … and you have even bigger goals for 2019. In preparation for the new year, Everlytic is reflecting on the one that’s passed; exploring how its platform has evolved and what it means for you.
Here are some of its favourite feature releases from 2018.
1. Workflows
Until 2018, drip campaigns were the best in class when it came to marketing automation. This is because they deliver pre-written messages at customisable intervals, triggered by things such as subscription events, birthdays and one-off start dates.
Workflows, on the other hand, offer the benefits of drip campaigns, plus so much more.
Like drip campaigns, workflows allow you to send messages automatically at specific times and with strategic delays. But, when combined with conditional triggers and smart database management, workflows can also send messages based on conditions like the subscriber’s stage of the journey, their demographics, and their interaction with your mails – and adapt and personalise the journey for different audiences.
Workflows was Everlytic’s major release around the middle of 2018. Since then, Everlytic has made many updates and upgrades. These include:
- Workflow conditions
Conditions are like "if statements" (an if-this-then-that function commonly used in Microsoft Excel) that decide where your subscribers fit into the campaign journey. Once your subscriber's actions or data meet a condition, they diverge into their respective paths in the Workflow to receive messages relevant to them.
At first, workflow conditions were limited to the information available in your database. With the release of Everlytic’s Message Activity condition, however, you can now also adapt your workflow based on how subscribers have interacted with the previous mails in the workflow. For now, this includes whether a contact has opened an email or clicked a link within it.
- Dynamic anniversary triggers
Everlytic’s Dynamic Anniversary Trigger lets you start sending your workflow messages before, on or after a specific date, anniversary or birthday – not just on the date itself. This is a nifty feature when you want to send a dedicated series of emails around someone’s birthday.
- Smart go-to actions
Once your reader has completed a journey on your workflow, you can send them to another node using a go-to action. This allows you to continue the conversation on a separate but related topic relevant to their subscription, and saves you from having to duplicate content you’ve already created on another branch.
- Workflow node reports
Everlytic’s advanced workflow reporting allows you to view detailed information about a contact’s journey through every node in your workflow, so you can track things such as:
- the date subscribers entered the workflow;
- total number of emails and/or SMSes sent and received in the workflow; and
- the date subscribers completed the journey (if applicable).
This reporting also shows each contact’s email address and mobile number, if they are in the system, and the date and time each message was sent to them.
2. The Builder
Everlytic’s drag-and-drop builder is one of Everlytic’s core features. It allows you to build and design high-quality, engaging emails and landing pages in just a few minutes – no design or coding experience needed. Here are some of its top updates from 2018.
- Dynamic drop zones
Dynamic drop zones make customising your email content simple and intuitive. They enable you to easily drop content into your template and move existing content into other areas.
- Rotating banner images
Everlytic’s Rotating Banners feature allows you to insert up to three images that rotate as a simple GIF in your email and link it to a web page of your choice. The Builder even adapts the images to the size of the section to which you move it. Rotating images like this grab readers’ attention, boosting engagement and increasing your clickthrough rate.
- Calendar invites
Last year, Everlytic made it possible to add calendar invites to emails, SMSs, landing pages and all campaigns. The .ics attachment opens on most email clients, including those on mobile, and automatically adds the event to the recipients’ calendars when they accept.
While there were many more features released in 2018, Everlytic believes there were the most impactful. And there are lots of exciting things planned for the year ahead, so watch this space.
A version of this article was originally published on the Everlytic blog on January 8 2019.
This article was paid for by Everlytic.