Accelerator 24.4.2 Release Notes

Initiatives Released 

In App Messaging

Use Case

Create, customize, test, and launch in-app message campaigns through Accelerator. This new channel allows customers to communicate directly with users as they’re engaging with your app! In-app messages support a variety of use cases to help you engage with your customers in a relevant and personalized manner. Use in-app messages to:

• Improve conversion – Send time-limited offers to users who have interacted with the app for a specific period of time, visited the shop at least three times, but not converted.
• Assist users – Provide additional assistance to users stuck on a certain level for a particular time period (and leave those progressing nicely alone)
• Drive Permission opt-in – Increase opt-in rates by requesting device permissions such as push notifications, location, and camera access before triggering the system prompt.
• Deliver Personalize experiences – Inject user-specific content into your message to ensure relevancy and drive conversion
• Solicit feedback - collect users' preferences and retarget them based on their picks; solicit feedback and ratings to gather feedback and better understand customer sentiment

Goals

• Give marketers the ability to engage their customers as they’re using a mobile app

• Dramatically improve the campaign creation and building experience

• Allow marketers to preview and test their in-app messages on actual devices

• Provide better visibility on the status of the campaign and better control over the campaign’s lifecycle

• Making it convenient for customers to view and understand campaign performance by surfacing in-app message metrics directly in the campaign

Capabilities

Create an in-app message campaign

The Marketing campaigns now give marketers the ability to create Inbound (in-app message) and Outbound (email and SMS) campaigns. Additionally, customers can set their campaigns' mobile app, account, and categories as part of the campaign creation workflow. After selecting the campaign’s mobile app, customers select what device types and platforms the in-app message should target (where applicable).

The create campaign modal now includes the channel, mobile app, account, and category settings

To help streamline the campaign building process, the campaign’s other assets - audiences, layouts, display triggers - are pre-filtered based on the mobile app, platform, and device type selections.

Campaign overview

The Overview page of the campaign allows you to view and manage all aspects of your campaign, including the campaign’s lifecycle. The cards on the Overview page - Who, What, and When - indicate which settings have been completed. While you can configure your campaign’s settings in any order, you must complete all sections before you can QA and launch your campaign.

Campaign content

The What card shows all the details about the campaign's content. Unlike Outbound channels - Email, Push, and SMS - the content is created as part of the campaign, not in advance through a template.

Message format

The message format dictates the content's orientation, the default number of elements, and the background’s resolution and safe zone. By default, MessageGears supplies three formats for each orientation. If you require additional or custom formats, contact your CSM.

Select your message’s orientation and format

Content types

Once you’ve selected the format, a form is generated with the a background and the defined number of elements. Use this form to input all your in-app message’s content. In-app messages supported a variety of content types, each with their own set of capabilities.

Image

In-app messages support using both static images (.png's, .jpg's) and animated images (.gifs) as the media type.

There are two options for adding an image:

1. Upload a static image file (.png, .jpg, .jpeg files only)

2. Input the image URL and, if required, include user properties to personalize the URL

Text

Add one or more lines of text that displays inside a text box and use the options available to set the text style and overflow behavior. Set the styling for the text and text box by selecting the:

• Font family, style, size, color

• Background color

• Line height

• Horizontal alignment

• Padding

Text values can be personalized using real-time user properties.

Buttons

The same Button styles are commonly used across campaigns, so we’ve made it easy to re-use buttons the and make small modifications for your campaign. After you select a saved button style, you have the option to modify the button size and position. Enter static or dynamic text that displays inside a button container and use the options available to set the button style and overflow behavior.

Select a button style from the dropdown and modify the text, size, position, and action

Pages

Pages allow you to design multi-step flows for app users within a single in-app message campaign. Each page can contain a unique set of elements. You can create new pages from scratch, or duplicate existing pages and modify them if they share common elements. Optionally, enable Swiping to allow app users to navigate between pages via swiping, or, add navigation actions (e.g. Open to Page 2) to buttons.

Enable swiping to allow users to navigate between pages

Use button navigation actions to create dynamic journeys based on users' selections

Personalizing campaign content

Use the new personalization menu to inject user data directly into each text input field, without having to copy and paste. The menu also allows marketers to define the fallback behavior and text, if applicable. When a fallback value is provided, it is displayed in the device preview as a placeholder.

User properties added via the personalization are displayed as chips in the input field. Selecting the chip re-opens the personalization menu, where the user can change the property or modify the fallback behavior.

Campaign schedule & display triggers

The When section allows you to define the campaign’s start and end date, and where the message should be displayed in the app.

Schedule

The schedule allows customers to define when the campaign is active and served to targeted users. Campaigns can have a start and an end date, or be launched immediately and be left to run indefinitely and ended manually.

Display triggers

Customers can choose where and when the message should be displayed inside the app: 

• Triggered when user takes action(s)

  • Opens app

  • Triggers custom event

• Display inside a message center

All custom events recored by the mobile SDKs are listed in the Triggers dropdown field.

The campaign triggers determine where the message is displayed in the app

Message display rules

Depending on the trigger types selected, the message display rules allow marketers to control how often and how many times a message is displayed. Configure these rules to ensure you’re not showing the same message too many times, too frequently, or too early in the user’s app session.

Message display rules and timing restriction fields are surfaced based on the display trigger type

Audience

The campaign’s audience details are surfaced on the Who card. In-app message campaigns support three audience types, which are defined in the Who section:

1. Audience or Blueprint

2. User lists

3. Push notification

Audience or Blueprint

This audience type allows customers to define the campaign’s target recipients using a predefined audience or Blueprint. If the Audience or Blueprint contains data variables, they are surfaced in the Data variables section. The Total users count reflects the number of audience recipients a valid mobileUserId value.

By default, Accelerator queries the connected database and generates a list of recipients at when the campaign is launched and every 30 minutes until the campaign ends.

After selecting a Blueprint, customers can select the individual nodes that should be targeted by the Blueprint.

Blueprint’s nodes to define your campaign’s target audience

User lists

This option allows customers to upload a static list of recipients who are made eligible for the campaign. The list - an XML or CSV file - must contain a MobileUserId value for each user. On successful upload, the number of distinct recipients is displayed in the Total users field.

Push notification

This option allows the in-app message to be triggered from a push notification. Once the in-app message campaign is active, it becomes available for selection from within the push notification template. In-app messages with this audience type do not require display triggers, since they are automatically triggered when the user engages with the linked push notification.

Advanced options

The advanced options available for Email and SMS are also available for in-app message campaigns, depending on the campaign’s audience type:

• Audience recording (Audience & Blueprint only)

• Campaign triggers (Audience & Blueprint, and User lists)

Audience recording

In addition to the audience's attributes, in-app message audience recordings include an Action attribute. The Action attribute is set to add or remove, depending on whether the recipient was added or removed from the campaign in the recipient extraction.

Audience’s are recorded whenever the audience recipients are updated (at campaign launch and every 30 minutes until the campaign ends).

Campaign triggers

In-app message campaign triggers function similarly to existing Marketing campaigns', with the following additions to the Campaign metadata:

• appName - The name of the campaign's mobile app

• appId - The ID of the campaign's mobile app

• platform - The campaign's mobile platform

• deviceType - The campaign's device type

Audience recording and Campaign triggers are configurable in the Advanced section

QA Devices

The QA card is displayed on the Campaign overview page and allows customers to add QA users once all all aspects of the campaign are defined and the campaign is ready to launch. Adding a QA user makes the user eligible for the campaign, before it is launched. The QA card lists the QA users that have already been added to the campaign.

The QA user modal allows customers to test the campaign on their devices before launching

Campaign state

In-app message campaigns introduce the concept of state. A campaign’s state determines whether the campaign’s assets are modifiable and if the campaign can be launched, paused, or ended.

• Draft - Campaign has not been launched or scheduled

• Initializing - Campaign has been launched and in the process of being activated

• Scheduled - Campaign has been launched, but has not reached the scheduled start date

• Active - Campaign is currently being served to targeted users

• Inactive - Campaign was once active and has since been paused

• Finished - Campaign has reached it’s scheduled end date or been manually ended

• Archived - Campaign has been Archived (unarchiving returns the campaign to it’s previous state)

The campaign’s current state and controls are displayed at the top of the campaign overview page, making it easy to monitor and manage the campaign's lifecycle.

The campaign’s state is displayed on the campaign over page

Campaign Launch

The Launch or Schedule (if start date is in future) button on the Campaign overview page is only enabled once all campaign’s assets have been defined. Upon clicking Launch or Schedule, the launch modal is displayed, providing a summary of the campaign’s settings. The modal also includes a Notification email address field, where customers can provide a contact to be notified of any launch failures.

The launch modal appears after selecting Launch or Schedule

Job failure warnings

When an error occurs, an email is sent to the Notification email address with the error details. Additionally, the campaign Overview page displays a message with the failure details, and if applicable, a link to the asset that caused the failure (e.g. the audience, audience recording, or campaign trigger).

The Campaign Overview page displays the job failure details

If an error occurs when the campaign is launched or when the audience is being refreshed, the campaign is automatically Paused. This ensures that the campaign is not served to recipients who would have been removed from the audience in the most recent job.

Analytics

In-app message campaign analytics are built into the campaign itself. The Analytics page displays metrics to help marketers understand the reach of and user engagement with their campaign. The metrics are divided into two sections: Overview and Button clicks.

Overview

The Overview section of the report contains two sections:

• Totals - aggregated metric counts for the entire life of the campaign

• Performance over time - the counts for a given granularity (daily, weekly, monthly) over the selected timeframe

Each section allows customers to download a CSV file with the respective data. The Performance over time CSVc contains a row for each timestamp, as defined by the selected granularity.

The Overview reports provide aggregated and time series metrics for a given campaign

Button clicks

The Button clicks section provides more granular campaign metrics, specifically how customers are interacting with the campaign’s individual pages and buttons. For multi-page campaigns, the report provides metrics for individual pages and each of its buttons:

• Views: The number of times users viewed the specific page.

• Dropoff: The number of times users dismissed the campaign while on a specific page.

• Button name: The name provided for the button. The default option is Button 1, Button 2 etc.

• Action: The action and value assigned to the button, for example, a deeplink.

• Total clicks: The total number of times users clicked the button.

• Rate: The number of times users clicked the button divided by the total of page views.

The Button click report contains individual Page view and Button click metrics

Configure audience refresh frequency

System configurations now contains In-App Message Settings, where customers can set the audience refresh cadence for their in-app message campaigns. By default, in-app message campaign audiences are generated at campaign launch, and reevaluated every 30 minutes after launch until the campaign ends.

In-App Message Settings in System configuration

Updated Logo

Use Case

MessageGears rebranded in October of this year, and we have a brand new logo. We have updated our logo in the side navigation, favicon, and login screen.

General changes

• Added a new checkbox to templates, under email content settings which allows showing or hiding email content after preheader text